This morning, I found myself staring at a question that I commonly see on social media:
This, in broader terms, leads to the classic worry that I think most authors have: what if somebody else plagiarizes or steals all or part of my writing and claims it as their own? (This, by the way, applies to almost any type of writing; fiction, non-fiction, current affairs, you name it).
I have done a lot of reading and watching on this general topic. Here is my considered viewpoint.
- If people want to steal your work, they will, and recourse is difficult and expensive
The reality of a world where most journalism and writing is distributed digitally is that is quite easy for a bad actor to steal a person’s written work and either plagiarize it wholesale, or copy it, every bit and byte, and slap their own name or somebody else’s name on it. There are numerous examples of fiction writers discovering that their latest e-book has been lifted 100% and is now being sold on other platforms, or is now on a free download platform. Sometimes, the work is translated (usually badly) into one or more other languages, so that superficially it looks like an original work from a writer operating in that language; however, careful examination soon reveals the truth.
Plagiarism and copying are both clear breaches of domestic and overseas copyright legislation. That’s the easy part. The problem is that enforcing copyright is expensive and time-consuming. If you have a name like, say, J.K. Rowling, you not only have a shedload of cash to push towards leading law firms, you also have the muscle of publishing companies and digital rights corporations at your disposal to steamroller would-be-copyright thieves with a legal blizzard in almost any jurisdiction. If, on the other hand, you are Mary Smith of Upper Podunk MS, whose first (really good) novel has just been lifted by a a thief in China, translated into several Sinitic languages, and republished under their own name in China? Your options are very limited. Shutting down that distribution cannot often be achieved by simply sending a takedown request. (China, in case anybody didn’t already realize this, has long resented most forms of intellectual property law from the West, seeing them as devious Western attempts to prevent the growth of China as an economic power).
Plagiarism is more common with journalistic and topical subjects, and is also difficult to combat, mainly because published works in that arena have a limited shelf life (sometimes mere days or weeks). By the time you have managed to get the offending work removed, its value has fallen down to somewhere close to zero. Plus, many media employers have an astonishingly cavalier attitude to plagiarism by their writers or employees. Accountability is often an alien concept. Which sends the message (as always) that plagiarism is only plagiarism if you get caught, and the upside is worth the risks.
If any part of Books of Loukas is lifted and re-published under somebody else’s name, there will probably be a finite (low) limit to what I can personally do to prevent its publication by that illegal route, and to sanction the offenders. I am not JK Rowling, richer than Croesus. One has to be realistic. But, cynically, I will be interested to see if the pirates manage to sell more copies than I manage to sell. Maybe I will learn something from watching.
If my works are being plagiarized or copied, there must be some value to them, so if it occurs, it would be a form of compliment (although the best form of compliment is legal sales and money hitting the bank account).
- People can steal finished prose, but they cannot steal unpublished ideas
If you are a fan of jazz, you will know that no two performances of a tune are ever alike. The wild card of improvisation will see to that. The same often applies to comedy, which helps to explain the historically clear overlap between those two superficially very different performance genres. Many jazz musicians are very funny people in person or in public, and some comedians are, mostly in private, good players of musical instruments in a jazz setting.
I regard my fiction works as more akin to riffs on ideas, the same way that the classic jazz composition has the theme or head, followed by improvisational sections. I do not regard them as stone tablets, fixed and immutable from the very beginning, like a classical music composition.
Because I have a constantly active imagination, I have way more ideas than I can ever convert into finished stories. Apart from Books of Loukas, I have an entire different 6 book series in early development, and my alter ego Belem Knight has many story ideas, some almost impossibly filthy.
My ideas remain unpublished in my scratchpad work area. They do not get discussed or revealed until they form all or part of a story or novel. I have given one or two ideas to other authors in back-and-forth on social media, what they do with them is their call. They may or may not realize that I actually did that.
I give away sections of novels or short stories as teasers for the rest of my work. I might even give away the first Book of Loukas, since it is the lead-in to more substantial later books. I am seriously considering it, for at least a limited period of time.
I do not discuss the plot, characters or stories of novel series in any detail. The working woman lifts her skirt from time to time to show the prospective clients the wares, but those prospective clients do not get any further unless they pay the money.
My attitude to piracy is one born of realism. If somebody lifts one of my stories or books, que sera sera. I am not going to stand idly by and let them get away with it, but there are going to be finite limitations to what recourse I can bring to bear on them and their enablers, since I am not rich, and I do not really want to act like the Mafia.
In the meantime, I will simply take another idea or ideas, and convert them to a finished literary work.
The most enduring form of revenge against piracy is to create new works.