I've been thinking over this for quite some time now, since I read about a Harvard student of Indian origin, who wrote a coming-of-age novel which had sentences very similar to ones from another famous young-adults-novel.
The young author had apparently read the original novel many times as it was one of her favourites. And she claimed that it was an unconscious action. (She lost a $500,000 worth publishing deal over it, nevertheless.)
We read books and then re-read the good ones, obsessing over the catchy passages and romantic descriptions of people, places and feelings. Inadvertently they get etched in our brains and sometimes even change our thinking patterns, for that's the power of a great author. They influence our imagination and re-arrange our perceptions.
So how would we know, when we express ourselves, if we are spewing out something that has got wired into our system, or if we are actually making that rare original statement? It's quite possible that such plagiarism happens subconsciously, without us comprehending the fact that we are in fact committing a crime.
It appears that almost every successful/critically acclaimed writer is always compared to earlier legends. We have Shakespearean-style sonnets, Keatsian-style poems, Kafkaesque fiction and so on, and this phenomenon exists in other fields as well, like music, dance and maybe even more prominently, in art.
Every new work these days is scrutinized and heedlessly categorized in the light of path-breaking masterpieces created by these legends. So does that mean that all of the stuff brewed by the seemingly innovative minds of today's world are Unoriginal Imitations of earlier works?
Plagiarism on the web, however, has become quite epidemic. People don't bother to cite the original references anymore, and admittedly, it's a little bothersome, though unlawful. I was surprised to find 'Plagiarism-checker' websites which allow you to cross-check yourself and see if the text matches with any of the already published works, available on the internet, of course.
Phew! Maybe, someday, if and when I publish something, I could take the help of these websites to keep myself Original! Imagine! I get a flash of inspiration (or so I think!), I write it all down, but there's that nagging feeling that makes me look up on the net if I'm being creative or committing 'literary theft' as Merriam-Webster so nicely calls it, and it turns out someone somewhere had already 'been there done that'.
Yeah, sad, indeed! :-|
[Disclaimer: All the images above have been directly stolen, er, downloaded from Google Images, and I don't own any of them. XD ]
