Everyone always wants to speak from the outraged and victimized perspective of a person who has been plagiarized, never taking into account the perspective of the one accused. The following is coming from the latter standpoint. The people who believe what they believe (i.e., “plagiarism fundamentalists”) will not be convinced otherwise long enough to open their mind even a single iota about this. But still, I can try. In other words, I’m about to get hella into it and cover many facets of the controversies surrounding and theories pertaining to plagiarism. What’s “my source”? Experience, motherfucker.

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Plagiarism. It seems to be the buzzword of the moment. Not just because of Claudine Gay (a convenient target to attack and bring down), but because of writers in general shaking in their boots and feeling threatened by their extinction due to AI. To be sure, it’s no secret that ChatGPT will one day take over the job of “writer” entirely, but few people are wont to accuse it of plagiarism (copyright infringement lawsuits, on the other hand, are more likely) when it’s so “handy” and “helpful.” Even though it “will offer responses learned from the data it has been trained on, meaning it can offer responses that are like those found elsewhere—like a human may.” Funny it should be phrased like that…for humans, namely human writers, do have a tendency to regurgitate what they’ve already seen and heard. It’s unavoidable. Osmosis and all that rot. But it is the dilution that occurs by osmosis that matters when trying to brand someone with the dreaded “P” word. And indeed, there is nothing worse than getting that black mark tossed at you as a writer, especially when your reputation (not your bank account) is the only thing you have going for you in this so-called profession. 

Just one person casting doubt or aspersions on your integrity as a writer can be enough to ruin you (see: this incident, which pertains to a far more open-and-shut case of conventional copy-and-paste verbatim plagiarism). As someone who has no trouble coming up with ideas, I resent the notion that one mistake or misjudgment could potentially ruin my writerly reputation (however minuscule it might be) forever. And all, for the most part, because someone had a weird vendetta against/general intolerance for me. I am speaking, in fact, on a matter that has got me into this contemplative mood about what plagiarism “means” and how I don’t necessarily feel there is a one-size-fits-all objectivity to it. That is, unless you orbit the dreaded circles of academia. Being that, for the most part, I dabble in fiction and deep-dive pop culture articles, I’ve managed to avoid academia like the plague. Turns out, my instinct was probably right. Because, recently, I had a very bizarre experience involving the accusation of plagiarism. It occurred months after I had taken a class (one of those “continuing education”-type things you’re supposed to do as an adult who wants to insist that they’re “staying hungry,” intellectual curiosity-wise) and wrote an article about one of the movies we had watched during it. Without fully understanding that what I was writing might be construed as plagiarism—especially by hyper-sensitive academia ilk—I did a review of the film incorporating, apparently, far too many ideas that were presented in the class. So much for being rewarded for “applying what you’ve learned.” 

Indeed, I got far more of a “learning experience” than I ever would have bargained for. Which brings one to the argument that, if you take the seed of something you’ve heard and turn it into your own words or interpretation, is it plagiarism? (Of course, a large percentage will reply with a resounding yes, especially academics.) Moreover, there are so many people who have the same idea/same response to something that it’s impossible to “police” who said what first, or who should be “attributed” with having the same exact reaction as many people would (e.g., the seemingly collective response to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie being snubbed at the Oscars as an ironic reflection of what Barbie was railing against: patriarchy). 

The even weirder thing, though, was that this was a “school” that prided itself on being the antithesis of what “usual academia” represents. Which is to say, pearl-clutching over just about everything. Including even the faintest whispering of someone plagiarizing. Turns out, all iterations of academia are the same when it comes to notions of work that was “thieved.” 

But for me, it was all very fucking bizarre. Mainly because, in any class I’ve ever taken, the main reason I enjoyed it was being able to use what I’d learned in my writing. Specifically, my pop culture-oriented writing. For what is the pop culture essay if not, ultimately, an amalgam of Slumdog Millionaire-esque factoids? What’s more, when it comes to the classroom setting, if we talk about ideas and one person is inspired enough to write something down relating to that conversation, I fail to see how it’s “plagiarism.” Then there is the method of “synthesizing information,” which is what teachers in classrooms are doing themselves when they teach (indeed, many of the “hot takes” bandied in the class I took could be found online). To boot, if you read multiple things and have a photographic memory when it comes to processing, subsequently re-piecing that information together in your own way, is it plagiarism? By the rigid, fundamentalist views of how academia defines plagiarism, perhaps all writers are plagiarists merely by using other people’s lives and repurposed dialogue in their work without “citing the source.” With that in mind, in a recent article in The Guardian pertaining to Claudine Gay, Susan Blum, a linguistic anthropology professor, is referenced and quoted as follows: “She takes exception to what she calls ‘plagiarism fundamentalism,’ the idea that every thought should be completely original—which runs counter to a human nature to mimic. ‘We have these things called mirror neurons, which allow us to feel what other people are doing while they’re doing them,’ says Blum. ‘There’s a kind of continuum between originality and complete copying, and language and culture lies somewhere in the middle.’” Exactly…and yet, academics seem to make no room for this way of human thinking, and how that might bleed into their writing.   

As it does with the common trope of two writers who are romantically entwined harboring resentment when the other uses their “lover’s” (can’t not put that word in quotes) life or ideas in their work. Take, for example, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Or the fictional writer Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) in Anatomy of a Fall, accused by her husband of “plundering” (a.k.a. plagiarizing) an idea from a now-abandoned manuscript of his. Sandra, who is cold-blooded as a writer in terms of what she’ll mine for material, insists, “You should be flattered that I was inspired by you. This is life, things circulate.” Why can’t more people see it that way, take themselves less seriously? The answer at the heart of it is, unsurprisingly, capitalism. The obsession with ownership over an idea because it can be commodified. This has also become pervasive in the scientific papers arena, with one professor, Marcus Munafo, from Bristol University commenting on the surfeit of fraudulent and plagiarized papers (courtesy of “paper mills”), “If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivized to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm.” That perfect storm being what happens when capitalism reigns over writing, whether research-oriented or creative.

To that end, and on another personal level, a friend of mine once asked me to send him a script and “joked,” “I need to see if you’ve got any good lines I could steal.” The implication being, as usual, that when you pass off the “right” thing as your own, it will not only get you the accolades/recognition that we all respond to like Pavlovian cliches, but also, ta-da, money! That magic word/entity that everyone wants their art to generate. 

Someone as obscure as I am is actually at greater risk when they put work out into the ether. It’s so easy to rip something off from a nobody. Not just because they’re unknown, but because they have no resources to argue. And sure, I’ve been on the other side of things where I’ve felt I was somehow plagiarized. Case in point, I wrote an article about Billie Eilish’s “Your Power” video being a blatant nod to Britney Spears’ “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” on April 30, 2021 before this one on May 3, 2021. That person has the bigger platform, ergo such a “revelation” will likely always be attributed to them. The same goes for another article where I mentioned the similarities of Doja Cat’s “Attention” video to “Bittersweet Symphony” and “Drowned World/Substitute For Love” on June 16, 2023, the same date as another article making the same comparisons dropped. Am I going to accuse either of these people of plagiarism or take it in good faith that they saw the same thing I did? The point is, there are a wealth of gray areas when it comes to plagiarism. So much so that I once thought that the true extent of it was really a matter of outright copy and pasting (not even bothering to “roget” while one was at it). 

Alas, in the wake of this being-accused-of-plagiarism incident, I suddenly felt like everything could be interpreted as plagiarism. This idea of ownership over every little utterance being steeped in the capitalistic ideals of our society. The ones that insist that everything has an opportunity to be profited from. Furthermore, the type of people I was dealing with were so obsessed with “truth” and “moral rectitude” that I could honestly see them going through every piece I’d ever written and trying to build a case against me just to validate their over-the-top reaction (fuckin’ academics, man). And also the type of people who would write their own damning response to this if they ever saw it (despite no names being named). The whole thing had (and has) me really shook. Questioning and doubting myself in a way that I’m sure they wanted me to. Because everything about this takedown seemed calculated and oddly-timed. Like, as (now formerly) regular readers of my website, why would they only just now notice a months-old article and decide to attack me for it? I felt Claudine Gay’d in that, as Andrew Lawrence put it in the abovementioned The Guardian article, “Much like with other transgressions, it seems that how plagiarism is enforced has more to do with the person being accused than the violation that was committed.”

The sort of people I was dealing with were fundamentalists. No room for gray areas or understanding. They simply decided I was a deliberately thieving asshole and shut me out of their lives without a second thought or opportunity to defend myself/go over the specific points of what they deemed plagiarism. What are you supposed to do when those accusing you won’t even engage or work with you to resolve the situation? It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever encountered, and I honestly hope no one dealing with such an accusation ever has to endure this puerile shutdown of all communication, when discussion and collaboration to remedy the situation are what’s needed. Not such venom and pretension involved in the entire debacle. I was willing to cooperate (unlike many plagiarists who are actually ill-intentioned) with the person but was instead met with radio silence, so I simply took the work down. I don’t want to be someone who “steps on toes”—not like that, anyway. But I kept thinking about how much different everything could have been if there was more collaboration involved to make the article “undamnable.” I was willing to own and atone for my sins (even though I doubted the scope of them, let alone the malintent), but there was no interest in that. All they wanted was for me to vanish, to quit “staining” their unyielding notions of integrity, their precious academic space. 

It led me to wonder if there shouldn’t be more leeway for people who were under the impression that writing something based on information they’ve learned wasn’t a crime. And, speaking of being able to accuse plagiarists of a crime, as it were, those who truly want to assert their ownership over something usually need the time, money and resources to do it. For the rest of us, the best we can hope for is that one of our ideas will hit a mother lode, financially speaking, before someone else can lay claim to it. 

Another factor that this whole debacle brought up for me is that I’m very much of the “if someone wants to corroborate the statements being made, they can look it up” approach to writing (obviously, this is totally anathema to academics). Citing every little fucking source just seems like an inane way to assert how valuable and erudite what you’re saying is. Because the articles I deal in are primarily pop culture related, most of the details can be interpreted as common knowledge (e.g., who’s the director, the main actors, the screenwriter, etc.). In addition, to what extent is “being influenced” considered plagiarism? Especially in a climate where all of us are absorbing so many random bits of information throughout the day—whether scrolling through social media, hearing sound bites, happening upon articles or their headlines. Sooner or later, something’s bound to creep into our heads that isn’t “ours.” Half the people on this planet go around parroting the things they’ve watched on TikTok, the other half reciting the finer points of think pieces and news items. It’s all some form of plagiarism, if we’re going to be as nitpicky as people seem to want to be about it lately. 

Which brings me back to how obvious it is that the real reason—the fundamental, ego-driven reason—people get upset is because they’re seeing someone else monetizing an idea before they can. This lust for the monetization of an idea and/or its associated work extends to all facets of the creative writing process (even academic writing). A prime case in point of this occurs in Glow (please, god, please, let it get a fourth season or movie someday), when Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) tells another party guest he’s doing coke with, “I’ve been making this wrestling TV show just so I can fund my next movie.” He continues, “I’ve been workin’ on it for, like, ten years, man. Ten years. It’s a semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual, time travel drama.” “What does that mean?” “All right, I’ll tell ya. It’s about a boy, this all-American kid, who can’t stop jerkin’ off to fantasies about having sex with his mother…so it makes him hate himself, right? So he builds a time machine to go into the future, where she’s old and hideous so he can escape his Oedipal impulses. But—alright—here’s the but: he puts the wrong date in the machine and he goes back in time instead to the 1950s where she’s just a horny teenager and she spends the rest of the movie just trying to fuck him instead of his dad.” “I’ve seen that movie.” “No you haven’t. I haven’t made it. It’s called Mothers and Lovers.” “Nah, nah bro. It’s called Back to the Future.”

Highlighting how a person can remain totally unaware that their idea is unoriginal until it’s too late, this scene also focuses on Sam’s incredulity that somebody else could “be as brilliant.” To boot, Sam isn’t only upset about the money he’ll never make from it, but, naturally, the other thing that vexes people most about being “plagiarized” a.k.a. assuming that no one else thinks like they do (once more, ego is at play when it comes to people being precious about their art). And that is, all the time spent working on a project only for it to come to nothing when someone else is recognized for it before you. Because “nothing,” in this society, means that 1) you haven’t made any money and 2) you haven’t gotten famous (or at least somewhat well-known in a niche community). What is sometimes billed as getting “credit where credit is due.” By the same token, capitalism advocates for the kind of vicious competition that would lead to someone taking and/or building on an idea and making it better, their own. Or shit, at least beating the other person to the punch in terms of making money off it. By this logic, we can blame capitalism for certain motivations behind someone who would plagiarize with malintent.

So it is that Sam laments, “I just worked on my shit so fucking long and then, boom. Someone else gets there first. I mean, it’s like why bother even trying to make anything that you really care about?” The more accurate question is, why bother trying to make art at all in a climate where it’s so easy to be accused of…lack of originality? Or what blunter types would call stealing. The glut, the oversaturation of similar ideas and word formations—it all adds up to so many writers saying the same thing. That goes double when publishers want to capitalize on some kind of trend, therefore they release several books of the same nature. 

What it amounts to is that plagiarism isn’t actually as black and white as moralists in the writing community would like to believe. Nor does policing it come from a place of “purity,” per se, so much as a green-eyed desire to own and monetize. And this doesn’t only extend to written word-oriented mediums. Take, for example, Rand Gauthier—better known as the pioneer of the celebrity sex tape internet leak. His monetary downfall is captured in the seventh episode of Pam and Tommy, “Destroyer of Worlds,” when we see that he’s lost total control of the “intellectual property” he could once claim solely as his own (despite it being a tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, well, you know…). Seeing a bootlegger freely sell it outside of a Tower Records in L.A., Rand marches into the store with his own box of “real” tapes, offering to “make a deal” with the cashier for a wholesale price. The cashier replies, “What makes yours the real tape and his bootleg? What’s the difference?” Rand irritatedly answers, “What’s the difference? The difference is I was first, man. I was first.” The cashier ripostes, “You know, David Bowie once said, ‘Never be the first to do anything.’ And I bet he wasn’t the first to say it.” There is an applicability to this exchange when it comes to people who are obsessed with maintaining monopolized ownership over something they come up with. But ownership is impossible once you release anything into the public realm. At which time, no one is fully responsible for whether they’re influenced by something or not. We, especially as writers, are all a summation of the people, things and ideas we encounter. Or, as the character of Truman Capote phrases it in Capote vs. The Swans, “What do they all think I do? I write. I am always listening. It doesn’t just drift off into outer space. I am recording. Because this is the way of our world.” To totally avoid all variations of plagiarism, a person would have to exist in a stimuli-free white room—a bubble, if you will. Which, for the most part, academics sort of do. Perhaps that’s why they impose their impossible standards of plagiarism fundamentalism on those living in the real world. Those who are “infected” more easily by the things they see and hear.

To live by this inflexible creed, though, means someone like Shakespeare would be banned from all bookshops, all classrooms. Not just because it’s widely known that he used collaborators on his plays, but because, recently, plagiarism software was able to detect the influence of George North on his work. Shakespeare’s approach to writing would make him persona non grata in certain circles today. Yet an article by Isaac Butler for Slate about the findings challenges, “None of this should make us think less of Shakespeare’s achievements and neither should the increasing evidence that he sometimes used uncredited collaborators and occasionally served as one himself. Shakespeare didn’t just faithfully reproduce his sources—he argued with and subverted them, he combined them in unconventional ways, and he made substantial changes to them.” Which, yes, should count for something in the column of more nebulous definitions of plagiarism. Elsewhere, Butler adds, “By our standards, Shakespeare, who lived before modern ideas of authorship, plagiarized constantly. The discovery of North’s influence on Shakespeare is a welcome opportunity to remember how the Bard of Avon’s genius actually worked, and how much his methods are at odds with our own ideas of artistic greatness. Shakespeare is not Western literature’s great inventor but rather its great inheritor. The Bard borrowed plots, ideas, characters, themes, philosophies and occasional passages from sources ranging from Plutarch’s Lives and Holinshed’s Chronicles to Montaigne’s Essays and plays by his contemporaries.” In fact, a lot of the literature we still revere today operated on borrowing ideas from others, whether individuals or civilizations (hell, look at Rome with Greece, or Greece with Egypt).

I am not saying that I’m some “pinko” who believes everyone should just be able to claim ideas as their own. I am merely accenting that there is a lot of hazy territory when it comes to what constitutes plagiarism, especially based on how you yourself think. Even so, I’m sure many will see the takeaway from this as “she’s okay with plagiarism.” But that’s not what this is. My intention is to open more rigid minds to the fact that, by the staunch definitions exalted by academia (and capitalists with money to sue), we’re all plagiarists. This is not me saying, “Plagiarism is okay.” This is me saying that plagiarism is not as objective as we (but mainly academics) think it is. That one set of strict, impossible-not-to-break-sooner-or-later rules—again, what can be called plagiarism fundamentalism—should apply to everyone is as absurd as world peace. This is not a matter of not giving a fuck or having no respect, this is about a set of values. What are you actually in this “game” for? To be recognized? Or because you couldn’t stamp out your artistic spirit if you tried, recognition or not? I do not personally write for money or recognition (which works out, since I don’t receive either), but for what I get out of it emotionally. The sense of having freedom of expression. And so, the muzzling that increasingly occurs by having to constantly look over your shoulder and wonder if someone might holler “plagiarist” seems to have become more of a detriment than a “safeguard.”

I do not think academic writers and non-academic writers can coexist as a result of these differing sets of values. One being ivory tower-y and one being, let’s say, chill. I’m bringing my own experience into this because I was so shocked by it, and because I think other people could be accused of the same thing if they found themselves in a similar situation. I bowed in submission for my “offense” even though I don’t feel like, from my perspective, I did anything wrong, violated any “code.” I made my own assessments of a movie that overused one concept in particular that was from the class. But I perceived the movie myself, judged it through this lens of learned information myself. I don’t understand how it was plagiarism, and if it was by certain rigid standards then I was willing to make the necessary amendments to it to accommodate those affronted. It should have been no harm, no foul. But it wasn’t. Because writers go absolutely batshit over their conceptions of plagiarism. To that point, people only want to “get legal” about things when they feel their “bag” is being affected/pilfered. But when a so-called plagiarist has nothing to gain financially and they’re willing to cooperate with amending the work, why must they still be viewed as trash?

In any case, I hope I haven’t only “further incriminated” myself by trying to speak openly on this evermore contentious matter. Particularly in the Narnia-esque realm of academia, wherein academics constantly want to give people shit for “stealing” when all they’ve been doing themselves is culling information (usually on someone else’s dime) and repurposing it all into a new grab bag to put their own stamp on it. To say it’s “theirs” now. Just because they have a fuck-ton of footnotes doesn’t make that “reductive” assessment any less true. And that’s fine, that’s what every writer ever does, regardless of specialty. But academics hate the word “regurgitation.” I realized this very literally long ago when, as a student worker in the Something Studies department at Something University, I was tasked with retyping up a professor’s notes. I did so and then put it in an email with what I thought was the jocular subject line, “Regurgitation.” He flew off the fucking handle at that and I was almost fired. Again, I say: fuckin’ academics, man. So goddamn uppity about themselves and their work. To the extent that you kind of want to remind them, “You’re going to be in the ground one day.”

Anyway, the majority of these footnotes are not being looked at—in truth, many will do all they can to avoid looking at them so they can keep reading the actual content. The citations are largely there, in the end, for the purposes of pageantry. This perhaps being why bell hooks used much fewer footnotes in her own writing than the average academic—leading, of course, to her tarring and feathering by “real” academics. This brings us to the egocentric nature of academia, how the writing is all in service of the writer themself, rather than the reader. In short, academia relies solely on what I call “cover your ass writing.” Ergo, why it’s usually such a non-joy to read. Often technical and clinical, it rarely has a creative or soulful bone in its body (apart from the paper title itself, which is then rendered dull by the barrage of footnoting).

In contrast, pop culture writing connotes an understanding that most of the ardent readers of such articles will be in on the references you’re making without needing to spell it out for them (e.g., “I feel like 2007 Britney”). Moreover, pop culture writing moves at an extremely accelerated pace in order to stay relevant with what’s trending in the current news cycle. Waiting around to cite sources is simply not the name of the game (and this is often the perspective such writers are coming from). This is part of the reason pop culture criticism is typically looked down upon by “legitimate” people. And yes, peruse any given pop culture website, and you ain’t gonna see a fuckin’ footnotes section—hyperlinks, sure, but no fuckin’ footnotes. Even so, I feel I give pop culture the reverence it deserves, for it does shape and reflect so much of society at any given moment in time. The seriousness with which I do regard pop culture has even gotten me cited in certain books (e.g., The Rhythm Image Music Videos and New Audiovisual Forms), for which I am grateful to have been acknowledged.

As for me, I can acknowledge that plagiarism, like shit, can happen…unintentionally. More and more. Not just because of the amounts of information we’re exposed to in our day-to-day that then seep into the subconscious, but because the definitions of what constitute it are ostensibly becoming stricter (again, AI is a primary factor in this). And also because of opposing value systems about plagiarism and its true meaning. Thus, all of us—even the most “unimpeachable”—have probably been guilty of it at least in some minor way or another, depending on who we ask. It’s how we all react to it (either with clutched pearls or a bit more understanding and collaboration) that makes the difference. And perhaps the next time you’re quick to yell “plagiarist!” at someone, you might do well to confirm that you yourself can’t be accused of the same. Because people in paper houses shouldn’t fling inky slurs that might cause the pages to cave in and collapse.