Yanno...

[ivyblossom]

First off, a big shout out to penelope_z, who is one of my very favourite writers in this fandom, and one of my favourite people. I was just thinking about how much I love her, and how wonderful she is, and how much I adore her fics. I mean, I first found her fics trolling through ff.net back in the day, and I wasn't reading much at the time, but I read two words from 'The Seasons' and I was hooked. She has such a light touch and she writes obsessed!Draco so very well. Even if she does pronounce H/D dead at the scene.

Next: a few random thoughts about My next question: what is plagiarism in a fanfiction context? Good lord this question is coming up in almost every circle at the moment. Everyone jumps up and down about Cassie, but I've never understood that. First, the disclaimers, second, the idea of inserting lines is that you recognize them. It's a literary device. Any rap or hip hop fans out there? Have you ever noticed that they quote each other all the damn time? Have you noticed that they take critical riffs out of one song and thread it through their own? One note, one word, one line, an entire backing vocal, a backbeat, an entire concept?

Right, so. Rap is the postmodern of postmodern music. Rap is taking the culture as an instrument and creating something new out of it. Rap is picking up influences and weaving them into a new piece of art, and the idea isn't to benefit from someone else's talent, the idea is to force the listener to make the connections. Do they cite this stuff? Not usually. Only if it's big enough. The rule is (as I understand it) that as long as you change something sufficiently, it becomes yours. The correct term is intertextual allusion.

So what the hell is fanfiction, then, if intertextual allusion is so problematic? We, I think, agree that plagiarism is really a muddy term and not one we would want directed at fanfiction. Fanfiction is not original fiction. We take something created by someone else and produce our own version, often wildly different, with the understanding that we cannot profit from our labours, that we don't own any rights to it, and that in the end, legally and morally, it's not ours. We riff off someone else's ideas and someone else's characters, generally with a vague disclaimer that we know we don't own it.

I think it's interesting that plagiarism debates show up so often in fanfiction communities. I've worked with professors to combat plagiarism before; papers snagged off the internet, and so forth. The problem there is that students are getting graded on work that they didn't do. In the publishing world, the problem, I presume, would be people getting paid for work they didn't do, and stealing someone's thunder. What does it mean in fanfiction?

I remember a few months ago someone was posting gothangelic's fic hush as if they had written it themselves, chapter by chapter, on ff.net. That seemed like a pretty clear cut case. Fanfic author did not write fanfic; fanfic author was getting praise for someone else's work; fanfic author was pretending she had written the damn thing herself, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Question: I wrote a fic where I took the entire plot and reworded some dialogue from a song. The fic is basically just the song, converted into a fanfic. The fic is called Haven. Is that plagiarism? I mean, it's not my plot. I think it was first written down by some Aramaic-speaking dude in a little book called 'The Gospel According to Matthew'. You can't actually copyright a plot. If someone started writing a fic that was exactly the same plot as one of yours, would you get cranky and point it out? Perhaps. So this is also problematic. I must say that I've seen several people snag lines from my fics and insert them into theirs. A line here and there, sometimes an idea or just a general kind of like, hmm, voice or feeling or style. Admitedly it does irk me a bit. I've never said anything, what's the point?

Perhaps it's the copy/paste aspect that is the line between reasonable riffing off something and outright plagiarism? We don't like the idea of people getting fandom fame on the basis of ideas and phrases that aren't theirs? Fame/notoriety = money in this game? Originality is the key in fanfiction?

Are we so sensitive about plagiarism that intertextual allusion is anathema?