If Shakespeare…

A few months back, the short story world was rocked by scandal, where one of the UK’s most successful writers (in terms of competition wins, at least) stood accused of plagiarism. If you’re interested, here’s the original post on the How Publishing Really Works site where the story broke, and here’s the post that I made on my own blog at the time. Since then, the writer involved has broken cover and posted his own explanation here, and I have also been directed to a fascinating account of two separate writers who independently claimed that they had each been plagiarised by the writers of “Groundhog Day”.

I’ll come back to this in a moment, but today a far more blatant example has emerged. Quite how this guy (a “21 year old law student”, according to his author bio) thought he could get away with plagiarising Stephen King in a submission to Shock Totem, I have no idea, but Angel Zapata’s extraordinary detective work has uncovered a remarkable number of examples of the man’s work that are almost identical to that of other writers, most of whom are at a somewhat earlier and vulnerable stage in their respective careers than Mr King.

It seems to me that there are several levels of this kind of thing. Clearly, the current example is as close to a cut and dried case of plagiarism as we’re likely to come across. The other case is a little more different. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty certain that whatever he has done would not be counted as plagiarism in a court of law. However, the unauthorised use of other people’s material that he has himself described in his blog strikes me as a tad unethical if nothing else. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to have done his career much harm so far. Since it all kicked off he has been shortlisted for two more prizes, Momaya and Yeovil.

In the end, however, I think what upsets me the most is that the new guy on the block didn’t think that anything that I’d done was worth nicking. Although if anyone spots anything that looks familiar, do let me know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 12:10 am and is filed under Analysis, Copyright, Writers in action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.