On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:01:47AM -0000, Neil Faulkner wrote:
From: Isobel Hamilton isobel19@hotmail.com
I have a B7 fanfic question. I've been browsing about a bit reading fics here and there, and I was wondering. If you were to read a fic on a site, then find another fic on another site that was *extremely* similar to the first one you read, just with tiny changes, posted by a different author, would you do anything about it? And if you did what would you do?
There have been cases in the past of fanfic being repackaged by unscrupulous dealers - Horizon suffered it about ten years ago - but that was paper zines being bootlegged for profit. There's not much profit in online bootlegging, so I can't see why anyone should want to do such a thing. What's the point?
Fame. Getting credit for someone else's hard work. Laziness. Fuelled by a complete lack of shame or conscience. You might as well ask "Why do people put any fan fiction on line, if there's no profit in it?"
There definitely have been cases of online plagiarism before, both intra-fandom and inter-fandom -- sometimes someone has stolen a story from one fandom, and just rewritten it with different character names. Presumably they thought that nobody actually reads multiple fandoms so they wouldn't get caught. (No, I can't quote specific details, my memory is not that elephantine...)
Mind you, there's plagiarism, and then there's influence. I can recall one case (in another fandom) where someone wrote a story which was obviously borrowing heaps of ideas and *images* from another person's story, but it wasn't the same story by a long shot (it was pretty crappy compared to the original). It wasn't exactly plagiarism, but the person was wrong in not crediting where her ideas came from.
In this case, I suggest you investigate carefully. See what other stories the two authors have written. Make careful inquiries. If one of the authors is obviously more talented than the other, guess which one is the plagiariser? On the one hand, you don't want to jump the gun in accusing someone of plagiarism, but on the other hand, deliberate plagiarisers won't blink an eye at lying through their teeth. Another thing: it isn't up to you to confront the plagiariser, if you can figure out which one it is -- that is something that the original author is in the best position to take action on. Just send a note, "by the way, did you realize this story X bears an uncanny resemblance to your story W?"
Yet another thing to consider is that you can't assume that, if the stories have *ideas* in common (as distinct from more closer details) that one is plagiarised from another -- some ideas follow on so logically from things in Canon that it's no surprise that two people might have thought of them independently.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nora: How much did all this cost? Dr. Bloom: I charged it to the Department. Research costs. (Chuckling) It's good for the kids. (VR.5: VR.5)