When L.M.M Montgomery read a newspaper story about a young orphan girl sent by mistake to a middle-aged brother and sister (the mistake being they wanted a boy to help run the farm) she was inspired to write "Anne of Green Gables". I sometimes wonder if she would have done that if she'd first decided to pop on to Facebook and update her status to "OMG, got brilliant idea for book!" and put in a few rounds of Farmville.
Anyway, luckily she didn't do that.She went on to chronicle most of the life of said Anne, and in one of her later books she used yet another newspaper story as part of the plot. I particularly remember this one because our minister that year preached about it under the guise of "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." I thought he was plagiarising Anne, but actually, he'd turned the same newspaper article into part of his own plot.
The story goes that in the town to which Anne moves with her doctor/surgeon husband, there lives a lady who runs whatever a boarding-house was called in those days (late 1890's). She is mostly accompanied by and has to take care of a grinning shambling idiot (I use that in the descriptive rather than the derogatory sense). He's her previously charming and well-spoken husband. Apparently he charmed her parents - and her - into believing he would be a good husband and then turned into a chronic wifebeater; and one of the only reasons she's not actually badly damaged is that he was a sailor and spent long periods away from home. On one of those trips (to Shanghai) he picked a fight with the wrong crowd and some percussive maintenance on his head turned him into the useless but non-violent wreck he is now. His crew brought him home (thanks, guys!) and now he can't earn money, hence boarding-house. Meantime, a writer has come to finish off his masterpiece, taken up residence at the boarding house and he and the ex-abused wife are in love. The good people of the village look askance at this arrangement (skeevy hoor!) at the same time as not doing a whole lot to help her eke out a living.
Enter Anne's doctor husband, who enthusiastically pronounces his belief that he can cure the idiot's idiocy with surgery, and is totally taken aback when the entire village gets up in arms about the prospect, on account of where Idiot George is better than Wifebeater George. Eventually the doctor gives the wife the choice, and she tells him to go ahead. (The minister said it was because she knew it was her Christian duty; personally I think the doctor sold it to her when he started the sentence "There's a huge risk involved, but.."). Idiot George not only survives the operation, but turns out not to be George at all. Apparently he's Fred, George's identical cousin; he signed on for the Shanghai trip at the last moment and was with him when George picked the fight that ultimately caused George's death, for dead he is. Fred was trying to go to his aid when he saw someone sink a knife in George's stomach and dump him in Shanghai Harbour; and shortly after that Fred's head met something hard and he went into limbo for seven years. The crew brought him home because they couldn't tell the difference between Fred and George and at least George had somewhere to go (thanks, guys!). So the wife is a widow, George is fish poo, and the doctor is suddenly a hero. Everyone is happy, except of course the villagers, who not only have to eat huge helpings of humble pie, they also have to find another village idiot and elect another skeevy hoor. Also Fred, who is now not only jobless and homeless, but has a long and interesting gap on his CV.
The point of this long ramble is that writers have always used sources. Even Shakespeare used the rumours of Danish regicide and insanity to craft Hamlet.
So at what point does using a Source become plagiarism? See, I am fascinated by the hoohah surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven't read it and probably won't, but when last did a book provoke such a reaction? It apparently sets back the cause of women's rights by fifty years (bzuh?) and there's a mass book burning being organised by the women who run the Auckland abused women's shelter organisation (I don't approve of any book burning on principle; this more so because women have been abused for far longer than books have been around to give their abusers the notion). It is held to be responsible for increased crowds of women visiting hardware stores to buy supplies such as rope and chains (I've tried to stay away from that one). And then there are those who are screaming PLAGIARISM.
What does it plagiarise?
Apparently, Twilight.
Now, given that the heroine of Fifty Shades apparently signs a contract allowing some filthy rich stranger millionaire to do whatever he wants with her, the only thing I can see that Fifty Shades has in common with Twilight is that it chronicles the unlikely survival of two heroines who share a total disregard for safety and common sense. At least I assume the heroine of Fifty Shades survives, given there's a Book the Second and Book the Third. We all know what happens in Twilight. Well, I do; my then-eleven-year old wanted to read it and I read it first so I would know how much please-explaining I would need to do (the answer is none, though I did emphasize that when you find a creepy stalker of any species lurking in the corner of your bedroom and watching you sleep, the appropriate course of action is to take a nine-iron to him. Or possibly the fairway wood).
So, suicidal heroines and filthy rich weirdos. What else do the books have that support the cries of plagiarism?
So, yes, I did it. I asked Google.
Do you know, there's a blogger out there who collected fifty (heh!) instances of plagiarism between the two? Well, she and her friends.
http://www.fiftyshadesofplagiarism.blogspot.co.nz/
I can't comment, not having read Fifty Shades; but it does strike me that in order to do this they all would have bought copies of Fifty Shades. No such thing as bad publicity, evidently.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/the-origins-of-50-shades-of-grey-go-missing.html talks about "romance-focused site Dear Author, which compared the two works side by side. In one test, using the plagiarism-checker TurnItIn, the texts had 89% similarity." There's a plagiarism checker?
Yes, there is. And here we have the good servant/bad master factor in a nutshell.
For all of this fascinating research time, I WAS NOT WRITING!!!
And so I am writing this, so I will see it and remind myself of what I am supposed to be doing when I get behind my computer. Writing - and using the Internet for that purpose.
