Forum / Has work ever been stolen from Fictionaut?
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 08:52am
I am asking for a friend.
No really.
I invited a friend and he's worried about the copy-pastability of the text on stories.
I told him it's okay, but I was thinking I should probably at least ask before I say, "Oh no, that's never happened!"
So, has anyone here ever had work taken from Fictionaut (that they know of)--not just the dreaded "P" word, but scraped for a link dump or anything?
And, out of my own curiosity, is there some mechanism that prevents scraping? I've never seen anything of mine harvested, so I started thinking there might be some cleverness built in on the back end that identifies that kind of activity and blocks the IP or something.
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Marcus SpehMar 14, 10:40amI don't know, but stealing that isn't really stealing and yet is theft of intellectual capital, did and does happen. It is called imitation and it is much more frequent than people like to admit. I'm inclined to think that unconscious nicking may be an important evolutionary mechanism to development...certainly imitation is, on the biological and the organisational and societal levels.
When I was first affected by it because someone took my idea and concept and made something else of it without, in due course, acknowledging it, I was terribly hurt. I'm over it now and whenever I think of it I pat myself on the back because the theft is proof that I'd written something original. (I still think it stinks especially if it is done consciously).
Otherwise, technically and procedurally, I think anything here or on the web at large is rather unprotected and this is the nature of the beast. The only reliable protection is to not publish it on the net.
I've come across only one case when a writer had taken a text from another source (an article by someone else) like one of my less clever students and put it intohis flash without mentioning it or changing it in any way...I sidn't say anything (this is not my school or class) but obviously the writer lost all my respect forever.
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Marcus SpehMar 14, 10:40am
One case on Fictionaut, I meant, regarding my last example.
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 11:05am
Yeah; there is no technical solution for imitation though, except to keep the work in a locked drawer and never ever talk about it. And what fun is that?
It's interesting you mention the borrowing without attribution. Personally, I try to keep good sources if I have to do anything approaching research, so at least I can double check. I suspect a number of "plagiarism" cases come from people copying something into a notebook or file and not clearly delineating what text has been copied, and at some point they return to their notes, and they've absorbed the information and they don't realize that they didn't write the passage because it's been so internalized.
This is my charitable view, because I can see how easily that could happen if one sets aside one's notes for some months or years. And something I'm terribly afraid of doing.
Of course the possibility exists that those writers are just thieving rat bastards and should be locked up in a cage with some annoyed skunks for a week.
(But should you ever see anything of the kind in my work please let me know; don't bite your tongue and be polite.)
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Marcus SpehMar 14, 12:21pm
This is something I most emphatically do not agree with, but I found it interesting nevertheless—John Gardner in his Paris Review interview (1979)—happens to the best of them (he's one of those):
«Besides using real people, as I've said, I get great pleasure out of stealing other people's writings. Actually, I do that at least partly because of a peculiar and unfortunate quality of my mind: I remember things. Word for word. I'm not always aware of it. Once in college, I wrote a paragraph of a novel that was word for word out of Joyce's “The Dead,” and I wasn't aware of it at all. I absolutely wasn't. My teacher at the time said, Why did you do this? He wasn't accusing me of plagiarism, he was just saying it was a very odd thing to do. I realized then that I had a problem. Of course, it was a big help when I was a teacher, because I could quote long passages of Beowulf and things like that. Once I realized that I also accidentally quote, that I'm constantly alluding to things I'm not consciously aware of, I began to develop this allusive technique—at least when it's fiction—so that nobody could accuse me of plagiarism, since it's so obvious that I'm alluding. In fact, sometimes I have great fun with it. Particularly in Jason and Medeia, where I took long sections of writing by Bill Gass, whom I'm enormously fond of, and with whom I completely disagree on almost everything unimportant, and altered a few words to mess up his argument. And in The Wreckage of Agathon I took long sections out of Jean-Paul Sartre, changed all the images, but kept the rest directly translated. So I use everything.»
This is, of course, conscious use of material, i.e. it's a technique. These two books he mentioned also aren't overly noteworthy (compared to October Light or The Sunlight Dialogues or Grendel).
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 01:03pm
It is interesting.
I like to find things tucked away, a line borrowed here or there, made use of. It feels like a wink from the writer, something that says, "I see you and I read the same books." Likewise, I have, a couple times, recognized something later and in discovering the thing being alluded to, I was able to recognize the allusion, which gave me a deeper understanding of the work that contained it. The idea of it not being intentional, or it being a deliberate deception, never crosses my mind, even though I'm aware of situations and circumstances where that might happen.
I have experimented with it myself,though not entire paragraphs. I have sometimes paraphrased or adapted a line from a film or a story that, to me, is a subtle nod toward acknowledging something that played a part in the generation of the story. But I write it with the expectation that it will be recognized, that it will be understood as an acknowledgement, and that's why it's there.
My Chupacabra story, How Chupacabra Broke The Heart of God, was inspired by one of Tyson Bley's poems, and of course is written in the style of The King James version of The Bible. The title is a direct nod to the inspiration and I worked with that passage of Genesis open, side by side, to try and capture the voice while avoiding any direct copying.
I think intent counts for a lot in these things. I also think that openness about acknowledging inspiration and sources counts for a lot.
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Sam RasnakeMar 14, 02:40pmNote a poem by Frank Bidart, one of my short list favorite poets, and his poem "Genesis 1-2:4" - from The Sacrifice, one of my favorite poetry collections.
[The link only lists the beginning of the poem.]
The poem originally appeared in Ploughshares.
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 02:53pm
Now there's a reason to go over and use the university library; they have Jstore access.
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James Lloyd DavisMar 14, 03:09pmI've only seen one instance of outright plagiarism here. It was not from one member of another... but of partial word for word copying from material outside Fictionaut.
I was surprised, even shocked, but like Marcus, I never mentioned it to anyone and the person involved hasn't been around in ages.
Plagiarism of fiction is rare and more easily detected in the internet age than ever.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 06:18pmPersonally I've ripped off every last one of you and will continue to do so until the end of time. I DARE YOU TO STOP ME.
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David AckleyMar 14, 06:29pm1) In contemporary music, what looks like plagiarism is evidently called " sampling," and is widely practised. Maybe someone who knows something about music could explain.
2) In his well-received REALITY HUNGER David Shields was inclined to use the considerable number of quotes from other writers without attribution until his publisher insisted otherwise.
3) It is common knowledge that the extremely popular and profitable "Fifty Shades of..." books were originally written as "Fan Fiction" attached parasitically to the similarly popular "Twilight..." series.
It seems to me these are all attempts to make a writer's ideas and words ( or music) common property, as if they simply floated up from the zeitgeist for anybody to claim and attach their name to, and as if the act of appropriation had as much merit as the original inventing. But maybe I just don't get it.
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Barry BasdenMar 14, 06:58pmsome thoughts from others on the issue:
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Marcus SpehMar 14, 07:14pm
@Matt "The Ripper" Robinson I ACCEPT THE DARE! (are we going to duel now?)
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DolemiteMar 14, 07:21pmMatt Robinson stole my face right off my haid.
(luckily, I've got TWO HAIDS!)
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James Lloyd DavisMar 14, 07:24pm
I love a duel. Film rights!! Film rights!!
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 07:28pm
David: I think sampling is supposed to be like collage, in music and in literature. I guess it comes down to intent? Intent to pass the sampled material off as your own versus the acknowledgement of where it came from.
Those seem less (to me) cases of theft than of rights and permissions.
I usually slap a CC-BY-NC-SA on my own work. I'm not so militantly free culture as to think that the creator's right to attribution creates and undue burden on a creator. (Though I've seen things like Shields' book cited as examples of why this is so.)
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Sam RasnakeMar 14, 07:29pm
In The Other Side of the Wind, a film which doesn't exist, John Houston says not to worry about stealing from others - the main thing is - and I'm quoting, more or less - "to never steal from yourself".
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 07:31pm
Also:
Marcus, you've already been ripped off. Some of the rest of us would like a chance. Go to the end of the queue and wait your turn.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 07:31pm
THE VIRTUAL STREETS WILL RUN BLACK WITH THE INK OF YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, SIR!
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Marcus SpehMar 14, 07:31pm
I shall call upon James Lloyd Davis and Frankie Sachs as seconds. My weapon of choice: a goosequill.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 07:38pm
In all seriousness, I can't think of anything more original than being authentic about your influences. If being original means pretending you didn't just about faint with joy when you first read Moby Dick or To The Lighthouse or All the Pretty Horses or Turn of the Screw, etc., then fuck originality. Own up. Authenticity forever.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 07:39pm
Marcus: you know I have longstanding, independent fears of geese and quills and when combined are absolutely fatal!
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 07:41pm
I was so looking forward someone crying "TYPEWRITERS AT DAWN!"
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 07:43pm
Dueling typewriters: idea "borrowed" from the film Deliverance, originally a novel, originally a twinkle in Daddy Dickey's eye.
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Frankie SaxxMar 14, 07:45pm
In the interests of being authentic, I was imagining more of an O.K. Corral scenario with Marcus as Wyatt Earp.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 14, 07:47pm
I'll be your huckleberry.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 14, 09:04pmI got a little suspicious when you presented yourself as a 60 year old female daughter of Holocaust survivors in one of your stories but decided it was coincidence. And it is fiction after all.
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James Lloyd DavisMar 14, 09:34pm
"This is funny." Doc Holliday.
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Darryl PriceMar 14, 10:43pmHow can the world not rub off on you? All that you see and hear and touch? Especially if you are a writer, other writers are going to turn your head around, make you feel something, make you think(only you can make you stink).If there are those who deliberately steal another's ideas, words, or plots, it's probably because they suck as people, certainly as writers, but most likely they are afraid of the dark. They want light and will do anything to get it. Is this sad, pathetic, well, yes, but more to the point, it may not be a violence, but something more pedestrian, like jealousy.Still it does hurt not to get the credit for something you came up with. That's what's so great about being a writer--there's always more where that came from.
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Joani ReeseMar 14, 11:30pmIf someone's writing on Fictionaut, I'm pretty sure he or she shouldn't be too worried about having work stolen. Most of the work posted is already published somewhere and can be stolen at any time from those places just as easily. The Internet is a big, wide-open venue for theft as well as goodness. I haven't seen Pynchon posting here recently, and he, McCarthy, or maybe Ford are the only people I'd steal from, so I guess they're safe. I have run into a bit of plagiarism as an editor and it's ugly and so damned needy that it makes me throw up a little, but Fictionaut isn't particularly at risk for writers. We're really not all that important in the larger scheme of things.
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Variola majorMar 14, 11:41pm
I have to stop by here more often.
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Joani ReeseMar 14, 11:46pm
Damn, Tom! Where ya been?
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Variola majorMar 14, 11:47pm
Lately, I've been hanging out at--hey, wait, I can't tell you that!
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writerMar 15, 12:35am"is there some mechanism that prevents scraping?" ... That's a good question. I once was invited to send in a story I'd posted on my blog, with a request to remove it from the blog before the mag published it.
Two weeks after removing it, as a little experiment to see if it would still show up in a search, I ran a random paragraph and...found it! On a scraper site. Not the whole story, but a good-sized chunk of it. It isn't actually plagiarism, but it is content theft. I'm sure the same thing could conceivably happen here.
As for outright plagiarism, sure something could be copied from F'naut, but work here is dated, and I'm sure F'nauters would all make great witnesses who would stand up for the ripped-off writer.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 15, 12:48am
There are quite effective computer programs for catching plagiarizing of term papers, especially those bought on the internet. Students are more desperate than the run-of-the-mill writer and topics are more standardized.
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Joani ReeseMar 15, 01:15am
As an English professor, I use Turnitin.com for every student paper I collect. As an English professor, I am also probably 95% more concerned with students who plagiarize than almost any editor out there is concerned with discovering whether or not accepted work is indeed that of the submitter.
I doubt most of the Internet editors are even remotely focused on sending their accepted work through an Internet plagiarism site. First of all, it costs money to do so, and second of all, they don't have the time nor the energy to devote to such things.
Most of these editors, like me, are volunteers who do what they do for the love of discovering good writing. They depend on the honesty of their submitters. They are right most of the time, but if someone is so desperate and ambitious that they'll steal the work of another writer and call it their own, they'll probably get away with it.
I suspect this lack of careful oversight will change once the Internet becomes more settled and we learn from our mistakes, but I also suspect the barn door's open for word thieves for the foreseeable future.
The only problem I see is that we are hesitant as editors to out those who have been caught because we think it's somehow beneath us to get involved in such a seedy situation. I find the practice despicable, but I, too, am hesitant to speak up. I've dealt with this behavior in-house, making sure the individual's work will never be considered again, and I've reached out to other editors I know to alert them to the person's lack of character. But, once again, Fictionaut isn't any more in danger of being poached than any other Internet venue.
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Marcus SpehMar 15, 05:40am
I know of plagiarism software but I don't like it (though as head of e-learning I have to support it) because it makes people lazy: teachers often don't know any more about [online] copyright than students (other than the trivial notion of "mine? yours?") and rely too much on the robot, and students are put in a fault position at the start, focused on avoiding plagiarism rather than focused on creating original work...it's a debate. Standardization is both the bane and the blessing of our age. And I'm one of those to blame, alas.
Interestingly, plagiarism detection is a by product: originally, this software (including Turnitin) was devised to support peer-review among student groups by stripping away personal information and creating anonymized papers which then everyone could read and comment upon. But this use, a form of knowledge management, has completely fallen by the wayside...
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 09:44am
@Chris -- I told him I thought Fictionaut is probably one of the safest communities for sharing work because the denizens are out there reading zines and journals and with the number of editors here, imo there's a much better chance of it being recognized from here than about anywhere else.
@JP -- There's a lot of people putting up unpublished work here too. Out of curiosity, as an editor, would you hold it against a writer if unpublished work had been posted here, and if in that time had been scraped by a bot and put on a link dump?
I have never encountered that situation, and I am curious how an editor would feel about that, and whether it would be a reason to reject work.
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Joani ReeseMar 15, 02:08pm
Frankie: I rarely, if ever, put up unpublished work at Fictionaut, and I do not encourage other people to do so unless they don't care about having their work published in specific places. I have been fortunate in that a couple of my unpublished pieces have been solicited and published after I put them here, so it's a matter of choice for each writer.
Most of the academic journals, however, would frown on work that's been on the Internet anywhere, though that too may change eventually.
Fictionaut, and other writing venues on the Internet, provide plenty of private groups for workshopping unpublished work. My suggestion to those who suffer from irrational exuberance is to place unpublished pieces at one of these private groups and not on the main page. After all, what if it's truly great and you've shot yourself in the foot with 75% of the well-respected print journals by placing it where anyone can see it?
As an editor, I have solicited work from the main page and asked the writer to take it down immediately, but every venue has its own rules about material. Some people attempt to fool the scrapers by using a nom de plume, but I don't recommend that either, as it's dishonest in its own way because if a venue truly wants something no one has ever seen, we should respect that wish or not submit to them. There are plenty of places that don't mind. (See David Ackley's list here on The Forum).
I like the rather new idea of some editors of online journals who are willing to consider work that's been previously published only in print. Many online editors understand that a print publication has only a small audience and much of the work deserves a wider readership, so they're forgoing their previous stance on only accepting unpublished pieces and considering print-only previously published work for their journals along with unpublished work.
Why not just put published work here and place unpublished work in a private group where it's *relatively* safe?
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 02:47pm
"Why not..."
Well, for myself, cause I'm only in the one weird private group I made myself.
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 02:49pm
I should go on to say, I understand what you're saying and it makes perfect sense, but it also requires that people somehow find their way into these private groups.
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Joani ReeseMar 15, 02:57pm
Frankie: Tried to message you with some ideas, but you don't accept messages. I think David Ackley has a group here (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). He has invited people to join in a previous forum post.
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 04:00pm
I don't accept messages?
I better go look at my profile.
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 04:05pm
JP: I can't figure out why I can't accept messages, but I did message you so maybe you can message me back.
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David AckleyMar 15, 07:35pm
There's a private group I co-administer with John Riley called The Bear Pit which welcomes anyone interested in honest and open feedback on their work who is willing to reciprocate. Let either John or me know if you're interested and you'll get an invite to join.
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David AckleyMar 15, 07:35pm
There's a private group I co-administer with John Riley called The Bear Pit which welcomes anyone interested in honest and open feedback on their work who is willing to reciprocate. Let either John or me know if you're interested and you'll get an invite to join.
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David AckleyMar 15, 07:35pm
Damned echo.
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Marcus SpehMar 15, 09:13pm
.ohce denmaD
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 09:44pm
(Could someone please tell me where the option is to turn my messages back on? I can't find it.)
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 09:49pm
(Never mind, whatever was wrong seems okay now.)
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