A twelve-minute read on:
- Pre-‘ramble’: Blogging about my postgrad because there’s no good reason not to;
- Who was the bad art friend?: The answer – none of them, and at the same time, both of them;
- The article’s impact: When the debate around your work doesn’t go the way you wanted it to;
- Fine distinctions: When it comes to copyright, the house always wins, and by ‘house,’ I mean ‘copyright lawyers.’
There’s a mirror world, mapped onto our own, where my doppelganger will decide not to write about the things they’re learning in their creative writing postgrad. The other day, they argued that, OK, maybe they don’t expect us to read all the books on our reading list – in fact, our tutors say they’re optional – but shouldn’t you spend time sorting them by the topics on the syllabus?
I pushed them away. Of course I know the reading list’s huge (fifty books!). Of course I know some of those books will have more nuanced views on topics than others. Of course I know that blogging about our required reading is a big ask, and I might not even have the energy to commit some days. But organising books for my ‘second brain’ is a counterproductive task – on principle, it’s built from the ground up:
https://brologue.net/2024/08/11/dont-call-it-a-linkdump/
Chances are, no matter where I start from, and no matter what week we’re on, whatever book I choose to focus on from the reading pile has got something to bring to the table for the topic this week. It’s what seminars are for: whether I chose Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World or Stephen King’s On Writing, there will be something.
My doppelganger oft forgets: You may know what it is you’re researching, but there’s no start, no end, and no yellow brick road. All any of us can do is walk, trust our epistemic curiosity, and make choices that seek out knowledge:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/04/zettelkasten-an-antidote-for-boring-notes/
To me, blogging’s just an extra step. I couldn’t imagine doing a postgrad without it. Anyways, enough pre-‘ramble…’
Our first seminar topic was a hot button issue: “‘Truth’ in fiction and creative non-fiction.” When we fictionalise real-life events into stories, what is considered appropriate conduct, and where do we draw that line? To get the topic rolling, we first read a story reporting a recent(ish) industry feud – Robert Kolker’s 2021 New York Times article, “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html
Opening the piece are paragraphs that seem to function as establishing shots, slowly building up the profiles of the women involved in the feud: Dawn Dorland, a perennial academic, who’d yet to find any commercial success in publishing, from a white, working class background; Sonya Larson, Grubstreet workshop instructor, published in the Best American Short Stories anthology, and who, growing up, was the only Asian American kid in a white, suburban, middle-class neighbourhood.
They had met each other at events enough times that Dorland believed they were friends. It was odd, then, when she opened a private Facebook group to tell people she was undergoing surgery to donate one of her kidneys, and Larson seemed to have gone ghost. Only a month later, twenty four hours after being sent an email about it, did Larson acknowledge she had seen Dorland’s posts.
To Dorland, Larson had appeared too busy to read it; the next summer, a friend made her aware of Larson’s then-new short story, The Kindest, wherein an Asian American woman (Chuntao), who struggles with alcoholism, nearly dies in a car crash, and receives a kidney donation from an upper-class white woman (Rose):
The woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.
The tale was intended as a commentary on racial power dynamics – the things Asian Americans experience that white people don’t – for example, how Asian Americans, from childhood, “get their pick of three survival strategies,” as Tony Tulathimutte illustrates:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/magazine/tony-tulathimutte-rejection.html
It’s also about when white people believe they have to play the hero in ‘rescuing’ a non-white person from those struggles – to the point that their deed is lauded and valued over everything else:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/White_Savior
I feel I know what that’s like. Rose’s kidney donation is to Chuntao what neurotypicals pushing certain pseudoscientific practices are to me. I do not need rescuing from my autism by way of a ‘cure’ – we call that ‘eugenics’:
And I do not need rescuing from my stims because I need to be “normal, actually:”
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis
It’s not just the donation – it’s that the donation is christened ‘progress,’ touted as ‘doing your bit,’ when in reality, Chuntao is going to go under the knife and wake up to find that, surprise surprise, nothing’s really changed (save the kidney).
Nothing really changed – that was Dorland’s problem. Staring her in the face, on the first page, was her letter to the person receiving her kidney, a semantic facsimile that was damn near word-for-word… a letter that, up until that point, she’d presumed that Larson had seen in passing and never really had time to take in. Intimate health events are no more immune to being missed by your friends than 4AM braindumps jettisoned into the void.
It’s not long before Kolker floors the gas pedal and brings us into the fore: First, you feel you empathise with Dorland’s side, then Larson’s, and then, if you don’t want to devalue the issues they bring to the table, you’re reluctant to say.
Kolker successfully maintains a neutral voice through the entire piece. He concludes little other than the facts which he acquired to write this article – to write anything that would suggest either party is more justified would taint the message that (I think) he’s trying to deliver: ‘truth,’ as a felt sense, is multifaceted. The issues that both parties bring to the table matter: plagiarism, racial bias, white saviourism, and so on.
For the seminar, I decided to look at a couple of adjacent things we might overlook – namely, how Kolker felt about the article’s impact, and the fine distinctions of plagiarism and copyright that are hiding between the lines. Kolker’s ‘truth,’ as he wrote in the article’s post-mortem, was that Bad Art Friend turned into Twitter’s ‘parlor game,’ a ‘Rorschach test,’ to find what matters to readers when the chips are down:
I can’t read minds – I don’t know what he believed to think this would sprout a discussion he might define as ‘cerebral.’ I do know, however, that he believes Twitter, at the time, was an ‘echo chamber.’ That is, what one sees of any debate is too personalised, to the point where rubbing up against anyone with opinions running counter to yours is an anomaly. As the vernacular puts it, you’re in a “filter bubble.”
I disagree on how these work. If, in some hellish, Randian future, I had a gun pressed against my temple by one of God Emperor Elon’s private militia goons, and asked to name one thing I agree with him on, I would, almost as a reflex, say that Twitter was the web’s town hall: a public forum where everyone was lumped in with everyone else. It had all the cacophony of the birdsong wars in my back garden.
If we’re isolated from anything or anyone, consider that this begins not in cyberspace2, but in the material world – indeed, in your very neighbourhood. For example, consider what the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation can tell us about St. Andrews:
https://simd.scot/#/simd2020/BTTTFTT/14/-2.8085/56.3361
If you’ve lived in any of the navy blue areas these past twelve years, you’re part of the least deprived 10% of the population with regards to income, employment, health, and education. Your experiences and access to these over the years are more likely to be familiar to others living in those navy blue areas.
Now, compare that to the postcode lottery of other Fife towns, like Methil and Leven, or Glenrothes:
https://simd.scot/#/simd2020/BTTTFTT/13.319815291697676/-3.1736/56.1915
https://simd.scot/#/simd2020/BTTTFTT/13.757433906575056/-3.0213/56.1852
On Twitter, you can be as affluent as Winston Ingram, King of Leccy, coasting through the energy crisis, and rub against posts from impoverished pensioners put on ice by the winter fuel bill cuts:
You can live in a neighbourhood of white households, and chat with people of colour online, all around the world, who’ve lived through different.
What Kolker saw in people flattening the story down into a simple, emotionally charged narrative was, in fact, two diverse subsets of the Twitter userbase, rubbing against each other, having a debate, which for some reason didn’t go as he foresaw. We, the readers, were supposed to take the dialectic approach, and propose that both parties are in the right AND they’re in the wrong.
Kolker could’ve been explicit about this, AND maintain impartiality, yet chose not to. It wasn’t the ‘right’ kind of debate for him. He believes Twitter “flattened” his piece; I believe his message didn’t need to be subtext.
Back to the matter at hand. It is an opinion expressed across every corner of the globe, in every literary genre, that plagiarism is the ultimate academic taboo, no matter the context. Dorland had reasonable grounds to believe that Larson was a friend, and felt that the use of her letter had crossed an ethical line. From a moral perspective, she felt that Larson, as a friend, ought to be open to asking for permission to mix an intimate, real-life event, into a short story.
Except, Dorland didn’t pursue it as an ethical matter, an issue of plagiarism – she sued Larson for copyright infringement. She literally had no other legal option, because, in the eyes of the law, you can’t sue someone for plagiarism.
As writers, we need to be very precise about how we talk about plagiarism and copyright, as they are fine distinctions. Plagiarism is concerned with the work that artists do; copyright, by contrast, is only concerned with who has permission to own, use and distribute, property.
There’s myriad places I could start from to illustrate what I mean. Two years ago, you may have read that A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh‘s copyright expired, and entered the ‘public domain:’
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/1/22862358/winnie-the-pooh-sun-also-rises-enter-public-domain
The pubic domain is a creative work commons – no-one owns it, and the works within it are free for everyone to adapt, reference, and distribute as they like. But Winnie the Pooh was still written by A. A. Milne – no-one would dispute the words came from his own labour. However, if you were to publish those stories under a different name, maybe do a bit of light editing here and there, and claim that “actually, this was my labour” – you’re a plagiarist.
Consider my own work – all of the posts I publish here are subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
You can take these words you’re reading right now, and use them as you like (as the foreword to a book, or reposted verbatim on your own blog, or read out by a voiceover artist to use as a sample for a music track, or or or…), so long as you credit me, make it clear there’s no endorsements, and provide links to this page and the CC-BY-SA license. Fail to do the former, and you’re a plagiarist; fail to do the latter, and it’s copyright infringement.
(Also, in so doing, your work has to be released under the same license, too.)
The public domain is proof that we can imagine one’s labour and property rights to be two separate entities. Moreover, it challenges the myths we tell ourselves about what property is, and why we need copyright law. Let’s keep the focus on copyright for today: Cory Doctorow writes that people often evoke ‘copyright’ to mean one of two things:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/27/poe-vs-property/
- Copyright is how we regulate creative labour and produce more of it – by figuring out who owns what, creative workers are incentivised to use the meat between their ears to innovate and out-story someone who’s already done their idea. Thus, an appropriate reward for their labour is allocated by the market;3
- Copyright gives individual creators the liberty to control who gets to take their work and adapt it for their own purposes – after all, no-one ever asked to be a victim of theft.
It was through Pluralistic that I came across two open access introductions to the weird and wonderful-when-it-works world of fair use and copyright – in SOOOOOONG! graphic novel form:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics
https://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic
Larson’s defense prior to the lawsuit seemed to be based on the first story; Dorland’s copyright suit was intrinsically bound by the second. But these stories are in deadlock with each other: there’s more copyright today than there was a century ago, but it hasn’t begotten more AND better art. Besides which, there’s only one group of people who’ve seen more coin from all these copyright extensions, and it’s not us artists. Neither woman could ever really win.
What did the courts say? Well, last September, the courts ruled in Larson’s favour, copyright-wise – though her claim that Dorland had defamed her was not substantiated:
So, she didn’t commit copyright infringement – but she’s still a plagiarist. She’s still a plagiarist – and her argument for Dorland’s overlooking other narrative elements, turning the short story into something about herself, is still important. It’s a topic that I’d like to save for a future post on a certain controversial novel. I think it’s a case study that better illustrates the manifestations of white saviourism in the real world.
- (Image by ReneeWrites via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC-BY-4.0 ↩︎
- Although, even in cyberspace, these days you’re isolated from the people you’ve told your platform of choice that you want to hear from. No-one, and I repeat no-one has ever said they wanted Big Tech platforms to nonconsensually shove targeted ads into their eyeballs. Tell me the last time you heard about someone clicking on an ad because they WANTED to see it. ↩︎
- According to Larson, the correct value to allocate to a private letter to the receiver of your kidney donation is zero: “It’s not art! It has no market value…” ↩︎
First as Plagiarism, Then as Property is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.