Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

It’s the internet! Do you really think we’re THAT gullible?!

T-shirt?

The Hasselbeck claim is bogus. If you read the comparisons, there’s nothing close. The only thing suspicious is that they both used “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” which I think we can all agree is too common a phrase to indicate plagiarism. (The use of “isles” is the lawyer’s typo, btw—it’s spelled correctly in Hasselbeck’s published book.)

And gee, both have lists of symptoms that are similar? Well, could that be because the symptoms of celiac disease don’t just magically change when someone new writes a book on the subject? It’s called scènes à faire.

If you ask me, which you didn’t, the problem starts in schools. Unless we have more stringent, and stringently enforced, plagiarism regulations students learn that it is, if not acceptable, at least overlooked. I caught one of my students blatantly plagiarizing (sophomore at a large University in California) and wasn’t allowed to expel him. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to fail his paper. Despite the UC regulations on the subject.
~ Gail

At the school where I teach, plagiarism is reported by the teachers, but usually swept away depending on the administrator that gets the discipline referral. Because, you see, if they get DISCIPLINED for the plagiarism, it ruins their chances of getting into the Honor Society, and we wouldn’t want to ruin those chances.

ARGHHHHH!

I’m wondering how widespread plagarism (and/or failure to credit citations) was before the internet made it so easy to catch.  A lot of the people who are getting caught right now seem old enough that they would have gone to school before teachers got in the habit of saying “er, that doesn’t sound like my student’s phrasing, why don’t I run this sentance through a search engine?”

No professional writer can claim that they don’t know when to cite or use quotation marks on materials or ideas coming from other people, I’m not saying these people don’t know any better.  I’m saying, maybe they’ve been copying other people’s work for so long that they honestly have forgotten that it’s wrong.  It’s just become a part of their writing process.  Horribly unprofessional.

In other news, how much do you want to bet that this guy wrote the book thinking “I’ve got to find a better source for this info than Wikipedia, or middle school english teachers will laugh at me” and then just never did?  Or forgot that he needed to?  Horribly unprofessional and kind of hilarious.

Spamword: reason86 - there’s a reason I use a consistant and uniform research and note-taking methods for all professional papers.  It prevents me from plagarising Wikipedia and looking like an idiot.

Because Wikipedia is soooooo reliable!

When I worked as an editor for a scholarly publisher, I had to fight with authors about plagiarism all the time. And who were these plagiarizing authors?

College professors.

So yeah. The problem does start in schools…

Given the proliferation of this recently, I’m guessing that there must be a widespread belief that anything on the Internet is fair game.  (Or maybe they really think we ARE that gullible.)

When my husband taught college, he used to be so frustrated with the plagiarism of his students.  In one class he had four students pull material verbatim from the internet.  He got even more frustrated when he found the college was not consistent in their punishments of the students for the same crime in the same class.

None of the students seemed to understand that what they did was wrong.  No one had ever told them WHY plagiarism was bad and you have to cite your sources, etc.  They’d been given instructions on how to cite, but never why it was important.

Not to minimize the seriousness of plagiarism as a problem, but I find myself a trifle bemused by the notion of someone’s having plagiarized Wikipedia on two counts.

First, Wikipedia isn’t a fixed-text entity—it’s perfectly possible for the text of a given entry to be changed over time (and indeed, a particularly sneaky plagiarist might well change an entry’s text himself after borrowing that text for another purpose).  On the flip side, someone with a grudge might conceivably edit a Wikipedia entry, inserting the text of someone’s offline work in order to create the false appearance that the offline work had been cribbed.  And I don’t entirely trust Wikipedia’s internal revision-tracking to be able to properly unravel the truth where this sort of chicanery occurs.

Second, I can’t help but think that sooner or later, we’re going to see an accusation of “but you stole that text from Wikipedia” refuted by the simplest and most elegant possible defense: “No, I didn’t!  I wrote that Wikipedia entry myself!”

If you ask me, which you didn’t, the problem starts in schools. Unless we have more stringent, and stringently enforced, plagiarism regulations students learn that it is, if not acceptable, at least overlooked.

At the school where I teach, plagiarism is reported by the teachers, but usually swept away depending on the administrator that gets the discipline referral. Because, you see, if they get DISCIPLINED for the plagiarism, it ruins their chances of getting into the Honor Society, and we wouldn’t want to ruin those chances.

*banging head against wall*  It is not the schools’ fault that people plagiarize.  I’m sorry, but most of the people that are out there plagiarizing things have been out of school for years, and those students that plagiarize do get caught and do face the consequences.  I know of 2 people in the same poli sci class that were caught plagiarizing the professor’s notes and they both were given F’s.  There is even special software that professors must use to check for plagiarism called turnitin.com.  Maybe it is only those schools that have the problem.

And even if it is a widespread university conspiracy that allows idiot undergrads to plagiarize through reinforcement, people should know instinctively that copying someone else’s work (especially doing so verbetim) is wrong—this is something taught in the 1st grade.

BTW, it doesn’t surprise me that that bitch Elizabeth Hasselbeck would plagiarize something.  She is way too lazy and way too stupid to write an intelligible sentence let alone a book about something that doesn’t have to do with how wrong us liberals are about everything from the non-existence of Santa Claus to the Operation Iraqi Freedom (originally Operation Iraqi Liberation).

First, Wikipedia isn’t a fixed-text entity—it’s perfectly possible for the text of a given entry to be changed over time

This is true, but like everything else on the internet, Wikipedia is cached. It isn’t difficult to look at the date of the last change and then find a cached page from before that to see what it said.

Also, Wikipedia records changes and who made them so if someone where trying to create a case of faux plagiarism it wouldn’t be too hard to detect that.

Detecting changes made in order to cover up plagiarism might be more difficult. Because of the cached pages it’s easy to find but only if you know that you need to look.

I’m wondering how widespread plagarism (and/or failure to credit citations) was before the internet made it so easy to catch

Very. Veryvery. Coleridge, for example, was an inveterate plagiarizer.

The second Anderson example really isn’t that bad. I’d argue it’s a sloppy paraphrase, and not an example of plagiarism.

On reading the lawyer letter from Ms. Hassett’s attorney, I have to agree with Caroline; the cited comparisons in that case are completely unremarkable.  They clearly demonstrate that both books cover the same subject, but they completely fail to demonstrate that Ms. Hasselbeck appropriated text from Ms. Hassett’s book.  (OTOH, they do give some indication of why a professional publisher might not have been interested in Ms. Hassett’s book.)

A further observation on that one: if Ms. Hassett’s attorney is correct in presuming that the Hasselbeck book is the product of a ghostwriter, then the fact that Ms. Hassett sent a copy of her book to Ms. Hasselbeck is not material unless it can be shown that Hasselbeck sent that copy along to the ghostwriter.

On the basis of the supplied documents, Ms. Hassett’s complaint is highly unlikely to go anywhere.

As much as want to stomp a mudhole in Hasselbecks ass for her “view” on just about everything on the planet, it looks like a pretty weak case there. The chapters are the most damning, but I don’t think that is going to be enough here.

Damn.

Second, I can’t help but think that sooner or later, we’re going to see an accusation of “but you stole that text from Wikipedia” refuted by the simplest and most elegant possible defense: “No, I didn’t!  I wrote that Wikipedia entry myself!”

Indeed.  I have occasionally repeated myself in print without citing the original published text under my own name.  I don’t believe one can plagiarise oneself.

What an idiot. In the days of Google, it’s so easy to trace these things back to their original source. Why would someone take the risk?

Although I don’t buy the excuse of unintentional plagiarism, I find myself vetting my own blog posts to make sure I’ve cited all my influences and sources. Between Twitter and so many interesting blogs, it’s all too easy to forget where you originally read something, or who had the idea first. I know this is not quite the same as copying someone’s text word for word, but I think you do have to be careful.

Aargh! I pressed “submit” too soon.

@AgTigress I’ve also copied parts of what I wrote on one blog and pasted it on another or on my own. If I’m repeating exactly what I’ve just written, it seems daft to reformulate the whole thing again, particularly when I wrote it in the first place. If I do copy & paste my own words, I generally preface it with something like: And as I wrote at so and so’s blog…

I don’t believe one can plagiarise oneself.

I suppose that technically one can’t plagiarism from oneself, but in some contexts you can get in trouble for doing so.

In my Masters program we face discipline under the anti-plagiarism rules for copying from ourselves. Work done for the program, especially the required thesis, is supposed to be original work for the project. If we reuse earlier work we are considered to be cheating.

I don’t know if there are non-academic situations that would be the same. I suppose it would depend on the agreement that a writer had with a her/his publisher.

This is so ironic to me.  Back when I was an undergrad (when dinosaurs walked the Earth) I had a prof pull me in and suggest that he believed I had plagiarized a paper.  His reasoning?  “No freshman writes like that.”  I had to define every word I used to prove that yes, I actually wrote like I had swallowed I dictionary.  Thankfully, I grew out of that!

But what stuck with me was the genuine horror I had that anyone would actually suspect me of something like that.  I can’t speak for anyone else, but I personally wouldn’t get the “bang” I need/want out of writing if it wasn’t my own work - good, bad, or indifferent. 

-Spam text:  problem33.  Hm.  I think there’s a message here somewhere…

For once, I think I’ll side with the authors on both of these. As much as I dislike Hasslebeck, this doesn’t look like plagiarism, just a similar topic. And I do believe Andersen’s explanation. It was well worded and I think expressed enough outrage and apologeticness (is that a word?) for me to think it’s the truth.

Now citing Wikipedia? Now that’s a whole ‘nuther ball game.

Plagiarism must be taken more seriously, particularly in the field of education and with our leaders.  I know that dissertations are tough to do, what with everything else that is going on in your academic life, but it part of the requirements for your degree.

In the case of Elizabeth Hasselbeck, she’s fried.  Unfortunately for her, she even picked up the misspellings in Susan Hassett’s book (isle for aisle), ones that wouldn’t have been spotted by spellcheck.  That mistake alone will see her lose the courtcase.

@AgTigress and @Lori

Lori is right, you can indeed plagarism yourself, particularly in academic situations. Essentially if it’s been published before it is NOT fair game, even if you wrote the original article. For instance, if you write a paper that’s published in X journal you cannot use the same words/paragraphs in an article for Y publication because they are basically already owned by X.

Its confusing, but I’ve had to reword myself more than once in order to avoid getting into trouble. Which sucks because there’s only some many ways to say, ‘past research indicated blah, so the assumption of blah is utilized here’. Ugh.

If everyone majored in English, then they’d know how to take the substance of someone else’s work and rephrase it substantially enough that it’s not plagiarism. 

You can’t do this with fiction, of course, so the Janet Daileys of the world are screwed.  But that’s why, when Anderson or Doris Kearnes Goodwin or any other nonfiction writer gets caught, I’m disgusted.

No one expects a nonfiction writer to depend entirely on facts he/she discovered all by themselves or to discuss only those theories they developed all on their own.  Everyone understands that works of history, sociology, technology, whatever, draw upon the research and ideas of others.  So, you read that doctors in China don’t get paid when their patients get sick.  How hard is it to put that into your own words?  And to list the author of the original article in your bibliography?

It’s the laziness of it that angers me - the whole “I’m a big successful author now so I don’t have to pay attention to niggling details like other peoples’ work.”

And the idea that you had so many notes that you got confused, or it just found its way into your manuscript w/o your noticing, is bullshit as well.  A nonfiction book is just a really, really big research paper - it still has to be put together one chapter at a time.  If you’re not even doing that yourself, and you’re not reading every word of it yourself, then it’s not your book and your name shouldn’t be on it.

Ms. Tucker: regards the isle/aisle misspelling, Caroline upstream indicates that that’s a typographical error in the complaint, and that “aisle” is spelled correctly in the Hasselbeck book as published.

It may be just me, but if I were going to file a lawsuit for plagiaristic copyright infringement, I’d hire an attorney careful enough not to base a significant element of his lawyer letter on his own secretary’s tyop….

Technically I’m not sure copying from Wikipedia is illegal (isn’t it open source?)
I’m not saying it’s right, and it’s certainly not advisable, but I don’t think they can take it to court.

I’ll point to this book on Amazon selling for over a hundred dollars, all content copy/pasted from wikipedia down to the dead links:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/613000608X/ref=ox_ya_oh_product

The “publisher” is called Alphascript, and they specialize in “copyleft” material—read: stolen from internet

I would note that many of the concepts/chapters cited in the complaint also appear in my handy-dandy “Living Gluten-Free for Dummies” by Danna Korn (handy Kindle edition on the iPhone), including a section on shopping along the perimeter of the store, a description of celiac, restaurant dining (including the special card), traveling, maintaing a GF kitchen, symptoms, detailed descriptions of what can be eaten, and, yes, raising GF kids.

Korn (or her editor) spelled “aisle” correctly, for what it’s worth!

I think part of the problem is a misunderstanding of the term “public domain.” Most people assume that “available on the Internet” means “in the public domain” and are stunned to hear that no, “widely available” and “in the public domain” are two different things.

Tina: 

But what stuck with me was the genuine horror I had that anyone would actually suspect me of something like that.

Ohhh, yeah.

I had a similar experience in college, but not a case of “too good” writing—this was actually my fault, but through ignorance, not malice.  (I screwed up proper citation of translations through a secondary source). 

My prof, fortunately, was VERY kind, believed my stammered explanation, and while noting that technically I could be called up before the Academic Judicial Board and *expelled*, he was just going to give me the opportunity to re-submit the paper and take a reduced grade.

I spent the rest of the day shaking in shame and horror—not at the bullet I had dodged, but at my own culpability in this most heinous of sins. 

I find the insouciance of these writers and their defenders to be in some ways more shocking than the original crimes.

Lori is right, you can indeed plagarism yourself, particularly in academic situations. Essentially if it’s been published before it is NOT fair game, even if you wrote the original article. For instance, if you write a paper that’s published in X journal you cannot use the same words/paragraphs in an article for Y publication because they are basically already owned by X.

But one wouldn’t use the same words of course.  If one did, one would obviously have to set them as a quotation, as well as citing the source.  When I wrote ‘repeat myself’ I meant simply presenting the same hypothesis, opinion or interpretation that I had originated myself and published, in different words, elsewhere.  I would not use the precise words I have published elsewhere even if they first appeared in a book whose entire text is my own copyright, but I see no legal or moral reason why I should not repeat the substance of what I said in such a case.  If that were illegal or immoral, it would mean that nobody could dare to make the same point more than once.
The copyright ownership of papers or articles can vary.  Certainly the copyright of academic papers in scholarly journals will usually be the publisher’s, but there are many variations, particularly in the ‘popular academic’ field, or in multi-author edited books, in which individual authors may sometimes hold the copyright of their contribution.

I didn’t mean re-submitting academic work and claiming it was brand new. I was referring to copying and pasting my own words on blogs when discussing the same subject. I wouldn’t do that for an entire comment, but I have done it for the odd paragraph when I wanted to say essentially the same thing but didn’t have time to reformulate it. I don’t think this can be considered plagiarism.

I know I had to sign all a form when submitting my post grad thesis guaranteeing I hadn’t previously submitted it elsewhere and gained a degree. I also had to do this for a few academic articles.

I’m now getting an opportunity to join in the “copyright and copying” educational issue, participating in a workshop on the subject at ApolloCon, a midsized SF/F con in Houston. I watched the Cassie Edwards case unfold. I attended the Jane Litte/SBSarah/Nora Roberts panel at RWA San Francisco. I’ve tried to keep up with all the other plagiarism explosions since (and before). And with the piracy issues and arguments. Hopefully, I’ll be able to participate in an intelligent manner. I just wanted to comment here and say thanks to Sarah, Jane, Nora and the SB commenters for their discussion and contributions to the issues at hand.

It never seems to stop, does it?

Yanno, if an original fiction author feels the need to plagiarise another writer’s words on any level, it might be a sign they are in the wrong line of work.

Just saying.

Eesh!
AND the Blackfooted Ferret Piracy Award goes to….

But one wouldn’t use the same words of course.  If one did, one would obviously have to set them as a quotation, as well as citing the source.  When I wrote ‘repeat myself’ I meant simply presenting the same hypothesis, opinion or interpretation that I had originated myself and published, in different words, elsewhere.

At least for my Master’s work this would still be a problem. In order to reuse previous work, even in different words, I would have to make substantive additions or modifications to the hypothesis or the conclusion. If the work remains fundamentally unchanged then it’s off limits.

Obviously that doesn’t have a lot of applicability to the general topic of plagiarism, except that it highlights the fact that all writers need to educate themselves about the rules that apply to their work.

I agree with CupK8. I think it’s T-shirt time.

AND the Blackfooted Ferret Piracy Award goes to…

Now THIS would be a cool thing.  An organization who awards this annually to the most egregious example of plagiaristic asshattery.

Given RWA’s educational bent and all, having this award at their annual conference would be a good tool to educate the mass of writers about plagiarism.  Or would that be too political for them?

I’d love to see a website, Blackfooted Ferret Plagiarism Hall of Infamy.  Not enough to set it up myself, mind you, but it would be a very cool thing indeed

Indeed.  I have occasionally repeated myself in print without citing the original published text under my own name.  I don’t believe one can plagiarise oneself.

Actually you can plagiarize yourself.  I had a friend who wrote 2 very similar papers for 2 different class, and she got in trouble because the profs were friends and traded papers.  When they noticed the similar wording and content she ended up being called into the department over it.  She didn’t realize that when you quote yourself you have to cite it.  It is totally ridiculous because you can’t steal something from yourself, but that is the rule.  If you look at scholarly articles, you see them cite themselves all the time so as not to get in trouble.

As a newspaper editor, I have less and less patience for these sorts or excuses—especially from veteran journalists. There certainly are some grey areas in the area of attribution (such as reproducing your own material), but swiping from Wikipedia is not one of them. And simply rewriting the information isn’t enough, either.

Liz, as I explained in a later post, by ‘repeat’ I meant the substance, not the words.  And naturally one would not submit closely similar papers to two journals simultaneously:  that would be improper for reasons that have nothing to do with plagiarism per se. 
The kind of situation I am describing is that in which a person publishes a catalogue or academic work of synthesis that includes new data and new interpretations thereof;  then perhaps 10 years later, that same scholar is contracted to publish a popular/general book (without academic apparatus—no footnotes/endnotes at all) or an article in a semi-popular magazine on the same subject.  This happens all the time, as everyone working in academic circles will testify. 
While the author will usually have the opportunity to include her own books or articles, in which the information and her hypotheses were first set out, in the bibliography or in a shorter ‘further reading’ section, she is certainly free to repeat the substance of her own work within the body of the text.  If exact forms of words are quoted, they will be set as quotations.  If I, for instance, had been the first person to identify the North Italian origin of the some of the Neolithic polished jadeite axes found in northern Europe (I wasn’t), I would need to cite chapter and verse in academic papers, but I would be free to continue to mention the fact without formal citation in lectures and in popular sources, because the information originated with me.  In fact, anyone now working in the field of Neolithic lithics may refer to the Italian source of the material, because that information is now proven and accepted fact;  it is not longer a theory.
If that is not so in the USA, then I must already be guilty of a great deal of self-plagiarism in the lectures I have delivered there at various times on my own subject areas.
Self-citation is often necessary, but it, too, is a double-edged sword for academics, and referees of academic papers tend to look askance at work that includes a long list of citations under the author’s own name:  it can be considered bad form.  My favourite example was one in which a late colleague of mine cited herself with approval as though she were a completely different person:  let us call her ‘Finch’.  Part of one sentence read something like, ‘as Finch has already cogently argued (1996, 26)...’  Well, since she wrote it herself, naturally she thought it was a cogent argument!

I think that legally, we may be moving from definitions relating to plagiarism to those relating to intellectual property, which is another minefield.  I can only say that I published my first paper in a scholarly journal more than 45 years ago, and about 200 papers and 13 books later, I think I do have a reasonable working knowledge of the norms.

Indeed, not all copyright infringement is plagiarism, and one gathers from parts of the foregoing that not all plagiarism is necessarily copyright infringement.

My initial understanding of plagiarism, when I was first introduced to the concept a good many years ago now, was that in strict terms, plagiarism specifically involves the verbatim appropriation of unattributed words.  Somewhere in my files I’ve got a short letter from Isaac Asimov on this very matter; I’d run across a close-but-sloppy paraphrase of one of his short mysteries in a local rag and written to advise him of the fact.  The substance of his comment was that because the misuse wasn’t a verbatim copying, it was impractical to pursue the matter, and I believe he did make the point that while the work was clearly stolen, it wasn’t strictly an act of plagiarism because the words had been changed.

And what we see in fiction—in cases ranging from scandals among fanfiction writers to “KaavyaGate” from a couple of years back now—seems all too often to be the close-paraphrase problem in varying degrees, which doesn’t strike me as plagiarism per se but is nonetheless problematic at best even when it may not stretch into copyright infringement.

Particularly in certain corners of the genre fiction (and fanfiction) universe, I think it’s possible for incidences of close paraphrase to arise without conscious or malign intent—partly due to conventions of style and craft, and sometimes to unusually retentive and wide-ranging reading habits.  Teen-aged Kaavya Viswanathan, whom I mentioned above, was reported to have a photographic/eidetic memory—and was apparently a voracious reader of the same kind of book she was trying to write under a fair amount of deadline pressure.  I find it totally unsurprising that bits and pieces of her favorite books wound up in paraphrased form in the novel she turned in.  One can’t approve of this kind of situation, and with or without intent a sufficiently close paraphrase may well constitute copyright infringement for legal purposes, but I hesitate to refer to all such instances as plagiarism.

By contrast, the Cassie Edwards affair documented in detail on this site looks like a different tankful of pirahna—the parallels are closer, the borrowings include nonfiction, and the span of time involved is much greater.  I wouldn’t dispute for a moment the use of “plagiarism” to describe that case.

In order to reuse previous work, even in different words, I would have to make substantive additions or modifications to the hypothesis or the conclusion. If the work remains fundamentally unchanged then it’s off limits.

Lori, are you saying that if you came up with an original Hypothesis A in 2003, published it, and now another researcher in the field has come up with his contrary Hypothesis B, which you wish to demolish in a conference paper which will be published in the conference proceedings, you are not allowed to re-state your own original theory in your argument against his revision?  Of course you are.  If it were not so, the whole process of academic research would grind to a shuddering halt.
The rules relating to submission of graduate theses and dissertations may have very tight restrictions (which vary), but I am speaking of ordinary, refereed publication.

On a completely different tangent, as to re-using one’s own work, one of the first lessons one learns in the world of nonfiction magazine freelancing is the idea of “double dipping”—using one round of research and spadework to produce several articles with different slants and approaches for several different editorial markets.

The key, of course, is “different slants and approaches”.  One doesn’t publish the same article in two or more places—particularly direct competitors—without proper disclosures and understandings in place; one writes different texts tailored to each different audience.  But so long as the underlying spadework is one’s own, one is understood to be free to use that spadework to one’s own best advantage.  [That said, I’d be cautious about too heavily re-using source material for which I’d billed expenses to a particular market, absent clear guidelines and/or an understanding with the editor in question.]

Second, I can’t help but think that sooner or later, we’re going to see an accusation of “but you stole that text from Wikipedia” refuted by the simplest and most elegant possible defense: “No, I didn’t!  I wrote that Wikipedia entry myself!”

Funny you should mention that, because I’ve had that happen! I questioned something I saw in an article as being very similar to the Wikipedia entry on the same subject, and subsequent investigation showed that the Wikipedia entry and the article were written by the same author.

Lori, are you saying that if you came up with an original Hypothesis A in 2003, published it, and now another researcher in the field has come up with his contrary Hypothesis B, which you wish to demolish in a conference paper which will be published in the conference proceedings, you are not allowed to re-state your own original theory in your argument against his revision?  Of course you are.  If it were not so, the whole process of academic research would grind to a shuddering halt.

I’m saying that for my program I couldn’t use the refutation of Hypothesis B as my Master’s thesis unless it involved substantial new scholarship on Hypothesis A and I had permission from my adviser.

I’m going to take a heretical view here and say that, while wholesale copying is bad, pursuing issues such as the repetition of individual sentences in a novel-length work is actually bad for literature as a whole, especially when applied to fiction.

Elegant re-use of phrases from previous work is one of the glories of English literature.  You could footnote them all, but it breaks up the flow of the story or poem.

I think we would have lost a lot if TS Eliot hadn’t felt free to embed tiny fragments of other peoples’ poems in _The Waste Land_.  I’m not sure that work could have been effectively written in any other way.  Why do we need to make such re-use of works written within the last century illegal and unethical?  Does it really help creators?

The last paragraph of the novel _Clouds End_ is the same, except for a name change and a pronoun change, as the last paragraph of _The Return of the King_.  I found the artistic effect stunning—the resonance with the earlier work threw new light on the end of the later one.  Should Stewart have been forbidden to do this?  Who would be better off if he was?  Certainly sales of _The Return of the King_ are not likely to drop because you can get one paragraph of it in a different book, so it’s not a sales-protection issue.  Is Stewart trying to pass off someone else’s work as his own?  I don’t think so; I think he fully expected most of his readers to recognize the paragraph and know where it came from.

I think we are, culturally, a bit crazy about this topic, and would do better to back off.  (And I say this as a university professor who would, none the less, reject a plagiarized paper.  It’s perfectly legitimate to insist that academic papers be the author’s own work.  But we don’t have to extend that rule as far as we do.)

Mary Kaye

I agree that sometimes an unascribed quotation can be seen as an hommage - like embedding a theme from one composer into an original work (Gounod’s use of Bach as a ground in Ave Maria, for example, or hundreds of melodies written over Pachebel’s Canon).  But sometimes it really does appear to be just laziness: I once ran across a scene in a book by Christopher Stasheff which had been lifted from another book in the same series.  Side by side, the two scenes were exactly the same, with the character’s name changed.  I suppose it is possible he simply ‘recalled’ the scene, or even wished to reference the earlier book… but that’s not what it looked like.