Descriptions can be similar and use similar words without being plagiarized. It’s when a passage is deliberately copied (or only slightly changed) that an author runs into trouble. The passages above wouldn’t make me look twice, honestly.

a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age—gawky and coltish, all legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet… lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. A smile lit up her face, made her eyes dance with secret fires that still, even after all the years, made me draw in a sharp breath. Elaine. Beautiful, vital, and as poisonous as any snake. (from Jim Butcher, Published Author.)

From the back of the room came a young woman, tall, still gawky and coltish, all legs and arms looking in her late teens, but based on her academic standings must be much older. Her hair was pulled back and she wore thick glasses: definitely not beautiful, or even handsome, but she held herself with poise and it made the lean lines of her body seem graceful and intellectual. She wore pointy-heeled boots, tight boot-cut jeans and a cotton blouse of yellow and she sported a no-nonsense frown. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Thanks

I have to ask–and I’m not being snotty–why would you use it? To use it as a resource, to springboard from it, or to put the idea of it into your own words is one thing. To simply lift it is another.

Totally agree. I think I had this question because I wondered how protected articles and such are on the internet. I often use all sorts of things on the internet (but I don’t lift them).

I’m just wondering how the laws apply with all the new technology. Plus, I want to make sure I understand what I can use (and give credit due) and what I can’t use at all. Does that make sense?

I’m not certain, but I think this is an example of a paid comment.

WC – it seems to me that Creative Commons is just another way of bundling rights because each creator of original work has an immediate copyright to that original work once it is created. I.e., it is not copyrighted while it is in your head, but once you put words to paper or images to paper, etc., it becomes “yours”. Creative Commons then is way for you to reserve your rights but still allow you to share your work.

Because enforcement is nearly impossible without the registration of a copyright, I feel that Creative Commons is more of a community ethical agreement. I.e., it is an honor code. In a legal sense, when a person licenses her work under CC, she is giving a set of permissions to users (copyright, as Robin says, is about permission).

Umm, no. The PS is b/c Jane’s profile blurb says she’s looking for contemporary romance recommendations so I recommended. As far as I know, the paid commenters are for no-name books. Phillips and Gibson are big names who don’t need to promote themselves that way.

I get paid comments on my blog too and they’re really obvious b/c the comments usually have nothing to do with the post and there’s usually a link to some advertiser’s site. Did you even bother to read my comment? Why would I waste my time writing a really long comment about plagiarism and copyright issues as it pertains to bloggers, if all I wanted to do was shill?

The copying of material happens all over the internet, reviews are misused that way as well. Just yesterday I was reading about someone who had lifted several movie online movie reviews and uploaded them to imdb claiming credit for them.

Okay, maybe I’m naive, but why would anyone do this?!? Are these people that desperate for attention? Is plagiarizing now the equivalent of a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum?

Is that PS in #15 an example of bloggers getting paid to mention other books that y’all were talking about last year?

(Sorry, feeling a little ornery from being treated like a sheep during Super Tuesday.)

Jane, as always, thanks for your continued posts on this subject. You have a way of taking a ponderous subject and distilling it down without a lot of head-scratching on my part. My druthers are simply to err on the side of caution: no word-for-word research, lyrics, articles in my work. If I claim to be a writer I should be able to get my point across in my own words.

Similarly, romance reviews have been “plagiarized” as well.

As far as I’m concerned there’s no need to put quotation marks there — any time someone takes another person’s work and presents it as their own, without attribution, that’s plagiarism. It doesn’t matter if the material is in print or online, or if the original writer is a professional or an amateur: Presenting someone else’s words as your own is plagiarism, period.

I just wanted to say I’ve been finding all of your posts about this issue extremely informative. I noticed you’re going to deal with blogger ethics next post. I’ve been thinking about that an awful lot lately because of your posts as well. Just haven’t gelled enough in my head for me to articulate my viewpoint yet.

I was wondering if you could deal with issues about borrowing of photographs and in my case, recipes. Most bloggers put up a Creative Commons license with attribution. Some don’t mind sharing as long as they get a link back. But other bloggers have a copyright notice of absolutely no copying without express written permission. Now the nature of the internet being what it is, people will lift regardless. I think the Creative Commons license also confuses many people and they assume they can copy anything as long as they provide a link. So I gave in, and at least requested I be credited if someone borrows my photo or recipes. Of course, I still sometimes see my photo or recipes copied and pasted on someone else’s blog with no attribution back to me, with them pretending it’s their’s. Yes, even food bloggers get plagiarized. One of my friend’s recipes and photos was copied, with another blogger trying to claim credit for it. Of course, I commented and said I knew it wasn’t hers. And Googled several of her other recipes and found she copied them all as well. I don’t know why she did it. She promptly deleted it after she was caught.

Unless a recipe is my own creation, I alway state where the recipe was inspired or adapted from, with a link back to the creator. That’s akin to an author’s acknowledgment of sources in the book. If someone cooked my recipe, why couldn’t they photograph what they cooked with a link back to me? I spend way more time than I should cooking, photographing, and writing about it. And it really bothers me when someone copies my hard work and slaps it onto their blog without due acknowledgment. Of course, plagiarizers being what they are, someone copied my Korean pancake recipe and labeled it a Vietnamese crepe. Umm, not quite the same thing. And using a pancake recipe to make a crepe won’t yield the same result. But then, plagiarizers aren’t always so smart about these things.

Heh! I guess I was able to articulate some thoughts! But yeah, can you talk about Creative Commons licenses, and links as crediting sources in the blogosphere? I’ll probably do my post after you give the legal viewpoint. :)

Thanks!

PS For contemporary books, try Match me if You Can by Susan Elizabeth Phillps and It Must be Love by Rachel Gibson.

Now that I’m doing edits, I did another search to see if I could find who I should credit the lyrics to. (On the initial site, it just said, “traditional”.) But when I searched by lyrics, I found a site claiming to have written the lyrics to the folk tune in 1969.

Mind, the version I used is a bit different than this one. The words are not identical. It’s a Wiccan coven based in Cali who say they wrote the lyrics, and it’s listed on their site as copyrighted.

So in this circumstance, how do I know what transpired? Maybe the witches changed the old words slightly? I wound up deleting the lyrics altogether because I didn’t want to mess with it.

BTW, has Penguin or any of Edwards’ other publishers made a recent statement on the issue?

I’m a little dense here.

Copyright and fair use are extremely complex concepts, which is why, IMO, even legal types sometimes use them incorrectly. Part of the problem, I think, is that the term “fair use” sounds like ‘what’s fair and unfair,’ and that sense is not strictly analogous to the copyright definition of fair use.

I was taught to think of it this way (for a quick and dirty distinction): copyright is about ownership and permission. Does someone own the rights to a work — to copy it? Technically, just writing something down creates what’s called a “poor man’s copyright” (with limitations, of course, around size, type, language, purpose, etc.), but without federal registration of the copyright, one cannot enforce his or her rights against infringers. So if something is under copyright, you have to seek permission to use it, because someone else owns the right to say who can and can’t copy it. OR, if you decide to use it anyway, you are an infringer who may or may not have a fair use defense that will get you out of paying retroactively for that use (although not necessarily out of getting sued). So the basic question here is, “does someone else own the rights to copy this, and if so, can I use part of it without asking permission?” The second question, of course, may not be answered until after you actually use the stuff.

In terms of plagiarism, the question is a little different. It’s more like, “did someone else come up with this, and do I need to give them acknowledgment for using it myself?” It’s not a legal question, unless it is bound up with some copyright issue (i.e. you use without permission OR acknowledgment). When, for example, a formerly copyrighted work lands finally in the public domain, the creator no longer owns the exclusive right to copy and distribute it. But the creator is still the creator, and if you decide you want to use something that person has created — even if it’s in the public domain — you can do so without legal permission, but shouldn’t necessarily without acknowledgment of its creator. Again, this determination depends in part on what kind of writing you’re talking about and to some degree on how you want to use it. At that point the issue is, ‘can I use this without having it seem like I’m taking credit for something that isn’t mine?’ Which, as Jane pointed out, is an ethical consideration, not a legal one, depending on the type of work, the community definitions of plagiarism, etc.