A colleague noted that our blog entry on an author who plagiarized others’ work and then defended it as a generational issue was quoted in a Sunday New York Times piece by Randy Kennedy:

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group involving movie studios, networks and artists, took to the alliance’s blog immediately to condemn Ms. Hegemann. “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,” he wrote, adding that a creative culture dominated by borrowing and repurposing is a “culture that will quickly grow stale.”

The NYT journalist also cites a new book David Shields called “Reality Hunger,” in which Mr. Shields has combined quotes from other writers to present an open-source style approach to writing. There’s not much I can say about this book, having not read it — although depending on his sources, I may have read much of it in its original, intended form — but based on the NYT piece and this Wall Street Journal review by Sam Sacks I read last week, I have a few thoughts:

1. It’s possible Mr. Shields, a professional writer, has provided a reader service by meshing together disparate thoughts in a new narrative. I gather here he’s focusing on writers’ opinions and insights, which is different from the fictional elements the other author plagiarized.

2. One would hope the work is well-cited, although both the NYT and the WSJ articles lead me to believe I would as a reader wish to see more direct acknowledgment of original sources.

3. While Mr. Shields subtitled the book “A Manifesto” and clearly feels he is revolutionizing print, it’s unlikely he has done so any more than any open-source approach has revolutionized any industry. Just as email didn’t replace snail mail, new ways of doing things often can co-exist with traditional approaches that have their own advantages.

As a former journalist and professional writer who still does research, I’d be the first to argue that there is an obvious tradition in non-fiction of building a new narrative on previous writings. There are proper ways of doing this. Maybe Mr. Shields has found a way to do it with a bit more edge, but even he would have to admit that he couldn’t have created his cut-and-paste if there weren’t insightful passages to cut and paste to begin with.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 4:17 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, creativity, creators, fair use, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.