My definition of "plagiarism" (which I think is the usual one for US academic standards) is copying passages of distinctive text from other uncredited sources, esp. in a way that would cause most of the audience to believe the copier was the true originator-- unless the copier thinks that the original source should be famous enough for the audience to recognize it without specific credits.

Conversely, I have no general objection to borrowing characters and concepts etc. from other sources, though it's somewhat context-dependent-- it did bother me when Cassandra Claire's "Draco Trilogy" used the "by your own hand" spellbreaking loophole from Tanith Lee's Cyrion, but a.) CC used it as an irreplaceable climactic plot twist, and b.) CC was already a proven verbatim textual plagiarist of Tanith Lee and other relatively obscure authors like Pamela Dean.

But in Gabaldon's first quote, she was condoning Cassie Edwards' verbatim copying from public-domain sources, as in the following (pasted/reformatted from SBTB's spreadsheet (http://smartbitchestrashybooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/cassieedwardsreve.pdf)):



Because Eastman's book is public-domain, it isn't legally actionable copyright infringement, which is what Gabaldon seems to have in mind. It *is* verbatim textual plagiarism.

Gabaldon doesn't understand the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism. QED?