Plagiarism: Selling Altered Fanfic and Published Works Edition

Amazon could easily check for duplicates before putting material live. But then people would have to deal with false positives. So it is a matter of which would be worse.

To be honest I don't see the point in plagiarizing. Even if you don't get caught immediately it's not like you can hide the evidence of your crime. All it takes is one person to have read both books and make the connection. So long as the original authors are willing to take legal action the problem is never going to be that significant.

If you know that at some point your reputation will be destroyed, your books taken off the market, and you will be facing litigation chances are you are not going to plagiarise.

You set up the account with false info and keep all the money you make until you are caught. Rinse and repeat.

LOTLOF said:

To be honest I don't see the point in plagiarizing. Even if you don't get caught immediately it's not like you can hide the evidence of your crime. All it takes is one person to have read both books and make the connection. So long as the original authors are willing to take legal action the problem is never going to be that significant.

If you know that at some point your reputation will be destroyed, your books taken off the market, and you will be facing litigation chances are you are not going to plagiarise.

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I suspect that few of them face any serious consequences. Only if there are seriously famous people involved. They won't get paid that quarter from Amazon, but I don't think Amazon attempts to recoup anything they've already been paid. That would just be too expensive and probably futile. If they steal from fanfiction.net and fictionpress and similar sites, then the people they steal from are unlikely to have the resources to pursue the person legally, even if they were easily able to find out who they are.

They get found out, and that particular author name vanishes from the Internet in ignominy, and comes back under another name, with a whole new bunch of stolen books. Nobody knows they are the same person as that terrible person who got run off the Internet a few months ago.

It's likely that the ones who are found out are the tip of the iceberg. The ones dumb enough to steal an especially popular book or fanfic, which some reader is going to spot pretty quickly. The smarter ones will pick up something more obscure. How many of them are there out there flying under the radar?

We've seen that "I didn't plagiarize! My ghostwriter plagiarized!" excuse before.

James D. Macdonald said:

We've seen that "I didn't plagiarize! My ghostwriter plagiarized!" excuse before.

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He plagiarized the excuse? At least he's being consistent.

Jess Haines said:

So the other day I read this:

http://www.dianapeterfreund.com/an-epidemic-of-plagiarism-in-the-indie-world/

Short version: It has become disturbingly common for a plagiarist to "scrape" content from other websites and package it up into a new book. Sometimes changing a few words and character names so it isn't noticed right away. It's been somewhat common knowledge that this was being done on Amazon with blog articles, but it seems to have spread now into fanfiction and even published works by bestsellers.

As the author of the above blog link says:



I find this terrifically worrisome since it is so easy for someone to put just about anything up for sale as a self published work. What protections is Amazon putting in place to prevent this in the future (if any)? What can we do to put a stop to this? I realize it can be reported, and then the plagiarized version of the work will be taken down, but it seems like there must be more that we (communal we of readers, authors, and other publishing professionals) can do to bring more notice to this problem and perhaps offer some solutions to nip it in the bud, before the plagiarists get any money.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

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There are sites that one (as in a teacher) can type in a few sentences from a submitted academic paper, and the site will tell if the paper (or the part typed in) is plagiarized, and from what. An expanded version could do this with books and all sorts of content sites from Wikipedia to fanfiction sites.

veinglory said:

Amazon could easily check for duplicates before putting material live. But then people would have to deal with false positives. So it is a matter of which would be worse.

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I don't understand - why would there be false positives? Can you give an example?

All I can imagine is two different people putting up a public domain work, and the work could simply be marked public domain (though if it doesn't attribute the original source, it's still plagiarism). If it's on gutenberg.org, it's public domain at least to their standards.

But with international access, even public domain may not be that simple. What's public domain in one country (perhaps because someone forgot to renew copyright) may not be in another (because they did renew, or they didn't need to renew in the other country).

Regardless not finding the original author's name in the new text would be evidence of plagiarism.

Computer scanning could do a large part, perhaps most of the work, and suspicious results could be verified by knowledgeable people.

LOTLOF said:

To be honest I don't see the point in plagiarizing. Even if you don't get caught immediately it's not like you can hide the evidence of your crime. All it takes is one person to have read both books and make the connection. So long as the original authors are willing to take legal action the problem is never going to be that significant.

If you know that at some point your reputation will be destroyed, your books taken off the market, and you will be facing litigation chances are you are not going to plagiarise.

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There are people who don't know this, and/or they don't care and they're out to make a quick buck.

Jess Haines said:

That's the thing, if they are caught, they may still have received money from Amazon (or whatever retailer) which never makes its way to the original authors/copyright holders. I doubt Amazon would release the information on the plagiarist so the copyright holder could take action without a subpoena to force their hand.

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This is a good point, Amazon (and similar sites) may only delete the infringer's work or account, but not inform the rights holder.

This kind of stuff has been going on for some time now...

benbradley said:

I don't understand - why would there be false positives? Can you give an example?

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I have a couple of NaNoWriMo novels I wrote in 2006 and 2007 and have been on my old writing site from before I turned pro for several years now. So this year I decided, mostly for fun and just to see how it's done, to make them into ebooks and put them up free on Smashwords.

But I haven't taken them down off my old site. They're still there - with a link to their pages on Smashwords so people know they are available that way too.

If Smashwords did a search to find material the same as the ebooks I was uploading, it would find them on my website. So that would be a false positive. Okay, it wouldn't be hard for me to prove that website is mine and I own the material, but that all takes time and time is money - not so much for me, but certainly for Smashwords and Amazon and whoever. And money is always the sticking point.

I am halfway planning to revamp a fan fiction series I wrote a decade ago. It will be very different when I am finished. But if the publisher likes the result, I am certainly taking down the old stories.

So my question is can I use MY OWN old fanfics for ideas for my original stories or would that be considered plagiarism?

apgambrell said:

So my question is can I use MY OWN old fanfics for ideas for my original stories or would that be considered plagiarism?

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No. You can't plagiarize yourself. Also, using an idea that's been done before isn't plagiarism. For one thing, ideas aren't copyrighted. Second, plagiarism refers to stealing someone else's words and claiming they're you're own. As long the material that you put in original stories is your own (you're using your own writing and your own characters and settings), it's fine.

Just scrape clean the fan fic aspects, make sure the story functions well without them, and you should be good to go.

Becky Black said:

If Smashwords did a search to find material the same as the ebooks I was uploading, it would find them on my website. So that would be a false positive.

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This actually happened to a friend of mine during Amazon's most recent purge.

People are less concerned about civil suits than about criminal action, I guess.

There was a recent thread about an author who realized his work was plagiarized. An important point came up.

It's not enough to prove the plagiarism. You also have to prove that plagiarism damaged your business. That ain't easy. Without that proof of damage, you might get an injunction ordering the work off the market, but the plagiarist loses very little otherwise. They just turn around, scrape someone else's work (or a different work of yours), and, as was already said, "wash, rinse, repeat."

Sort of like with spammers. It doesn't cost them much, and it only needs to work a little bit to turn a profit.

People want easy money, and some people want fame. Some people are unscrupulous about how they get either. Plagiarism, spam, or bank fraud, people are people.

Buffysquirrel said:

People are less concerned about civil suits than about criminal action, I guess.

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Certainly - and probably with good reason, in the sense that "the potential cost and risks of the legal action itself" is more likely to inhibit one than the other.