It would seem that Helene Hegemann is a talented, creative young woman. One wonders what sort of fiction she could have created had she simply “stood on the shoulders of giants” and written an original work inspired by past literary giants. Instead, she decided to cut and paste pages of published literary works and pass off the result as her own work. Of course, she eventually got caught, as plagiarists almost always do in this digital age (see Chris Anderson).

Here’s the twist, reprinted from a New York Times piece by Nicholas Kulish (thank you to another author, Brenna Lyons, for pointing out this story):

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Well, there you go.

As a professional writer for about a quarter-century, I’ve long been wary of what I view as a growing cultural acceptance of plagiarism. In 2006 I publicly called out my own daughter (withholding her name, of course) for appalling plagiarism in a school essay she wrote on Jesse Owens. That 2006 post linked to a BBC story about the “Google generation,” which doesn’t understand the difference between research and plagiarism, between expanding one’s intellect and lifting someone’s intellectual expression.

There are two key take-aways here:

1. Education is key. Since that incident with my daughter, we’ve moved and she now is in a different school district. I’ve been pleased with her new teachers and my son’s teachers, how they are instilling in my kids an understanding of research and documentation. At times they even insist that some or all of the works cited must be from a book or research article; nothing that is ephemeral, like a Wikipedia entry. We parents share a responsibility to help our children understand that just because you can cut and paste something doesn’t mean you should. (See “Is Technology Our Master?” for more on how we enable technology, not the other way around.)

2. Mash-ups happen because someone creates an original work. Our would-be novelist says nothing is original, yet the passages she lifted from other books were original expressions in those books, even if the ideas were not new. Copyright is ownership of expression. It encourages new expression. If one cannot have any rights over one’s creative expression — if releasing that expression into the world creates common ownership of that expression — there will be little incentive for many to put in the months and years of work required to write an original novel. We need to ask ourselves if we want to live in a culture where new expression does not just build on the creativity of others but appropriates and repurposes it. That is a culture that will quickly grow stale.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 6:17 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, culture, education, fair use, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.