Wherein the cake is taken

[wombat1138]

(Partially reposted from FW comments.)

The Diana Gabaldon fanfic flap has generally failed to interest me, mostly because I already knew that her thought processes on such matters were completely alien to me, thanks to her comments about Cassie Edwards' plagiarism.

Re-reposted from elseweb, emphasis added; the original forum link from there no longer works:

Oh–with regard to your last sentence…in fact, you _can_ legally use absolutely anything that’s in the public domain (i.e., out of copyright). And in fact, at least two of the “sources” they were mentioning almost certainly are. Given the peculiarities of style in some of the bits quoted, I still don’t know why one _would_–but it’s totally legit to do so.

Bottom line being that no, in fact, you _can’t_ plagiarize a source that’s out of copyright. You can do anything you want to with it.

–Diana

I've been following her series over the years, even though it's been getting increasingly overgrown and underedited. Her bizarre logic about plagiarism and fanfic hasn't bothered me enough to consider giving up on her books.

However, this does: after deleting all of the fanfic-related entries from her blog, she's updated it with a gushing book recommendation without mentioning that the author, Samuel Sykes, is her own son. He hasn't been sharing that information on his own, either.

Paper trail: back in a 2008 interview, she mentioned "a fantasy anthology titled DRAGONS (for which I’m coauthoring a novella with my son, Samuel Sykes)."

Earlier this year, a different interview had had this exchange with Sykes; emphasis added:

[Q:]You have a story in the recent The Dragon Book anthology that you co-wrote with Diana Gabaldon. How does a young, as-yet-unpublished author find themselves working with one of the mots successful names in the industry? What was the process like, working with Diana?

[A:]We have the same agent. It was quite a fun process. Mrs. Gabaldon has an immense amount of talent and clout and it was quite an honor to work with her for as much as we did.

Oy.

(Sykes was the maiden name of Diana Gabaldon's mother, according to the dedication of her first book. So that's where his pen name comes from. He previously collaborated on at least one other anthology story with her while using his own name, Sam Watkins.)

Comments

[scriva.livejournal.com]

I didn't really care for the Diana Gabaldon part of the argument, since I'm not a fan, but the interview snippet you posted is very interesting, because I have a general problem with the idea of intellectual property when barely any contemporain work is completely original. I could never really express those gut feelings in a rational way, but someone on the Westeros board (which I frequent) brough up the idea of stealing from the public domain. I didn't understand at first, but they explained it the way that modern authors steal from the public domain without giving something back, thanks to the idea of IP. My example from ASOIAF would be GRRM's use of Walter Scot's tournay concept with the "Queen of love and beauty" which he did not only use once, but thrice. If Ivanhoe was not in the public domain, his books would look quite different and would maybe not even possible. It seems that DG has a very similary approach to these concepts.

/sorry dl:tr

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

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?