Stuck on a scene? Just plagiarize!

[Dr_Strabismus]

Feeling unappreciated by the AH crowd is really a terrible reason to leave Lit, to delete your stories, and stop writing

Yep. People in the AH are not representative of the readership here, or the writership, or any other ship you want to jump.

 

[MillieDynamite]

As said earlier in the thread, there is a vast difference between inspiration and plagiarism. Wanting to achieve the feeling of a scene from another story means you put in the effort to duplicate the feeling, not the words, not in the exact same order. When I wrote Written in Blood, I worked hard to evoke the same feeling. I used some of the same terms, 'for the dead travel swift,' 'the life is in the blood,' and worked some scenes into my story, but reimagined, not copied. Even then, I worried some of it was close, so I did a plagiarism check, and get came back as not. When I'm inspired by a story and want to write my own version, I try to make my own version. Just correct your mistake and move on, don't delete your account, and don't leave. Just fix it! It isn't like three sentences amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Oops, I watched Casablanca last night.

 

[lovecraft68]

Per usual, I think Bramblethorn did a great job of laying all this out and end of the day, and I did say this somewhere further back, worse things have been done here that didn't lead to an all out lynch mob. The most outraged person in this thread really needs to check themselves because its a matter of time before their behavior becomes 'public' here.

And because of that I agreed that this is wrong, but I'm not going to join the crucifixion parade because of my aforementioned point. I'll add though, that it was poor timing to start a "I'll pull all your story data for you" thread before the smoke was settled here because you did earn some mistrust.

I can understand wanting to bail from the forum but removing your stories seems like cut off your nose to spite your face because if how proud you were of all your numbers.

But its your call to make

I hope Electric Blue feels better now about his "should be banned from the site" posts.

But hey, life goes on for all of us.

 

[alohadave]

The most outraged person in this thread really needs to check themselves because its a matter of time before their behavior becomes 'public' here.

What exactly are you implying here?

It sounds like you are threatening to out someone for some behavior.

 

[lovecraft68]

What exactly are you implying here?

It sounds like you are threatening to out someone for some behavior.

No, not me. What I know -and was shown-came from others. Matter of time before someone decides to make it public. I thought someone was going to a bit over a year ago, but they decided to leave instead. Too bad they were a great poster and even better writer.

 

[NoJo]

they were a great poster and even better writer

Ok, not me.

 

[lovecraft68]

Ok, not me.

Also not you because you're back.

 

[lovecraft68]

Jokes aside, what's going to be a shame is because 8letters had some popular stories there will end up being threads where someone comes here with a "what happened to..." and someone is going to happily link this thread, which would be kind of shitty, but I know it will happen.

 

[SimonDoom]

Let's recap this a bit, to be real. The thread started on 12/28. People expressed concern and dismay, but most withheld judgment because we hadn't actually seen the text comparison. The thread went off on various diversions, as Lit threads do, including inane discussion of Star Wars by LC and me and others. On 12/29 Bramblethorn posted the comparison. And most everyone agreed it was plagiarism, which set off more conversation, but very few suggested punishment of any kind. There's no call whatsoever for the characterization of this thread as asking for someone's scalp, or of constituting a purity police. But according to 8Letters by 12/30 he decided to delete all his stories, not just the offending one. I count exactly one contributor, among all those in the thread up to that point, that might, with a stretch, be described as calling for a "scalp" up to that point. He's free to do as he pleases, but this seems like jumping the gun to me, and I don't understand why someone who's been writing stories here and posting comments here for going on 10 years and who has built up an impressive reader following would pull all stories and toss all that hard-earned success in the waste bucket because of something one or two people said. This was very much NOT a witch hunt.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Let's recap this a bit, to be real. The thread started on 12/28. People expressed concern and dismay, but most withheld judgment because we hadn't actually seen the text comparison. The thread went off on various diversions, as Lit threads do, including inane discussion of Star Wars by LC and me and others. On 12/29 Bramblethorn posted the comparison. And most everyone agreed it was plagiarism, which set off more conversation, but very few suggested punishment of any kind. There's no call whatsoever for the characterization of this thread as asking for someone's scalp, or of constituting a purity police. But according to 8Letters by 12/30 he decided to delete all his stories, not just the offending one. I count exactly one contributor, among all those in the thread up to that point, that might, with a stretch, be described as calling for a "scalp" up to that point. He's free to do as he pleases, but this seems like jumping the gun to me, and I don't understand why someone who's been writing stories here and posting comments here for going on 10 years and who has built up an impressive reader following would pull all stories and toss all that hard-earned success in the waste bucket because of something one or two people said. This was very much NOT a witch hunt.

Sometimes, when people are ashamed and embarrassed by something they have done, they feel a need to atone. Sometimes that takes the form of punishing yourself. Perhaps 8Letters is going through something like that, hurting himself by destroying something that obviously meant a lot to him. I don't know, I'm not a therapist, just a person who has been through some shit.

In any case, I don't approve of what he did, but I am sorry that he won't be contributing here anymore.

 

[lovecraft68]

Sometimes, when people are ashamed and embarrassed by something they have done, they feel a need to atone. Sometimes that takes the form of punishing yourself. Perhaps 8Letters is going through something like that, hurting himself by destroying something that obviously meant a lot to him. I don't know, I'm not a therapist, just a person who has been through some shit.

In any case, I don't approve of what he did, but I am sorry that he won't be contributing here anymore.

Good analogy, the AH version of cutting.

 

[lovecraft68]

Let's recap this a bit, to be real. The thread started on 12/28. People expressed concern and dismay, but most withheld judgment because we hadn't actually seen the text comparison. The thread went off on various diversions, as Lit threads do, including inane discussion of Star Wars by LC and me and others. On 12/29 Bramblethorn posted the comparison. And most everyone agreed it was plagiarism, which set off more conversation, but very few suggested punishment of any kind. There's no call whatsoever for the characterization of this thread as asking for someone's scalp, or of constituting a purity police. But according to 8Letters by 12/30 he decided to delete all his stories, not just the offending one. I count exactly one contributor, among all those in the thread up to that point, that might, with a stretch, be described as calling for a "scalp" up to that point. He's free to do as he pleases, but this seems like jumping the gun to me, and I don't understand why someone who's been writing stories here and posting comments here for going on 10 years and who has built up an impressive reader following would pull all stories and toss all that hard-earned success in the waste bucket because of something one or two people said. This was very much NOT a witch hunt.

It's the classic cop out - in his mind he's quite justified In what he did, because he "doesn't know what it feels like to have sex from a female perspective" (neither do I, but with imagination, I can have a go at writing it); and it's only if we feel he's crossed a line that it's a problem. He then effectively belittles his stolen source, "it wouldn't be hard to rewrite what little is from..." and still tries to say, it was only a little bit, what's the crime?

He's a fake, and should be kicked off the site. How many more stories have stolen content?

Well your buddy here made several remarks like this. Other than Mr. Righteous here, I don't think anyone really called for his head, just telling him he was wrong for doing it.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Sometimes, when people are ashamed and embarrassed by something they have done, they feel a need to atone. Sometimes that takes the form of punishing yourself. Perhaps 8Letters is going through something like that, hurting himself by destroying something that obviously meant a lot to him. I don't know, I'm not a therapist, just a person who has been through some shit.

In any case, I don't approve of what he did, but I am sorry that he won't be contributing here anymore.

I don't think running from what he did, serves any purpose. He had plenty of good stuff to show for his efforts. Everyone makes mistakes. You own up to it and try to fix it. At least that's what I think you should do.

 

[TheRedChamber]

The scene I started with is on page 6 and page 7 of "A Girl Named Mitch Ch. 02" (link). I can't find the story I pulled the vibrator use from. Something "Angel" or "Devil"?

My sex scene is halfway down this page.

I don't know what it's like to have sex from a female perspective. That story had a female narrator, and, as much as possible, I wanted to use a woman's words to describe what sex with another woman is like.

I made a bad decision on how much to take from "A Girl Named Mitch". I rewrote the vast majority of a FF sex scene into a MFF threesome. If you look at the comparison, what's from "A Girl Named Mitch" is 10-20% of the whole sex scene. To me, the sex scene is very much an 8letters' sex scene. And the sex scene is just a half a page of a seven page story, which is in a different category from "A Girl Name Mitch".

It doesn't matter. If people feel I crossed a line, I crossed a line. It wouldn't be hard to rewrite what little is from "A Girl Name Mitch", but I'll take the story down instead.

I think there was a good discussion to have been had about what I did. What are the rules for plagiarism for professional writing and how applicable are they to amateur porn writing? I think what I did was minor compared to other stories I’ve seen on this site. It’s minor compared to what a lot of politicians have done. I didn’t take from another story its plot, its premise, any of its characters, any of its plot points, any of its scenes nor any of its dialog. I think what I did wouldn’t have been discovered if I hadn't be open and honest in my extended author notes about how I wrote the story. Even knowing I had used another author’s words in my sex scene, no one could find on their own what I had used. Shouldn’t the response had been to ask me to rewrite the small portion of that sex scene that was borrowed from another story? How could I rewrite those ten lines to keep the flavor of "A Girl Named Mitch" so it wouldn't be plagiarism? But we didn’t have that discussion.

When this thread started, I thought that all my contributions to this forum, the statistical analysis I’ve done, all the writing advice I’ve posted, the 20+ stories I’ve published, the contest I’ve won, and having a story in the I/T HoF would get me a lot of the benefit of the doubt. I was wrong.

If someone had said, “8letters, this is bad. You’re a good guy and a good writer. Take out those ten lines and write your own,” I would have happily done that. But it was all the purity police swinging their silver hammers of outrage, dragging me over the coals for six pages. Well, now you have a scalp - I’ve deleted all of my stories. Literotica took their sweet time in deleting my stories - I requested they all be deleted on 12/30.

Thursday, I created this thread offering to do a service for my fellow authors on my way out the door. Reading the replies, I kept getting the feeling that so many of the posters had hearts several sizes too small. It confirmed for me that there was nothing I could have said on this thread that would have made them happy.

This captures well the attitude I felt from the purity police:

8Letters,

Firstly, thank you for your statistical analysis of story scores which I've used a lot over the past year and have found invaluable. You've also given me honest and useful feedback on my stories previously. I genuinely think its a pity you're leaving.

I stayed out of the thread until now because I didn't have anything particularly to add to what others have said previous. Even this post is going to repeat a lot from previous posters, but hopefully I can put it all together for you. I'm even not sure if you're going to be around to read this. I hope so. I'm going to write this just as some advice because its becoming increasingly clear to me that you don't seem to get the underlying problem or how you could have handled it better. You've made three posts to this thread and I'm quoting them all at the top because I'm going to be referring to them. I'm not the police, nor am I the site-owner, and none of this is intended to be 'building a case' against you, instead I hope its useful to you in the future.

The first and most important thing I'd like you to consider is that in none of those posts have you used the word 'sorry'. You've come close by saying you'd 'made a bad decision', but you've never actually apologised. To be clear, you don't necessarily have to apologie to us, but you needed to apologise publically - and since you're addressing the matter here a simple 'I've written to JCMcNeily, told him what I did and expressed regret for it' would have gone a long way.

By the time you posted your first response on the thread, it should have been pretty clear which way it was going to go. You could have written more about how this happened and how you viewed the copying. Hell, as you are clearly very computer literate you could have produced your own 'diff' version of the two stories and let people see exactly the similiarities rather than have Bramblethorn do it. It might also have been good to state clearly whether any of your other stories included plagiarism.

By the time of your second post, you start trying to explain but still don't give the impression that you are that concerned or that you 'get it'. You took 'the wrong amount' from the story, you 'wanted to use a woman's words' so you did. Most worrying you say 'If people feel I crossed a line, I crossed a line.'. You are not giving the impression that you have thought about what you did and you feel sorry for it. And while I truly believe you didn't understand what you were doing was so wrong, otherwise you wouldn't have written about it in the first place, you're not really asking any questions about what would or would not be acceptable when taking inspiration from another story.

I'm afraid your third post comes across as completely disingenous. You say that how you could have rewrite those ten copied lines should have been a topic of discussion, but then you'd ended your previous post by saying it wouldn't be hard to rewrite those lines, but you're taking your story down anyway. We didn't know that you wanted or needed help about this. Your third post also conveniently ignores the fact that you don't know what the second story you copied from is and simply rewriting that when we don't know what the original text was would be a lot harder. Instead you never mention the second plagiarised story again.

You also say that you requested that your stories be taken down on the 30th December. You didn't tell this to anyone here at the time. If you had, I'm sure you would have had several posters, myself including, saying that you were going too far and that it wasn't necessary. Instead you opened up a thread offering to help people with statistics. You say now you wanted to help people on your way out of the door. That thread might have done a lot better if you had clearly stated you were leaving when you posted it and this was part of an apology. Instead, as many felt you hadn't addressed the plagiarism issue properly, people called you out on it - and it also didn't help that a lot of people were confused about what it was exactly you were offering to do anyway.

You mention all the things you've done for the community and I think most people acknowledge this. The problem is that, in many ways, this makes the situation more serious rather than less. Because we know you and because you are taken seriously around here, it does become far more of an issue that if a random unknown poster had been caught. The fact that you've won prizes and have top stories is going to make people more worried if parts of your other successful stories have been plagiarised as well. People who have taken your good advice previously would be stratching their heads at how you got this basic part of writing so horribly wrong. People, I think, have been genuinely surprised by whats happened because they do know you and did not expect that you would do this.

(I've more to say, but I'm going to need to split this post to avoid the word limit)

 

[TheRedChamber]

Let's be clear about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the worst thing that a writer can do. In a professional setting plagiarising has ended the careers of many writers. There was a case a couple of years ago in video games journalism, Filip Miucin, where a writer got caught copying other reviews. I'd suggest looking into it because his initial bad responses and attempts to redeem himself and get work in the industry are a good example of just how badly this kind of thing can go and remind me a lot of what's played out here. You're lucky that you are writing under a username and could easily start again under a different name (and I still think you could have and maybe still can continue as 8letters, although its getting more and more difficult) - Miucin will never work in journalism again.

You mention that you didn't take any of its plot, characters or premise from the other stories. The funny thing is, if you had, you would have been fine. There's a story about Brahms and how, after the premier of his first symphony which he'd spent most of his life getting good enough to write, was approached by a critic and told that the final movement sounded a lot like Beethoven's Ninth. To which he's supposed to have replied. "Yes, yes, any fool can see that." I was reminded of this last night while watching a new eposide of the new Star Trek which was so reminicant of Alien(s) (featuring monsters bursting out of peoples bodies, chases down darked space ship corridors, little girl who is better at surviving than the adults etc) that I can only imagine that if I had the opportunity to confront the producers about it, they'd call me a fool for even bringing it up. There are only so many plot ideas, character archetypes and settings that a story can take place in and, in order that it is possible that we are able to continue writing stories, its agreed that quite a high degree of copying of abstract concepts is allowed - even when it is so blatant it becomes funny like in this episode.

What you can't do, and what you did, is copy and paste other people's words into your own story. For academic English there are rules about citing, quoting and paraphrasing and it can be easy for inexperienced writers to slip up. In literary English, although its possible to make allusion to other writers works sometimes, there's rarely a reason why you need to be copying whole sentences from other writers, or paraphrasing their paragraphs, and if you do you need to be damn clear that's what you are doing (possibly in a forward) if there's any chance it could look like plagairism.

You say we should have had a discussion on what the rules are for copying from others works. You've been around the forums long enough to know that we do, in fact, regularly have discussions about how much its appropriate to adopt ideas from other stories. We don't really discuss it at a sentence level however because most of us know instinctively where boundaries are. You can say the amount you copied was minor. Possibly, but it hardly matters since most people are going to feel that you shouldn't be cutting and pasting that stuff across anyway. You outlined a working process by which you started with someone elses work and tried to make it minimally your own rather than start by writing something original. That is a big problem and people, including myself, are confused about why you don't seem to realize this. There may be good reasons why not - for example, maybe you were home schooled and never got the same lessons about not copying of your deskmates that the rest of us got. I don't know.

For reference and as a starting point to a discussion, here's how I see it.

Short generic phrases are fine ("long, luxurious blonde hair").
Longer more unique phrases can be used but may be recognized and seen as a homage or cliche - (Voboy could use 'a goddamn sexual Tyrannasaurus' without getting into trouble, but might be wise to avoid it if he doesn't want people to think of Predator when reading a different story).
All but the shortest more generic sentences are going to be suspect. As sentences get longer and more unique the chances of writing exactly the same thing drop significantly. Nonetheless, you can probably laugh off one. When you start to have multiple similar sentences from the same work then you're in serious danger of getting accussed of plagairism.

The problem with your response is that you still seem to think that a normal person would have been 'happy' with your responses. Having watched from the sidelines, I don't think most reasonable people would have been happy. Again, we're not the police and we're not the site, so we have no say in what you need to do, but you've singularly failed to go through any of the stages that we'd expect from someone who realized what their mistake was, was genuinely sorry for it, and wanted to take steps to make things right.

Honesty, this thread, as others have pointed out, has been relatively tame - hell, it disolved into Star Wars discussion for about two pages. It probably hasn't felt that way because you are at the center of it and, regardless of how serious you think the issue is, you clearly did what you are accused of and, as I've tried to explain here, really haven't been dealing with it well. I get that its not easy to deal with this kind of blame, but it seems to me that you've been trying to communicate as little as possible and wait for it to blow over and are now frustrated that its not going to happen, probably because a lot of people don't feel you've provided appropriate closure for what you did.

I'd like to end by repeating that it isn't necessarily too late to be a welcomed member of the board, even if you'd alway need to deal with people raising this issue every now and then, and it would be a pity if you stopped writing here as a result of it.

 

[SimonDoom]

Let's be clear about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the worst thing that a writer can do. In a professional setting plagiarising has ended the careers of many writers. There was a case a couple of years ago in video games journalism, Filip Miucin, where a writer got caught copying other reviews. I'd suggest looking into it because his initial bad responses and attempts to redeem himself and get work in the industry are a good example of just how badly this kind of thing can go and remind me a lot of what's played out here. You're lucky that you are writing under a username and could easily start again under a different name (and I still think you could have and maybe still can continue as 8letters, although its getting more and more difficult) - Miucin will never work in journalism again.

You mention that you didn't take any of its plot, characters or premise from the other stories. The funny thing is, if you had, you would have been fine. There's a story about Brahms and how, after the premier of his first symphony which he'd spent most of his life getting good enough to write, was approached by a critis and told that the final movement sounded a lot like Beethoven's Ninth. To which he's supposed to have replied. "Yes, yes, any fool can see that." I was reminded of this last night while watching a new eposide of the new Star Trek which was so reminicant of Alien(s) (featuring monsters bursting out of peoples bodies, chases down darked space ship corridors, little girl who is better at surviving than the adults etc) that I can only imagine that if I had the opportunity to confront the producers about it, they'd call me a fool for even bringing it up. There are only so many plot ideas, character archetypes and settings that a story can take place in and, in order that it is possible that we are able to continue writing stories, its agreed that quite a high degree of copying of abstract concepts is allowed - even when it is so blatant it becomes funny like in this episode.

What you can't do, and what you did, is copy and paste other people's words into your own story. For academic English there are rules about citing, quoting and paraphrasing and it can be easy for inexperienced writers to slip up. In literary English, although its possible to make allusion to other writers works sometimes, there's rarely a reason why you need to be copying whole sentences from other writers, or paraphrasing their paragraphs, and if you do you need to be damn clear that's what you are doing (possibly in a forward) if there's any chance it could look like plagairism.

You say we should have had a discussion on what the rules are for copying from others works. You've been around the forums long enough to know that we do, in fact, regularly have discussions about how much its appropriate to adopt ideas from other stories. We don't really discuss it at a sentence level however because most of us know instinctively where boundaries are. You can say the amount you copied was minor. Possibly, but it hardly matters since most people are going to feel that you shouldn't be cutting and pasting that stuff across anyway. You outlined a working process by which you started with someone elses work and tried to make it minimally your own rather than start by writing something original. That is a big problem and people, including myself, are confused about why you don't seem to realize this. There may be good reasons why not - for example, maybe you were home schooled and never got the same lessons about not copying of your deskmates that the rest of us got. I don't know.

For reference and as a starting point to a discussion, here's how I see it.

Short generic phrases are fine ("long, luxurious blonde hair").
Longer more unique phrases can be used but may be recognized and seen as a homage or cliche - (Voboy could use 'a goddamn sexual Tyrannasaurus' without gettign into trouble, but might be wise to avoid it if he doesn't want people to think of Predator when reading a different story).
All but the shortest more generic sentences are going to be suspect. As sentences get longer and more unique the chances of writing exactly the same thing drop significantly. Nonetheless, you can probably laugh off one. When you start to have multiple similar sentences from the same work then you're in serious danger of getting accussed of plagairism.

The problem with your response is that I don't think you've made anyone 'happy' with your responses. Again, we're not the police and we're not the site, so we have no say in what you need to do, but you've singularly failed to go through any of the stages that we'd expect from someone who realized what their mistake was, was genuinely sorry for it, and wanted to take steps to make things right.

Honesty, this thread, as others have pointed out, has been relatively tame - hell, it disolved into Star Wars discussion for about two pages. It probably hasn't felt that way because you are at the center of it and, regardless of how serious you think the issue is, you clearly did what you are accused of and, as I've tried to explain here, really haven't been dealing with it well. I get that its not easy to deal with this kind of blame, but it seems to me that you've been trying to communicate as little as possible and wait for it to blow over and are now frustrated that its not going to happen, probably because a lot of people don't feel you've provided appropriate closure for what you did.

I'd like to end by repeating that it isn't necessarily too late to be a welcomed member of the board, even if you'd alway need to deal with people raising this issue every now and then, and it would be a pity if you stopped writing here as a result of it.

This says it very well. You've captured the problem in appropriate detail without piling on the person involved. I think you make it very clear that's not your point.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sometimes, when people are ashamed and embarrassed by something they have done, they feel a need to atone. Sometimes that takes the form of punishing yourself. Perhaps 8Letters is going through something like that, hurting himself by destroying something that obviously meant a lot to him. I don't know, I'm not a therapist, just a person who has been through some shit.

That does happen, but I can't say I've seen a lot of shame and embarrassment in what 8letters has posted either here or in his user profile update. TBH it feels more like a case of "look what you made me do".

 

[MelissaBaby]

That does happen, but I can't say I've seen a lot of shame and embarrassment in what 8letters has posted either here or in his user profile update. TBH it feels more like a case of "look what you made me do".

Must likely, you are right. But it is possible that what he has said here is defensive posturing. Taking down his stories seems like a form of self harm. Like Lovecraft said, the AH version of cutting.

 

[lovecraft68]

I still think you could have and maybe still can continue as 8letters, although its getting more and more difficult) - Miucin will never work in journalism again.

He can easily come back under that name as far as stories go. the vast majority of readers don't come to the boards and would never know about this.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

He can easily come back under that name as far as stories go. the vast majority of readers don't come to the boards and would never know about this.

Let's be honest here. Vast majority of readers wouldn't really care, even if they knew about this, even if 8letters' plagiarism was much worse than it actually was. They come here to read erotic stories, and they couldn't care less who is the one writing them and how is that same one writing them. Only we care. And we should care, as it is in our interest, and its simply the right thing to do. 8letters should also just act mature and do the right thing.

 

[lovecraft68]

Let's be honest here. Vast majority of readers wouldn't really care, even if they knew about this, even if 8letters' plagiarism was much worse than it actually was. They come here to read erotic stories, and they couldn't care less who is the one writing them and how is that same one writing them. Only we care. And we should care, as it is in our interest, and its simply the right thing to do. 8letters should also just act mature and do the right thing.

I mostly agree, but over time a lot of readers have contacted authors to let them know someone has stolen and is selling their work and I was once notified by a reader here someone had lifted one of my stories here, then published it here word for word except for a title change, so some do care.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I mostly agree, but over time a lot of readers have contacted authors to let them know someone has stolen and is selling their work and I was once notified by a reader here someone had lifted one of my stories here, then published it here word for word except for a title change, so some do care.

That is a great thing to hear actually... But yeah, I'd still say vast majority doesn't care at all. I suppose one should be happy there are those who don't belong to that vast majority.

 

[SimonDoom]

That is a great thing to hear actually... But yeah, I'd still say vast majority doesn't care at all. I suppose one should be happy there are those who don't belong to that vast majority.

This is true of plagiarism generally, not just in this case or on this site. Readers may not care that author X lifted a few lines from another book/article/essay, but to authors and their livelihood it can mean everything, especially in academia. It's absolutely essential to the author's integrity. The test of honor is whether you will do the right thing even if you know you won't get caught if you don't.

 

[MillieDynamite]

This is true of plagiarism generally, not just in this case or on this site. Readers may not care that author X lifted a few lines from another book/article/essay, but to authors and their livelihood it can mean everything, especially in academia. It's absolutely essential to the author's integrity. The test of honor is whether you will do the right thing even if you know you won't get caught if you don't.

My father showed me some passages in Centennial, in the cattle drive part of the book, and a couple of books by Clarence E. Mulford, where the same jokes, incidents, and even in someplace, the exact words in the same order were used. He said, "After I read Centennial, I never read another word that James Michener wrote." When he was reading Centennial, certain parts struck him as he'd read them before. It took him time to remember, but then he dug out his Hop-a-long Cassid collect and scanned them until he found them. He said those parts stood out sharper in the minny series, which he watched to see if they kept those parts. The fact that the copyright holders never made a stink amazed him.

He said it wasn't blatant, but a few of them, being word for word, didn't feel like two writers having the same ideas. Especially on the jokes, the incidents in both were rather common things in western stories, but the jokes were original in the 1910-1930 area and not so easy to dismiss as coincidences.

 

[NoJo]

Personally, I took down my stories as an act of self-preservation, not self-harm. Clash of worlds and all that.