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The costs of plagiarism

Plagiarism is a nasty word and offence — and literary plagiarists, when caught, tend to be subjected to long-lasting shame. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this working definition: "the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas or the expression of the ideas ... of another ... a purloined idea, design, passage, or work." Tom Lehrer wrote a wonderful mathematician's song about it. The practice apparently being widespread, especially in journalism, academia, and the professions, some writers on the subject speak of degrees of plagiarism. The worldwide spread of the Internet has made plagiarism easier to commit than ever before — and incomparably easier to detect. The defences against the charge of plagiarism are predictable: a photographic or computer-like memory, or the habit of taking notes from many sources and then failing `inadvertently' to acknowledge the sources. Over the past ten days, Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore, has become the world's iconic plagiarist, caught purloining from multiple sources just when she was knocking at the door of quasi-literary fame in a genre known as `chick-lit.' She had signed a phenomenal publishing deal at the age of 17; it looked like the Great American Dream come true for the young woman born in Chennai. Two years later, she is a writer in disgrace, her two-book contract and movie deal off, the putative subject of a thousand and one morality plays.

Following media revelations, Kaavya acknowledged taking material from fellow-novelist Megan McCafferty for her debut `chick-lit' novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Confronted with 40-plus instances of Ms. Viswanathan writing and publishing passages that closely approximated those from Ms. McCafferty, the publisher Little, Brown and Co. pulled the book off the shelves worldwide, after many copies in the first printing of 100,000 copies had been sold. There have been further exposures: of copying (at least three portions) from another chick-lit novel by Madeleine Wickham, a British author who uses the pen name Sophie Kinsella; and of borrowing inappropriately, although in a less obvious manner, from Meg Cabot and, believe it or not, from the great Salman Rushdie. Kaavya's somewhat original defence is that as a fan of Ms. McCafferty's she had "internalised" some of her passages in an "unintentional and unconscious" way. Thus the act of purloining is sought to be passed off as some kind of ill-judged tribute. Kaavya cannot, of course, escape individual accountability for her intellectual dishonesty. But once this is noted, is there any denying that her meteoric rise and fall was the product of a high-pressure and cruel system of pushing, packaging, and commercialising budding talent? In her particular case, the fast track was — counsellor (hired by well-meaning parents) to literary agency to `book packager' to publisher. The `star-maker machinery' is now striking back.

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