Cassie Claire, and Why Plagiarism Is Bad
Okay, I wasn't going to do this. No, really, I wasn't. I have a week left until I start back to school, I have a ton and a half to do, and fandom wank doesn't make the list.
But we all know how much I like procrastinating, and this has really started to piss me off. So.
Cassie Claire. Yeah, you knew it had to be her, right?
Way back when I was a newbie in HP fandom, I asked some people I knew on FictionAlley for recs. Because, you know, there were a LOT of fics on FA alone, and beyond their fairly random "houses", said fics aren't really organized in any way. Last I looked, they'd set up a Google search to which you could plug in whatever to find fics. Which is great, except if I want to read a fic with, say, Moody, as a main character. So I plug his name into the FA search, and I can come up with every fic that mentions him even once.
Yeah. I don't read on FA anymore unless someone directly links to a fic that, from their description, I think would interest me.
So, I took the recs that people gave me, and I checked some of them out. Almost everyone told me I should read CC's Draco trilogy, which I think at that point was two finished fics and about the first... six chapters of the third fic. Or so. I don't remember what year this was or anything- I guess I could look it up if I really wanted to, but I don't care that much.
So I read the fics, thought parts of them were VERY well done, and, I'm sorry to say, left CC some feedback saying as much. I wasn't as deep into other fandoms (ie, Buffy) at that point as I am now, but I sure as hell knew my Babylon 5. Imagine my surprise, my "WTF?"ness, as I read whole chunks of quotes I was sure I'd heard on B5. I remember looking at her disclaimers, and not being too impressed by what I found.
As clearly as I can remember- it's been years, and I didn't care that much, so this may not be totally accurate- what I saw said something to the effect of that she'd used "various ideas" and such from several places/sources (not sure if she named them or not) and that these were intended as a 'homage' to those sources. No infringement intended, blah blah... you know the rest of the standard disclaimers. She seemed to think- and I've read her saying this a few places- that it was a fun "game" for her readers to play spot the plagerism quote.
CC, not that you'd ever read the journal of such a lowly fen as myself, but assuming for a second that you did, I want you to meet someone. CC, this is JMS. JMS knows how to do a homage properly. Like so: Naming one of his characters, Alfred Bester, after the sci-fi grandmaster of the same name. That's a homage. Calling the people who live in DownBelow "lurkers", after the lurkers on lists- that's a homage. There are a bunch of other ones in B5 which he's been asked about and said, "yeah, that was in homage to x", or has said "we called them this in homage to..."
Stealing whole bigass quotes is not a homage. Stealing practically whole chapters of books (the Pamela Dean books, which I've not read, but I have seen a line by line comparison with parts of CC's fic and the books in question)- that's not homage, either. That's stealing stuff someone else wrote, and claiming it as your own.
Or, as they taught us in school, plagiarism.
(Oh, and on the subject of JMS, I'd really like to see him meet CC at some point. From all accounts he's a very nice man, whom you do not want to piss off, and certainly don't want to steal work from. I've heard he can get very nasty to people who do this, and he has kind of scary lawyers. Just saying.)
Other examples of homage: random quotes from well-known sources tossed into other stuff. The Star Wars theme playing in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when the parking attendants steal the car. One of the storm chasers in Twister yelling, "That's no moon, it's a space station!" A quote I saw somewhere from Gilmore Girls (don't watch, can't vouch for the authenticity of this one) where one character asks another who they're looking to hook up with at this time of night, Spike and Drusilla?
Little stuff. Usually just a line or two, meant as a nod to something else. I'm not sure if they have to pay to use this stuff- probably depends on what it is. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people who made these movies and TV shows did things properly- that if they had to pay royalty fees to the original creators of these lines/ideas, then they did so. And most of us know where this stuff comes from, and we share a smile and a chuckle with the creators of the new material, and we move on.
Now we get into how fanfic is not its source material. Most of us have argued a time or two that fanfic qualifies as derivative material- which I think that it pretty much does. Most of us who write fanfic have probably used the, for lack of a better term, signature lines of our fandoms. Our Luke Skywalkers say "May the Force be with you." Our Jack O'Neills tell Carter or Daniel to dial the Gate up so the team can go home. Or any number of other things that characters say or do a lot, that everyone knows we fanfic writers didn't come up with.
Personally, even if the thought had crossed my mind, I'd never have been comfortable doing more than that in a fic. The only time I would even use more than a line or two from the original source was when I planned on doing something else with it- I have one unfinished fic I'm thinking of now, narrating Palpatine's POV from a scene in TPM. I used the lines and actions from that scene in the story. But it's clear that's what I'm doing, and if I ever finish and post the fic, I'll make that clear in the disclaimer, that I didn't write those lines, or invent the particular situation.
In short- duh?
I've had no interest in finishing reading CC's fic since I figured out that the parts that interested me didn't come from her brain, but somebody else's. And I haven't thought much about her since, other than to laugh at her occasionally when something else comes up, like that whole laptop thing.
Then I heard that she was getting the Draco trilogy published, changing the names and the identifying HP stuff. And to be honest I'd all but forgotten the plagiarism. I just thought that if the trilogy was really the great HP fic everyone said it was, this might not be such a good idea- a bunch of kids remarkably like the HP characters, going to a school remarkably like Hogwarts? Wizards and magic and werewolves a lot like JKR's, and... well, you get the idea.
Then I remembered the extensive, overwhelming plagiarism. And I started to wonder how on Earth this would ever work. It reminded me a lot of that crazy Laurie Jarro chick in SW fandom, who thought she'd publish her fanfic on Amazon and B&N and such, and figured she'd get away with it because only her friends and family knew. (Yeah, shockingly, that didn't pan out for her. George Lucas and his lawyers for the win.)
But, you know, whatever. I figured, if CC gets her stuff published, either they'd make her take the stolen stuff out, or they wouldn't catch it, someone else would after it got published, she'd be sued by a ton of writers and their lawyers, and life goes on. It's happened before, a few times recently that I know of (they made the national news, and everything.)
Now, I'm not sure what brought up the whole world of CC wank yet again. I'm not tied into HP fandom in any way except with the people I've known for a while, and of all of us, I think irreparable has her ear most to the ground in fandom. So I have no idea what brought all this on.
What I do know is that there are people still defending CC, saying that she hasn't done anything wrong. Saying that people are out to get her because we're jealous of her talent, and so on and so forth. And that just makes me want to scream, because, uh, no. The people with the talent here? JMS. Joss Whedon. Pamela Dean. A bunch of others that I know nothing about, including whomever created/writes BlackAdder (not sure what exactly that one is, I've just seen it mentioned as another "source for ripping stuff off" of CC's work.
Speaking of really stupid defenses, let's go back to my early days at FA for a second. I've since stopped posting my fic there, because I don't much care for the way it's run, or the people who run it (ie, Heidi). A lot of people who post fic at FA and/or post to their boards are probably perfectly okay people. I'm probably missing a lot not being there. But I started to not like how much peer pressure and groupthink were going on there, and Gods help you if you deviated too far from those 'norms'.
Case in point. When I got to FA, there was a major groupthink permeating the place. It said "We don't like Fanfiction.Net, because they were mean to Cassie Claire." Me, being nosy, wanted to know why. What did people tell me? "Oh, they said CC plagiarized, which is a bunch of bullshit because she'd never do that, and FF.N is dumb anyway, so nobody goes there or posts their fic there." And, you know, FF.N can be pretty dumb, has a LOT of crap posted on it, a lot of not so sharp people reviewing fic, and I don't miss much not being there, either.
Except, come to find out that what Fanfiction.Net didn't like about CC's fic was that someone pointed out to them all of the stolen Pamela Dean stuff. Which means, in my book, they were perfectly justified to suspend her account, delete her fic, whatever. I remember from my own days of posting on FF.N that they, like most fanfic sites (shockingly!) take a dim view of plagiarism, and if you're caught at it, you get the boot.
Again- duh.
I don't know what the point of my writing all of this is, really, except that the situation pissed me off. Being a so-called Big Name Fan does not mean you can steal lots of shit and get away with it. What it actually means is that because more people read your stuff, you're more likely to be caught at it. And whatever lame excuses you come up with to try and justify it, stealing is still wrong. Even if you're Cassie Claire.
But we all know how much I like procrastinating, and this has really started to piss me off. So.
Cassie Claire. Yeah, you knew it had to be her, right?
Way back when I was a newbie in HP fandom, I asked some people I knew on FictionAlley for recs. Because, you know, there were a LOT of fics on FA alone, and beyond their fairly random "houses", said fics aren't really organized in any way. Last I looked, they'd set up a Google search to which you could plug in whatever to find fics. Which is great, except if I want to read a fic with, say, Moody, as a main character. So I plug his name into the FA search, and I can come up with every fic that mentions him even once.
Yeah. I don't read on FA anymore unless someone directly links to a fic that, from their description, I think would interest me.
So, I took the recs that people gave me, and I checked some of them out. Almost everyone told me I should read CC's Draco trilogy, which I think at that point was two finished fics and about the first... six chapters of the third fic. Or so. I don't remember what year this was or anything- I guess I could look it up if I really wanted to, but I don't care that much.
So I read the fics, thought parts of them were VERY well done, and, I'm sorry to say, left CC some feedback saying as much. I wasn't as deep into other fandoms (ie, Buffy) at that point as I am now, but I sure as hell knew my Babylon 5. Imagine my surprise, my "WTF?"ness, as I read whole chunks of quotes I was sure I'd heard on B5. I remember looking at her disclaimers, and not being too impressed by what I found.
As clearly as I can remember- it's been years, and I didn't care that much, so this may not be totally accurate- what I saw said something to the effect of that she'd used "various ideas" and such from several places/sources (not sure if she named them or not) and that these were intended as a 'homage' to those sources. No infringement intended, blah blah... you know the rest of the standard disclaimers. She seemed to think- and I've read her saying this a few places- that it was a fun "game" for her readers to play spot the plagerism quote.
CC, not that you'd ever read the journal of such a lowly fen as myself, but assuming for a second that you did, I want you to meet someone. CC, this is JMS. JMS knows how to do a homage properly. Like so: Naming one of his characters, Alfred Bester, after the sci-fi grandmaster of the same name. That's a homage. Calling the people who live in DownBelow "lurkers", after the lurkers on lists- that's a homage. There are a bunch of other ones in B5 which he's been asked about and said, "yeah, that was in homage to x", or has said "we called them this in homage to..."
Stealing whole bigass quotes is not a homage. Stealing practically whole chapters of books (the Pamela Dean books, which I've not read, but I have seen a line by line comparison with parts of CC's fic and the books in question)- that's not homage, either. That's stealing stuff someone else wrote, and claiming it as your own.
Or, as they taught us in school, plagiarism.
(Oh, and on the subject of JMS, I'd really like to see him meet CC at some point. From all accounts he's a very nice man, whom you do not want to piss off, and certainly don't want to steal work from. I've heard he can get very nasty to people who do this, and he has kind of scary lawyers. Just saying.)
Other examples of homage: random quotes from well-known sources tossed into other stuff. The Star Wars theme playing in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when the parking attendants steal the car. One of the storm chasers in Twister yelling, "That's no moon, it's a space station!" A quote I saw somewhere from Gilmore Girls (don't watch, can't vouch for the authenticity of this one) where one character asks another who they're looking to hook up with at this time of night, Spike and Drusilla?
Little stuff. Usually just a line or two, meant as a nod to something else. I'm not sure if they have to pay to use this stuff- probably depends on what it is. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people who made these movies and TV shows did things properly- that if they had to pay royalty fees to the original creators of these lines/ideas, then they did so. And most of us know where this stuff comes from, and we share a smile and a chuckle with the creators of the new material, and we move on.
Now we get into how fanfic is not its source material. Most of us have argued a time or two that fanfic qualifies as derivative material- which I think that it pretty much does. Most of us who write fanfic have probably used the, for lack of a better term, signature lines of our fandoms. Our Luke Skywalkers say "May the Force be with you." Our Jack O'Neills tell Carter or Daniel to dial the Gate up so the team can go home. Or any number of other things that characters say or do a lot, that everyone knows we fanfic writers didn't come up with.
Personally, even if the thought had crossed my mind, I'd never have been comfortable doing more than that in a fic. The only time I would even use more than a line or two from the original source was when I planned on doing something else with it- I have one unfinished fic I'm thinking of now, narrating Palpatine's POV from a scene in TPM. I used the lines and actions from that scene in the story. But it's clear that's what I'm doing, and if I ever finish and post the fic, I'll make that clear in the disclaimer, that I didn't write those lines, or invent the particular situation.
In short- duh?
I've had no interest in finishing reading CC's fic since I figured out that the parts that interested me didn't come from her brain, but somebody else's. And I haven't thought much about her since, other than to laugh at her occasionally when something else comes up, like that whole laptop thing.
Then I heard that she was getting the Draco trilogy published, changing the names and the identifying HP stuff. And to be honest I'd all but forgotten the plagiarism. I just thought that if the trilogy was really the great HP fic everyone said it was, this might not be such a good idea- a bunch of kids remarkably like the HP characters, going to a school remarkably like Hogwarts? Wizards and magic and werewolves a lot like JKR's, and... well, you get the idea.
Then I remembered the extensive, overwhelming plagiarism. And I started to wonder how on Earth this would ever work. It reminded me a lot of that crazy Laurie Jarro chick in SW fandom, who thought she'd publish her fanfic on Amazon and B&N and such, and figured she'd get away with it because only her friends and family knew. (Yeah, shockingly, that didn't pan out for her. George Lucas and his lawyers for the win.)
But, you know, whatever. I figured, if CC gets her stuff published, either they'd make her take the stolen stuff out, or they wouldn't catch it, someone else would after it got published, she'd be sued by a ton of writers and their lawyers, and life goes on. It's happened before, a few times recently that I know of (they made the national news, and everything.)
Now, I'm not sure what brought up the whole world of CC wank yet again. I'm not tied into HP fandom in any way except with the people I've known for a while, and of all of us, I think irreparable has her ear most to the ground in fandom. So I have no idea what brought all this on.
What I do know is that there are people still defending CC, saying that she hasn't done anything wrong. Saying that people are out to get her because we're jealous of her talent, and so on and so forth. And that just makes me want to scream, because, uh, no. The people with the talent here? JMS. Joss Whedon. Pamela Dean. A bunch of others that I know nothing about, including whomever created/writes BlackAdder (not sure what exactly that one is, I've just seen it mentioned as another "source for ripping stuff off" of CC's work.
Speaking of really stupid defenses, let's go back to my early days at FA for a second. I've since stopped posting my fic there, because I don't much care for the way it's run, or the people who run it (ie, Heidi). A lot of people who post fic at FA and/or post to their boards are probably perfectly okay people. I'm probably missing a lot not being there. But I started to not like how much peer pressure and groupthink were going on there, and Gods help you if you deviated too far from those 'norms'.
Case in point. When I got to FA, there was a major groupthink permeating the place. It said "We don't like Fanfiction.Net, because they were mean to Cassie Claire." Me, being nosy, wanted to know why. What did people tell me? "Oh, they said CC plagiarized, which is a bunch of bullshit because she'd never do that, and FF.N is dumb anyway, so nobody goes there or posts their fic there." And, you know, FF.N can be pretty dumb, has a LOT of crap posted on it, a lot of not so sharp people reviewing fic, and I don't miss much not being there, either.
Except, come to find out that what Fanfiction.Net didn't like about CC's fic was that someone pointed out to them all of the stolen Pamela Dean stuff. Which means, in my book, they were perfectly justified to suspend her account, delete her fic, whatever. I remember from my own days of posting on FF.N that they, like most fanfic sites (shockingly!) take a dim view of plagiarism, and if you're caught at it, you get the boot.
Again- duh.
I don't know what the point of my writing all of this is, really, except that the situation pissed me off. Being a so-called Big Name Fan does not mean you can steal lots of shit and get away with it. What it actually means is that because more people read your stuff, you're more likely to be caught at it. And whatever lame excuses you come up with to try and justify it, stealing is still wrong. Even if you're Cassie Claire.