A great article on plagiarism

First I loved Malcolm Gladwell. Then I was pissed at him for his “all chick lit is the same” crapola on his blog during the Viswanathan scandal. Now I love him again, because I think I agree with him on his views of intellectual property.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041122fa_fact

Go read it now. And then let us discuss how pure our inspiration has to be for it to count? Had I been Bryony Lavery, the playwright of Frozen, I would not have thought that quoting from a decade-old non-fiction article in my play would have been a problem. Gladwell asks:

How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”

I think this is what disturbed me so about the Holy Blood, Holy Grail case in England.
How could you be accused of plagiarism when you used a non-fiction piece as background for your fiction. That’s not plagiarism. That’s research!

It also matters how Lavery chose to use my words. Borrowing crosses the line when it is used for a derivative work… But Lavery wasn’t writing another profile of [serial killer psychiatrist] Dorothy Lewis… And she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life as a building block in making that confrontation plausible. Isn’t that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.

In the end, Gladwell decided that he wasn’t upset about the lines from his piece that had been co-opted into the play, though admits that it wasn’t until he realized how briliant the Tony-nominated script was that he was able to fully articulate how robbed he didn’t feel by the transformation. (Small cynical observation: one wonders if it were a piece of crap, would he still be cool with it?)

Dorothy Lewis, the psychiatrist profiled in Gladwell’s piece, was the one who first brought this case to light, and even asked Gladwell to turn over the copyright on his article so that she could further her lawsuit against the playwright. She said that details of her life had been lifted wholesale to create the psychiatrist character in Frozen. And she was disturbed (one reason among many) because the play’s character had an affair with her collaborator, and she feared people would think that she had done the same in real life.

Lewis is upset not just about how Lavery copied her life story, in other words, but about how Lavery changed her life story. She’s not merely upset about plagiarism. She’s upset about art—about the use of old words in the service of a new idea—and her feelings are perfectly understandable, because the alterations of art can be every bit as unsettling and hurtful as the thievery of plagiarism. It’s just that art is not a breach of ethics.

I guess this is why you only write about real people who are dead.

But then again, who can stop to count the novels where the whole point is to speculate on whom the author is really talking about? Primary Colors, Valley of the Dolls… these kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge inspired by pieces have long been a staple of creative types everywhere. To divorce a writer completely from inspiration is to force them to create pieces that have absolutely no resonance with the audience! As long as the names are changed to protect the innocent… (wait, do I have to quote Dragnet to use that line?)

This is, naturally, a subject of great interest to me, as I have written a book with an obvious real life counterpart: Yale University and its system of secret societies. The book is not a roman a clef, not a fictionalized memoir. It’s a novel. I made it all up. Naturally, I researched heavily to make sure I was making up all the right stuff. And parts of the people in the book remind me of parts of people I knew at school. But then again, shouldn’t they? If all my characters bore no resemblance to Yale students, then how could I claim to be writing about Ivy league kids? The whole point of fiction seems to me to be to make it as true-sounding as possible. As Mark Twain said, “the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to be believable.”