Plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is theft.
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| Title: | Plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is theft. |
| Creator: | Michela Ecks |
| Date(s): | October 15, 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | multi |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | online here; WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is theft is a 2001 essay by Michela Ecks.
It was posted to Writers University.
Excerpts
If you come to my place of residence and drink all my Diet Coke, I will get very annoyed and I will demand, being the cheap creature I am, that you go out to the store and buy me more. If you trash my house, I'll call the police. It's my place of residence and you follow my rules while on it. If you have a problem with them, you leave. The same philosophy applies to web sites.
Let me start this out by saying that I think plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is theft. Plagiarism is not right. Plagiarism is immoral and unethical. Plagiarism in the fannish community is even more deplorable for several reasons. The first is that fan fiction exists only because the powers that be allow it to exist. Our fannish activities can stop at any time if they do not want us to do them. Secondly, fan fiction is about writing. It's about community. It's about belonging. Some of us belong by sending feedback, putting up a web site, writing fan fiction. Communities are small. If you steal from some one in this fandom, the person in the other fandom will know and you'll hear about it. Plagiarizing isn't being community minded. It's being incredibly selfish and putting yourself above the community. It's also about giving the community your best that you can offer. When you plagiarize, you are not giving the community the best that you can offer.
On God Awful Fan Fiction's message board, a poster mentioned a story where the author took line for line a scene from Babylon 5 and plopped it down in the middle of an X-Files story. The section was not credited. The author wasn't creative. jms, the creator of Babylon 5 was. The author recognized this else they wouldn't have stolen the section. Is an author creative after they've been caught stealing? The answer is maybe... leaning towards no. The thing is, once you've been caught plagiarizing, all your work becomes circumspect. Cassandra Claire was caught plagiarizing by the staff at FanFiction.Net and people sing her praises saying how creative she is. I'm left to sit and stew in my own juices. I sit and go "No, she isn't creative. She stole from other creative people." I also become circumspect. I will not be able to read anything by Cassandra Claire without asking myself if I'm really reading her own work or if I'm reading something she's changed, something she's stolen... something she is passing off as original fan fiction that isn't original at all. Cassandra lacked the creativity, indeed the finesse, to rework and reword her story so that you couldn't identify it from the original. She lacked the creativity to totally remake and remold an idea of someone else's into an original Cassandra Claire. What she didn't wasn't original. It wasn't creative. Plagiarism isn't creative.