I listened to a certain song by Beck when I was young and it didn’t mean that much to me, but today I feel like it describes my life. ‘She’s alone in the new pollution..’ That is the condition in which everyone finds themselves when their trance breaks and they no longer engage with a workplace, an entertainment device, or a community. I quit my job at a laboratory, I don’t watch Netflix shows or play clicky games, and I don’t like dealing with the local school system. Strangely enough, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier or freer. It is only when you fully disconnect that you truly feel free to create. It is lonely but liberating.
Whenever you create something good, it is going to be reproduced in new forms. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all.
When someone is copying a style or brand, you don’t have much recourse to complain, and you are lucky if your expression of that style is powerful enough to be able to profit from it before an imitator with more talent or financial support comes along.
At the same time, everybody is working at cross purposes, so whenever you do anything, someone else is going to view it as sabotage. They will try to undermine what you produce.
If you are lucky, someone will join forces with you to create a collective movement in a fortuitous direction that brings the archetypes into better balance. If you are unlucky, that someone will copy your work without citing you.
The internet has made theft of IP easier than ever and that is why my novel was ripped off within four months after I self-published it on Amazon. The thief paid a ghostwriter to produce a shorter, dumbed down version. He self-published the result on Amazon and then purchased advertising, reviews, and Twitter followers to promote the product he had stolen. When I confronted him, he said, “There are no new stories.”
Some of his more honest reviewers on Amazon wrote, “Great concept, terrible execution.” He thought that by shortening my story and focusing on more prurient aspects, he was making it better. Ha.
I thought this young man’s moral failings might be unusual, rather than representative of young people today, but I was wrong. Little did I know that a second young person was also using my novel as a template.
In comparison to the ghostwriter-assisted four months required by the young man, this young woman took five months to rewrite the story in her own voice and instead of self-publishing it, she used it to find an agent who then sold it to a publishing company which is scheduled to start selling it in March 2021. I found this out through an announcement on the Bookseller.
Whereas the first thief focused on making the female protagonist pathetic and disgusting, depicting her getting ridden by an ‘alpha male’ at the end of the book, the second thief focused on making the female protagonist sympathetic and she made the relationship with her tormentor more romantic. The first thief was a young man who rewrote my book to appeal to young men. The second thief was a young woman who rewrote my book to appeal to young women. I had written the book to have appeal for a wide range of readers and, judging by the number of plagiarists, I was successful.
Below, you can see the beat sheet that the plagiarists used in their dumbed down versions of my story:
- X comes from a broken family with an absent father. Her history is marked by tragedy. (p. 1-3)
- X lives in a big, bad, techno city ruled by plutocrats. If you don’t follow their rules, you’re trash. (p 1-13)
- X has no one to talk to because everybody is absorbed by their virtual identities (p. 1-13)
- X is surrounded by people who have artificially enhanced their appearances in strange ways (p. 1-13)
- X lives in a closet-sized apartment and is heavily in debt (p. 1–13)
- X has a video job interview with a mysterious person (p. 14)
- X finds out that the job is absolutely pointless in a Kafkaesque way (p.15-16)
- X finds that sexuality in the city has been warped and has trouble finding someone attractive (p. 19)
- X spends all of her time talking with an AI or with herself (p. 50-60, 68-70)
- X meets her mysterious tormentor again (p. 75-81)
- X tries to reconnect to her past and is betrayed by the system she’d chosen to trust
- X loses her job and becomes desperate to earn a living (p. 175-183)
- X is obsessed with her mirror images (p. 184 and others)
- X is rescued by a mysterious character who has been helping her (p. 185-187)
- X is paid to do a job which destroys plutocrats’ property, chaos ensues (p. 188-199)
- X leaves the city and sees another version of herself attacked and eaten by beasts (p. 200-205)
- X has lost the ability to communicate due to what the city did to her (p. 217-235)
- X literally and figuratively eats fruit from the tree of knowledge (p. 221)
- X is tormented by her connection to the technology of the city (p. 229-235)
- X gazes into a new sort of mirror which is responsible for the deaths of most of the people in the city (p. 236-245)
- X remembers a past she had long since forgotten due to the technology of the city (p. 246-248)
- X survives her look into the mirror, but no one else did. (p. 249-251)
- X finds a replacement parent figure (p. 252–253)
- X is able to see her self in a completely different light (p. 252–253)
- X is turned into an unlikely savior (p. 254-255)
- X is taunted by the mysterious individual who had been guiding her life (p. 255)
- X is told that he is obsessed with her because he learns from her struggles (p. 255)
- X finds out what happened to her absent father (p. 256)
- X chooses to run away from the mysterious person in search of something real, new, and connected to nature (p. 257)
In the original story written by me, X was named Alix. The first plagiarist renamed her Renee and the second plagiarist renameed her Lydia. The second plagiarist put more focus on her family life and search for romance, and the first plagiarist focused more on her relationship to a city.
If I try to apply the same plagiarism standards to my story and figure out the extent to which it has copied from other, earlier works, I discover that the story it most closely resembles is Beetlejuice — with ghosts replaced by AIs and the family replaced by a city.
The sub-sequences that resonate with Beetlejuice would need to be combined and eliminated from the list in order to improve the mathematical estimate of its uniqueness. For example, points 1-4 would become a single point.
- X comes from a broken family with an absent father. X lives in a big, bad, techno city (family) ruled by plutocrats (parents). If you don’t follow their rules, you’re trash. X has no one to talk to because everybody is absorbed by their virtual identities X is surrounded by people who have artificially enhanced their appearances in strange ways (p. 1-13)
- X lives in a closet-sized apartment and is heavily in debt (p. 1–13)
- X has a video job interview with a mysterious person (p. 14)
- X finds out that the job is absolutely pointless in a Kafkaesque way (p.15-16)
- X finds that sexuality in the city has been warped and she has a hard time finding someone attractive (p. 19)
- X spends all of her time talking with an AI (ghosts) or with herself (p. 50-60, 68-70) X meets her mysterious tormentor again (p. 75-81) X tries to reconnect to her past and discovers she’d been betrayed by the people she’d chosen to trust (the city)
- X loses her job and becomes desperate to earn a living (p. 175-183)
- X is obsessed with her mirror images (p. 184 and others)
- X is rescued by a mysterious character (Beetlejuice) who has been helping her. X is paid to do a job which destroys plutocrats’ (her parents’) property, chaos ensues (p. 188-199)
- X leaves the city and sees another version of herself attacked and eaten by beasts (p. 200-205)
- X has lost the ability to communicate due to what the city did to her (p. 217-235)
- X literally and figuratively eats fruit from the tree of knowledge (p. 221)
- X is tormented by her connection to the technology of the city (p. 229-235)
- X gazes into a new sort of mirror which is responsible for the deaths of most of the people in the city (p. 236-245)
- X remembers a past she had long since forgotten due to the technology of the city (p. 246-248)
- X survives her look into the mirror, but no one else did. (p. 249-251)
- X finds a replacement parent figure (p. 252–253) X is able to see her self in a completely different light (p. 252–253) X is turned into an unlikely savior (p. 254-255)
- X is taunted by the mysterious individual who had been guiding her life (p. 255)
- X is told that he is obsessed with her because he learns from her struggles (p. 255)
- X finds out what happened to her absent father (p. 256)
- X chooses to run away from the mysterious person in search of something real, new, and connected to nature (p. 257)
This would reduce the uniqueness calculation from thirty factorial down to sixteen or twenty-one factorial – which is still a number that is much larger than the number of books ever published. Thus, I would conclude that my two plagiarists have stolen my intellectual property, even if they claim that they were inspired by Beetlejuice rather than by my work.
The owners of Beetlejuice IP would then count the number of plot elements in italics and conclude that I have stolen an eleven point plot structure from them, since eleven factorial is larger than the number of screenplays and novels that have ever been produced.
My argument that my plagiarists have committed a crime seems to be falling apart – unless I want to acknowledge that I have committed a similar crime!
Not so fast…
My two plagiarists used the same girl/sci-fi city/AI tormentor framework that I did while Beetlejuice used a girl/family/ghost framework, so perhaps a sufficient number of substitutions can detach one work from another — enough to avoid the charge of plagiarism. I wonder how one could quantify this.
If someone rewrote Harry Potter with a female protagonist and replaced Hagrid with a fairy while maintaining a seventeen plot point overlap, is that enough? Probably not.
If someone rewrote Harry Potter such that it took place on a space station and magic was replaced with technology, is that enough? Probably. Ender’s Game had some similar elements.
In either case, most readers would be smart enough to be annoyed to discover that they were reading a book they’d already read.
You are probably still skeptical of my analysis, but consider how recognizable the Harry Potter plot is after only seventeen plot points. Sure you can filter out sub plots and identify other works that have used them in a similar order, but as the number of plot elements grows, so does the uniqueness.
- wizard leaves orphan baby with relatives (5)
- child is neglected (3)
- child has magical powers (3)
- child is sent an invitation to a special school (5)
- the invitation is ignored by relatives (3)
- child is picked up by a giant and brought to school (3)
- child gets a magic wand and an animal (3)
- child makes friends with a boy and a girl (4)
- child has stern professors in magical subjects (3)
- one of the professors is new to the school (3)
- child has a talent for a sport involving flying brooms (3)
- child uses an invisibility coat to steal information about a mystery (5)
- child misses his parents and sees them in a magic mirror (5)
- child helps giant find some scary creatures in the forest (5)
- child finds out that the man who killled his parents is killing unicorns in the magical forest (7)
- a troll is released as a subterfuge and the children have to defeat it (5)
- child and friends sneak into a forbidden part of the school to stop a bad thing (5)
- children must solve a series of puzzles involving magic and chess (4)
- child finds out that the man who killed his parents is hiding within one of his professors. (4)
- child defeats the evil man (3)
Clearly, stories with these plot points have been written many times. Five factorial is 120 and compared to the millions of childrens books that have been published, it is a small number. But as the list goes on, the math of the situation changes dramatically. Twenty factorial is 2.4e18. That means 18 zeros and compared to the number of childrens books in existence, it is a large number.
One might argue that certain sub-sequences are common enough that they should be combined into a single, common plot point, but that is what I tried to do by grouping concepts with 3-5 elements that frequently occur in series. Perhaps one might find a work that uses more of these elements in series, but I think that, as long as the number of unique combinations is greater than, say, ten million, you can be certain about the geneology of a work and whether or not it has been plagiariazed.
I really do think it should be possible to mathematically analyze the genealogy of a piece of fiction, but creating a system to automate this would be a bit tedious. You’d have to have a good database of synonyms and archetypes, so that when you enter a plot:
Princess loses fortune to wicked stepmother and fairy godmother helps her meet prince charming who makes an effort to find her and marry her.
it would automatically be compared to all stories indexed according to
Young person loses fortune to powerful bad character and powerful good character helps her meet an attractive person who wants a future together.
Those sentences might be reduced to as few as 10 key plot points and 10 factorial is 3.6 million, a relatively small number compared to the 130 million books published since the beginning of recorded time, but relatively large rcompared to the number of novels produced each year. This leads me to think that with a zooming in procedure, it would be posssible to construct a simple algorithm to identify structural plagiarism.
Things are more complicated for books that contain multiple, overlapping plots. You could weave a Cinderella story into a Pinnochio story, but how would you encode this? Is this just 20 factorial if Cinderella and Pinnochio have ten plot points each? Or do you double 10 factorial? Those two calculations are very, very different.
I think that you would double 10 factorial if the author had not been able to extract new meaning from the combination of Cinderella and Pinnochio. Is Prince Charming also Pinnochio and does that change how Cinderella feels about him? Is Pinnochio’s nose a euphemism for something else in both stories? In that case, a calculation using 20! would be appropriate.
(I now need to write a story in which Cinderella gets off every time Prince Pinnochio tells a lie.)
What I’m trying to prove is that there are common and uncommon plot sequences and one might calculate the likelihood of a certain sequence occurring through a random mutation or through a cultural leitmotif. The longer the sequence is, the more unique it becomes and I think that the cutoff for a unique sequence seems to be around 15-20, depending on the medium. A 20-word-sentence that is identical to a sentence written by someone-else was probably copied, especially if it contains an uncommon-word. That was 20 words.
The plot sequence overlap with the guy who I think plagiarized my novel was 30 points in order. He didn’t copy any sentences verbatim, but he copied beats in order and the meaning contained therein. He shortened the story and gave it a new voice, for sure, but I think that what he did was illegal.
Imaginary boyfriends and ai friends are a growing cultural leitmotif and it doesn’t matter much who the first person was to use that idea, but if the idea is used in unique ways to create a plot that strikes a new cultural resonance, I think it would be possible to detect the first occurrence of that resonance. It is just a matter of signal processing.
I’m going to keep my eye on a soon too be published book called I, Henry because every single point of the 9 point blurb overlapped with that of my first novel. If the full text shows that there are fifteen or more points of overlap, I’d think the publisher would want to know.
A million books are published each year and only 10% are fiction, so a simple algorithm that flags published works according to plagiarism suspicion would calculate:
8!/100k = 40% likelihood that if the 8 point concept does not have an obvious historical counterpart and it emerged in two publishing houses in one year that one of the houses has stolen from the other
9!/300k = 120% likelihood that if the 9 point concept does not have an obvious historical counterpart and it emerged in publishing house A three years after it was published by house B, then A stole from B.
I know I sound absolutely unhinged, but I was trained in physics. Obsessing over details and formal systems of analysis is what we do.
What started this nasty bout of analysis?
When I saw that a pretty, 20 year old, married Englishwoman in flower arrangement school wrote a break-out novel and the blurb and focus were point for point identical to that of a novel I published two years ago, I reacted by taking screenshots of her twitter feed and tracking when she wrote the book and how long it took her.
It took her a few months to write a break out novel!? and she started writing it right after I’d published a similar book that took me two years to write? hmm. I saw that for the past couple of years, she’d been producing 3 novels per year and I’ve found that people who produce at that pace tend to have some bad habits.
I started investigating prolific authors last year and I’ll add her to my list of people to watch. If you are also watching an author, a good way to catch them is to check out the sorts of books they’ve been reading on Goodreads. This makes searching for copy and paste plagiarism easier.
My investigation is made a bit difficult by her Twitter claim that she beta read 32 unpublished works in the year before she wrote I, Henry, but I still think that this can be sorted out. Many of the most prolific authors today have a tendency to construct their works by copying from others, often verbatim. This particular, young author has been writing three books per year since she started writing just a couple of years ago and she fits that profile.
A strange thing I found is that her Goodreads page is linked to that of another writer – in the US.. Strange. Is this the true identity of the author? Or did Goodreads just glitch on me.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4824952.Zoraida_C_rdova
Did Zoraida Cordova create an English, Twitter sock puppet to make her work more marketable? Is she being used to edit or ghostwrite the work of a blonder, younger, more marketable author? My investigation continues…
Ugh. If literary agents don’t stop this sort of nonsense and if publishers don’t stop this sort of nonsense, who will? Amazon?
Clearly not. If a book is successful, a host of assholes will publish ‘summaries‘ of it and Amazon doesn’t remove them. Maybe they are legal because they do not claim credit for the work.
Then again, do the numbers add up for successful book sales? This book about a girl getting raped in South Carolina sold 6 million copies, yet are people really buying that many books or are publishers using books to launder money? There are 120 million potential readers in the US and I doubt that 5% are reading a single book, even if Reece Witherspoon recommends it. Shoot. Just add a rape and your book will be a success.
I’ve been frustrated with this system for quite a while and I’ve seen no improvement.
What is it about stories that makes us feel so possessive about them? They emerge from the chaos within our memories and we feel a need to pass them on. In the process, we somehow convince ourselves that they came from something unique to us. Nevertheless, the moment that they emerge from our collective blind spot does feel somehow sacred.
Tale as old as time…
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The image in the header was stolen from https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p075hss0/octopus-the-thief-of-the-deep
If you would like to hear this post read aloud with some additional exposition, click on the video below!
Kirsten Hacker 