Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]