Cats and Rats together...and oh my, the plagiarism scandal of CopyPastCris gets more absurd..

[shadowkat]

1. Where I talk Wales into meeting me late tomorrow afternoon at a cat and rat cafe in Brooklyn. There was a story on NY1 about how they use pet rats to help acclimate the kittens and befriend them.

ME: There's a cat cafe in brooklyn heights I want to check out. We can do tea or coffee at the cafe where you can play with kittens and weirdly rats.
Wales: Wow. How sick is that? Cats and rats. Ok.
ME: Okay found it, it's in Brooklyn Heights -- (I send her the link.) But I wouldn't bring your cats (which are feral) because they'd probably eat the rats.
She calls me. (This was texting.)
Wales: Okay, you've intrigued me -- this is a life-long fantasy of mine. I've always wanted to see kitties and rats get along. And I really want to play with friendly kittnes. Can we do this!!!
Me: Uhm okay - but I may have to do laundry at 12 noon - because best time to do laundry.
Wales: We can do it while you do laundry.
Me: Won't work -- it only takes two hours to do laundry and you sort of have to go in and out..
Wales: How about 3PM -- where do you want to meet?
Me: How about at the cafe?
Wales: I will be there. We can do dinner after. This is so cool.

Afterwards, we'll go eat, maybe stop by an ice cream place opened by a top tier Indian (India - India) graduate of NYU and Johns Hopikins Business School and Ice Cream Making school -- who has created Indian flavored ice creams and opened a shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. NY1 had a story on both -- and I was about to jump to my soap, but paused to watch the story.

So...will update you on what happens after we go.

2. Hmmm...SmartBitches does a podcast with the readers who researched the plagirism case "CopyPastCris" and tabulated the number of books the writer plagirized -- which is more than 50 books and counting.



Interview with Kristy Caffeinated Fae and Claire Ryan, who are the top readers who are fighting against plagirism

Today I’m talking with Kristy, known on Twitter as CaffeinatedFae, and Claire Ryan. Kristy is a former bookseller, and Claire is a fantasy writer and programmer, and together, they’ve been taking on the full account of Cristiane Serruya’s alleged plagiarism, which you might have seen being discussed online as #CopyPasteCris.

Kristy and other readers, including Jeanna Skinner, have been maintaining lists of the passages from other romance titles discovered inside of Serruya’s books, and that list is mammoth – over 80 books now. Claire has created a programming solution to comparing books to look for similar passages.

We talk about what they’ve done in response, and what they’ve learned – and how the research and accounting of how many books were involved has affected them, a little bit, too.

Oh my god, they have 85, three articles, three websites, and three

Sarah: – how many books are on your list? It’s currently March 24th, so how many books are we talking about now?

Kristy: All right, so we have eighty-five books by thirty-six –

Sarah: God almighty!

Kristy: Yeah – by thirty-six authors, three articles, three websites, and two recipes. That’s how many there are, which is insane and horrifying, honestly.

Claire: Yeah.

Sarah: Now, is this across all of Serruya’s backlist, or is this just that one book?

Kristy: It’s all of them. At least –

Sarah: Ho.

Kristy: ‘Cause I’m going off of trust with the Romancelandia on Twitter.

And...

Claire: So I, I did actually post on Twitter, I put together a, a visualization, I guess? of, of what lines I’d found in, in Royal Affair, and it’s just an image that has, like, it, it’s an image that’s sort of basically like a barcode for the book? If someone wants to –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Claire: – if someone wants to, you can go to my Twitter feed and take a look at it, and it just shows you colored lines for, for, like, a different color for every author, so you can see, like, what kind of, what scenes were lifted or kind of where they were in the book, and then different colors for every au-, and it’s, and it’s, there’s a lot of stuff there, but they’re all mix-and-matched, so I mean, what I personally think was done here, and, and because it was easier than writing her own book, is that she took scenes from lots and lots of different books. I mean, I think the record for Royal Love is like, there’s twenty different books in there. Twenty different books –

Sarah: Good God!

Claire: – a lot of different scenes, and she just mix-and-matched them and lined them up into something that was kind of like a plot, and then sent that to a ghostwriter and said, hey, clean it up. And then she gets back, obviously, a book and publishes that under her name. I, I, that’s just personal opinion. I’m not going to say for definite; I’m just saying that that’s what it looks like to me, based on the results that I’ve got.

Sarah: That is, that is your theory; that’s your working theory –

Claire: That’s my, that’s, that’s my theory. You know, I think that this was probably, I, I, I think it’s probably likely, just because this would be easier than trying to sit down and write a whole book if you’re not, like, if you’re, if you’re not prepared to do that or if you’re busy or, I don’t know. [Laughs]

Sarah: I’d, I, it seems like an astonishingly weird amount of work to me to, to basically – I was trying to describe this to one of my kids, and I was like, basically, this person took a bunch of different passages of books, and imagine that you put them on a playing card, and then you shuffle that playing card like a Vegas dealer, and the cards go across in a big arc, and then they shuffle, and then they go in a stack, and then they go out, and then they go back, and boom! there’s your book –

Claire: Yeah.

Sarah: – all of these different pieces all mixed up, and, and, and, like, the expression on his face matched the expression on mine: this sort of dumbfounded, like, but why?

They make a good point about how the romance genre gets no respect, and it should because it's about interpersonal relationships. True. Female specific genres get traditionally crapped on by people.

Seriously, it's an interesting listen.

Why You Don't Plagiarize Nora Roberts and what she went through with Janet Daily who did it

Robert's response to Copy Paste Cris

I don't understand why folks do this.

And... Apparently there are people out there who write a book, sell it, then sell their work to someone else, they repackage it and sell it as their work... Alrighty, then.
The information age has created that.

And Claire Ryan created Similar Works logrithym where you can discover if someone has plagiarized your work. I know people were doing this in fandom back in 2008. See, it's not a good idea to try and plagiarize in the digital/technological age -- where there are coders/programmers out there who can create programs that can catch you at it.

And here's the list of books that were plagiarized.

Comments

[conuly]

It's my understanding that while rats - at least, those which aren't infected by toxoplasmosis - will avoid cats, cats (even the feral ones) rarely attack grown rats... probably because, unlike mice and juveniles, a full-grown rat is not an easy target.

[shadowkat]

Well, went up there and didn't see any rats. But we also didn't go inside -- there was about twenty people in there, with kids, and about seven-ten cats. Eh, wrong ratio.

[wendelah1]

Usually romances are not very satisfying. The formula doesn't suit me. Honestly? I'd rather read fic because at least I know I'll like the characters.

[cactuswatcher]

I'm the last person to be defending Romance. But I think it's fair to ask why something like noir detective stories seem to be appreciated more, when they are just as formulaic, just as predictable, and on average just as forgettable as Romance novels. They similarly touch base with a slice of interpersonal relationships and both often involve mild to moderate porn.

Some people are as bold as they are stupid. I've never read a Nora Roberts novel, but I knew long ago, her books or those under any of her other pen names would be the last things you'd want to plagiarize because if you got many readers someone would notice!

[conuly]

And those plagiarized snippets are so... pointless. It would've taken a trivial amount of effort to edit them into something that was a lot less provable.

[sculpturelle]

Thanks for the links re: plagiarism. Food for thought. Whether it's romance or comic books or cozy mystery or fantasy - genre stories all seem to be riffing off each other. The sheer volume of books and cross-pollination make it 'seem' like it's share and share alike. But there's a difference between influence and plagiarism. I'm not sure "cheaters" see the difference.

[shadowkat]

Well said, I was thinking much the same thing today but struggling on how to articulate it. We all borrow a bit from each other -- it's impossible not to, but to steal someone else's words, their style, worse to copy and past portions of your work and other writers work into theirs? Ugh.

I was discussing it with a friend tonight, and they said it reminded them a little of fanfic, except in this case the person wasn't just playing with someone else's characters and world (ie. playing in their sandbox with a few of their toys), they were literally taking the other writers words. (Or stole the entire sandbox, complete with toys, and games, etc and repacked, retooled and resold it as their own.)

Fanfic has run into similar problems -- with people stealing their works in this manner. I remember the Xander fandom went after Ozymandias who stole whole paragraphs and chapters of other's work and took credit for it as his. And then there was the Cassandra Clare scandal about how she'd ripped off another fanfic writer. Not to mention Nautibitz who had someone rip off her fic.

It's every writer's deepest fear -- that someone out there will take what you wrote and repackage it as theirs. I know it scared me when I published my book on Amazon. What if someone stole my work and repackaged it and made more money off it, and got credit for what I'd created? Oh god. Worst fear.

But they don't get that.