On the Immorality of Plagiarism

First of all, there is a simple point to be cleared up before any reasonable discussion on the topic can take place. The culprit, when he/she is not citing ‘precedents’ for their crime, try to exonerate themselves by pleading that they didn’t steal, merely ‘borrowed’. “I didn’t steal m’lud, I only borrowed,” is the sort of statement that gets you laughed out of court and into jail which is why no thief with an IQ of more than three would offer it in his defence. Incredibly though, you will find respected journalists offering it up in defence of the plagiarist. The more highly regarded the thief the more they rally to their defence, pleading that ‘borrowing’ is not theft.

In literature people do borrow, often unconsciously, and cannot help themselves. But if the writer catches himself on in time he is usually quite happy to acknowledge his source or he will surrender his project instantly if the borrowing has any significance and he has enough integrity not to want to put his name to something that wasn’t his in the first place . In any case, he is likely to be honest with himself, and with you.

The plagiarist however is a different animal. He steals consciously. And because he steals consciously he will never acknowledge his source. That is the difference and it is an important one.

The plagiarist will do anything rather than acknowledge his source because he knows, once he does so, he is instantly unmasked as a thief, a liar and a fraud. He spends his days therefore ducking and diving, hiding away, in order to avoid scrutiny. When he speaks in public he recites from pre-prepared answers. If he must be asked questions he demands to know what they are beforehand and the same applies to any footage shot of him for general distribution. He never confesses his crime either. He has ALWAYS to be found out and the more people he has to help him remain under cover the more difficult that is.

In days of yore many English dungeons could boast what they proudly called an “oubliette”. It comes from the French word “oublier” meaning “to forget”. Robin Hood was supposedly held in one before he was freed by his comrades. This contraption - sprung fully formed no doubt from the inventor’s brain – was basically a hole in the ground. The pit was shaped like a bottle with just room enough for the wretched victim to stand up in. You were lowered into the hole via the neck and the lid fixed on. Your captors then pissed off and forgot that you ever existed. There you remained, in cold endless night, until you went mad with grief and terror and eventually died of starvation. People who didn’t like you would say you “deserved” it.

A ’successful’ plagiarist does something like this to his fellow man. The differences are that the victim gets to eat and walk around, and to lead what passes for a normal life; indeed you cannot ever tell he is in a pit at all,  if you do not hear his moans, because the oubliette he has been flung into and in which he dwells is his own soul, the soul that he once believed was his and now belongs to his tormentors. Now you know. And when next you hear the word ‘plagiarism’ you may move away fromt the conception of it as a game on a par with scrabble and think of it as it really is – a crime against all of us, because it is essentially a very serious crime against human rights and human freedom.

The Satanic Windmills of Plagiarism.

Plagiarism. What is its nature? The will to win by possessing is its impetus; a will that cannot climb its selected mountain under its own steam: it needs help; and it forages for that help in the honest labours of another. And if you consider Rousseau’s definition of morality as “self-restraint”  plagiarism is totally redundant in that respect. Whatever it needs it takes. To win at any cost is the motivation and in that there is simply no room for morals, no room for compassion, no room for humanity. To my mind it manifests the heartless soul of imperialism. It must have what it needs irrespective of the cost to others. It is violence. It invades foreign territory at will. It’s primary self-deception is that it already owns what it seeks to possess. Rape therefore is its true nature; the rights of  the defenceless ‘other’ negated absolutely.
                                  The philosophy of the plagiarist  if he/ she can be said to have one is ALL ART IS MADE OF IDEAS. IDEAS BELONG TO US ALL. THERE IS NO COPYRIGHT ON IDEAS. The latter statement is only partly true but the real fallacy lies in the first statement, viz, ALL ART IS MADE OF IDEAS. It is true and it is false all at once. The introjected object is the idea. Reality is subsumed and managed by us under the forms of ideas. But, the creative spirit itself is consciousness, i.e, the subject that experiences. Consciousness is not an object. The eye cannot see its own capacity to see any more than a river can flow backwards to find out  from whence it came. The violence done to the work of another is  violence done to the creative presenter of ideas, violence perpetrated against the subject. It is personal  in other words and cannot be other. Only the victim knows how personal it actually is.

                                 Without the individual presenter the ideas delivered by creative endeavour COULD NOT EXIST  in the particular forms chosen and moulded by the presenter. This is easy enough to understand. You can pilfer the style and method of pictorial representation of a Rembrandt self-portrait for instance on the false premise that the great work is composed of nothing but ideas but you cannot present your finished copy as a portrait of  YOU however radical and imaginative your changes may be if you preserve the actual essential features of Rembrandt’s features, what makes Rembrandt’s portrait unique.  The simulation can never be the truth and the TRUE origin of your facsimile is Rembrandt’s portrait without which yours could not exist. In literature, the definitive statement that Mr. Smith invented certain things is in no way invalidated by digging up ’similiarities’ in books long since forgotten. And if you subscribe to the fact that there are only 36 possible plots available to us in the whole of literature you may take it that your plot, however ingenious, is among them. Theft can never be lawful and this fact of happenstance-similiarity cannot and should not be presented as a defence of it. The fact that an author has invented something without directly copying known precedents should pass as proof positive as to original creation in view of the fact that plagiarism by definition is the exact opposite, i.e,  deliberately and intentionally and without acknowledgement copying directly from known sources in an attempt to claim ‘original creation’ for yourself. It is for the publisher to determine if the level of precedential similarities are acceptable or not or whether the ignorance of the writer in regard to them can be taken on trust. It follows then, as night doth the day, that if a writer is found guilty of plagiarism so too is their publisher and their agent as neither of these can claim professional integrity and total ignorance of existing precedents at one and the same time. For either to cite such precedents in support of their client’s copyright claim to ‘original creation’ is imbecility  at best and skullduggery at worst.

                                 To mask your theft what you have to do is change the form. You have to change it to the extent that nobody can recognize it’s origins. With regards to literature, you can for example steal the character of Hamlet. You can give him black hair instead of blond, make him fat instead of slender, etc, etc, etc but if you have derived your ‘original’  character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet you have changed the true into the false and have tried to pass off your false attempt as your unique creation. What you have taken from Hamlet is what makes Hamlet “Hamlet”, however cleverly you have cleared your tracks.  His essential character must remain intact else your pilfering was in vain. Indeed, a production of Hamlet in Hong Kong could well portray Hamlet with all the aforementioned traits with oriental eyes added as mandatory. But he would still be Hamlet, speaking his lines and acting out his part. Your facsimile may be original in its falseness, especially if you do not dislcose your source, but sooner or later you will have to get rid of your self-delusions and confront the fact that you are no Shakespeare, that Hamlet was never yours to begin with and that there is more to artistic creation that the take-over of original ideas that do not belong to you exclusively as an individual even if they do belong to humanity at large. That is on a par with claiming E=mc ² as your own discovery when you cannot add up your grocery bill without a calculator. The world belongs to us all but no individual is entitled to take possession of it in his/her own name. What compounds your felony to those who have but a minor grasp of dialectics is this often forgotten element in the balance.  The times one lives in calls forth from the imagination the ideal and inevitable  response to those times in art form. Without Napoleon there is no Eroica. The man who, in the honest pursuit of his craft, answers that calling is the true orginator of the work. The one who copies that man’s work and attempts to pass it off as their own is an imposter and a cheat of the lowest possible calibre. In brief; the copy however attractively presented is not the truth and can never be the truth.

“To have been… or not to have been. That is the query.” ( Prince Mc Hamish of Scotland.)

       Plagiarism – The Ransacking of Another’s Soul.

         How to Tweak your Way to Ignominious Glory.

There are many types of plagiarism. It goes on in many disciplines from music to painting, from mathematics to medicine. It goes on from the simple story called “Finding Nemo” to the high-flying speeches of presidents. From lazy little Johnny sneaking a peek at his fellow student’s answers during exams to shysters avid for letters after their names offering theses by forgotten graduates, signatures substituted, in their demand for a doctorate they could never possibly win on their own merits. Proving it is difficult; and if the plagiarism is eminently successful you will need people of the same misfit sociopathy as yourself to fight in your corner.  Of course, the crime is indefensible no matter who is fighting your corner.

                        “Competitive Plagiarism”  is the most obnoxious form of the disease. This is where the malfeasant is motivated by the conviction based on self-inflated notions of his ‘abilities’; “anything you can do I can do better.” Providing of course you show me what and how. Just give me the text and explain to me how you created it bit by bit and ….I will take it from there. Ciao!

                        Salieri who is alleged to have pilfered the work of Amadeus Mozart falls into this category. The predator, in other words, takes the work of the other as  THE GIVEN  on which to stamp their own name and creates nothing by way of novel invention worth a damn. The goal is not in the service of art, not to improve on something pre-existing for the sake of art, assuming one’s talent is commensurate with one’s arrogance,….but to steal. Else one would acknowledge one’s source. In their defense, self-righteous plagiarists (as they all must be) will cite precedents, genres etc, whatever indeed will make the original creator look like a plagiarist himself. The plagiarist’s philosophy if thieves can be said to have one is that “all creators pilfer the ideas of others. I am no different but I can prove I am better at it.” Salieri might well refer to Mozart’s teacher Haydn or Bach to justify his theft. Fact is, Salieri is incapable of writing anything comparable on his own which is why he is driven to plagiarism in the first place, irrespective of whose shoulders Mozart may have stood on to create his own divine music. Apologists for Salieri and his ilk are all over the net. By the same token you will find people in your junk mail telling you you have won a million bucks if you just contact them to pick it up. Salieri is said to have been Mozart’s ‘friend’. Greed hath no friends.

                        Any schoolboy of twelve or over indeed can tell you how to go about your “borrowing” of ideas. For example, there is nothing new in the story of Hamlet. There are precedents in literature that go all the way back to Oedipus about the prince bent out of shape over his mother and her new lover who has usurped his father’s status and kingship. Freud wrote about its prevalence in myth and named the complex after Oedipus. Unaware that there are only 36 plots possible in the whole of literature according to recent findings Shakespeare would derive his plots from history books and other works by Boccaccio, Brooke, Holinshead etc. Ergo, I can pillage the plot of Hamlet with impunity just as Salieri might have pillaged the work of Mozart. There is nothing new in it after all. All I need is the essential tried-and-tested idea. THE MAIN IDEA. I can do with the rest as I will. Once I have that I can pillage the mighty scenes of  the ghost of  Hamlet’s father appearing to him on the battlements, the Mousetrap Play to unmask Claudius, the death and madness of Ophelia, the final showdown and death of the hero in a sword fight etc, etc.

                        Hamlet indeed is a good example because the plot is complex. The cake is rich and from it you can extract all sorts of ingredients if you are that desperate and barren. You keep the style of writing of course and the world of the play, tweaking this and tweaking that, tweaking here and tweaking there, until your little heart is content. “To be or not to be” becomes, under the laser of your ‘genius’ (After all you are now greater than your impudent rival Mr. Shakespeare) …. “To have been or not to have been.”  You blush at your own powers of creativity, at how you have moved the ghost from the battlements to the dungeons; the Mousetrap is renamed the Flytrap; and you positively weep when you fling Ophelia into a lake instead of a brook as the author had intended. It is all soooo you! You see your own reflection in every tweak. Tired of tweaking you may even get ‘professional tweakers’ marshalled  by your so-called ‘literary’ agent to take over for you while you dream of riches and fame and meeting the queen and learn how to pass yourself off as a saint from your PR people. Won’t daddy be proud?

                         Finally, you give your Hamlet black hair instead of blond, make him good with pistols instead of sword, remove him from stupid old Denmark, install him in a castle in Edinburgh and call your concoction “McHamish Prince of Scotland”.  A masterpiece is born! All kneel. You have won at last. People will call you a ‘great’ writer. But people are gullible as your agent, who is firmly on your side (at least until the shit hits the fan) has no doubt counseled you. As for the author you pillaged, in the words of Ophelia – “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown”. You know what you have done of course. And you cannot Un-Know it try as you might.

                        Et Caïn dit « Cet oeil me regarde toujours!  (Victor Hugo “La Conscience”.)

                         Next, in the illustrious company of whoever else has helped you commit your crime you have your story peddled to the publishing houses. Of course that is all just for the gullible. The pre-selected grabs his long-awaited product with both hands and sets about interesting the rest. They smell money in it which is all that concerns them. Their market researchers tell them it is time for just such a story. The world is hungry for your inconsolable hero. Mc Hamish has winner written all over him  and they buy up the copyrights. Trees are felled by the myriad and books shipped everywhere by night and day and, of course, film producers fall over themselves for their take of the ‘universal’ cake. The thing is a smash hit and Disney includes Mc Hamish’s castle in its theme park complete with ghost in the dungeons and the thrilling pistol-duel at the end. By then ,of  course, you have rehearsed your lines for the press; about how ‘inspired’ you were by a great idea that just fell into your lap out of the heavens where you now dwell, how you slaved and toiled into the wee hours giving shape to your masterpiece, how you sacrificed health and well-being in the style of the great Romantics (whose shoes you are not worthy to unlace), to bring forth your masterpiece…. and all the rest of it. Pabulum for the paying public for whom you have as much contempt as for the man you ripped off. Your agent protects you from very dangerous things like questions,unsolicited interviews and unexpected visitors.

                         And if your new-found wealth does not succeed in preventing you from being dragged into court by Shakespeare’s protectors, those messengers of Hugo’s eternal Eye devoted to the integrity of the creative soul of Mankind, your legal hounds can argue that your play is “similar to”  but not really the same. After all, Shakespeare’s ghost was younger, had a beard, didn’t speak in Glaswegian slang, appeared on the battlements for crying out loud not in the dungeons, was a swordsman not a gun-toter, his girl was called Ophelia and there is no connection at all betwen “Ophelia” and Agnes Ofeelme, etc, etc, etc, etc. Your fans have been educated into being appalled at the very notion that your genius that they crave in their sleep to emulate is being called into question. They sing hymns with anxious teachers for your vindication. Middle-class newspapers that serve the interests of those who have been creaming off from your theft rally with all the ruthlessness you deployed to commit it gather in their clubs to defend your innocence. Your agent and political gurus rejoice that they had the foresight to cast you as a saint in the way Maggie Thatcher was cast as a firm but sensitive Head Mistress. Everything is panning out perfectly. You are inviolable…… or so you think, now managing director of the magic theatre whose floors you used to scrub. Who can get at you? But, a large eye follows you to bed at night and in the morning as you draw your curtains it is staring at you from the horizon.

                        Of course, most of us know Hamlet - one of the greatest plays ever written. But we are not really talking about Hamlet per se. Nor Shakespeare for that matter. They are just similes for the sake of argument. It would be damn difficult to rip off Shakespeare without acknowledging him even though most lawyers can easily prove he is dead and a fair few that is is still alive and dines regularly with Elvis in Clapham. The Bard for all that is established forever.

                        But, what if your source is another book by an author that only a few people know about, an obscure writer whose story never quite got the fanfare treatment yours was guaranteed to get even before you began to paste it together?  What if it was a story ahead of its time that was allowed to sink into obscurity like the paintings of El Creco that were only rediscovered centuries after his death? For example, what if the story and the world within it was created by a doting father for his son. What then?

      Et, comme il s’asseyait, il vit dans les cieux mornes
L’oeil à la même place au fond de l’horizon.
Alors il tressaillit en proie au noir frisson.
        Cachez-moi !  cria-t-il; et, le doigt sur la bouche,…..

                        What I have explained by analogy is, as far as I am concerned, how it is done by plagiarists everywhere who are driven by greed and ambition. You need neither flair, nor imagination. You need to know only how to read, photocopy and to write. And, we can all write. Can’t we?

Cover of Li Po

An Interview

with the author of Travels with Li Po.

Interview with William Kelly

(Q) How do you explain the lack of interest in Travels With Li Po and your allegations about it?

(A) There are a number of reasons. First of all, I suspect Rowling’s legal hounds are deterring any interested party from investigating the whole Harry Potter thing. What they are saying to inquirers is designed expressly to stop them in their tracks.That is their job. A Gorilla would stop any man in his tracks just by roaring from a mile away. The Gorilla knows this of course. Likewise, defamation lawyers are usually heard to some affect by good citizens such as editors and journalists who are trying to hold onto their jobs, families and careers. Having the right to threaten with punishment that is backed up by the State gifts them with power over the little man in the street. They are very likely using the apology wrestled out of the Derry News to substantiate their ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ statements, an apology which we repudiate and which should never have been made in the first place and was only made because that paper was faced with extinction if the editor did not cry “enough!” from the power-grip he was under.

Violence takes many forms: just because it is delivered by fax instead of gunfire doesn’t fool anyone who has been targeted by it. Justice itself, of course, is impartial or so we all want to believe. In practice it is anything but, political interests usually holding sway over both reason and a plaintiff’s lawful democratic rights. That apology was to drive us off the pitch by discrediting us. The Bogside Artists were certainly damaged by it, regardless, and for the reason I have just given. Our gullible public bows to all things legal the way savages prostrate themselves before the witchdoctor and for the same reason – out of fear of reprisal by unknown forces. The other reason is that people have been weaned on Harry Potter and “there are none so blind etc….” Sad, but true. Lastly, and most of the responses I have received so far fall into this category. They all say the same thing; “This cannot be true”, we are told, because I took so long to make it public. If truth was determined by that criterion most of the history books in your library, including the gospels, would never have seen the light of day and a man may well feel free to act on the conviction that his wife is a liar because she should have told him sooner that she was pregnant…. but you cannot argue with such people. It is beyond them to imagine a world in which Harry Potter did not exist. I have no difficulty there because I lived in that world and could see all around me the crying need for a role-model for kids that could proffer a palliative for their pain and give insight and validation to their own confused experience of living. That is where the VISION came from. If you think it descended magically on a woman during a train journey who dreamt of becoming a writer…. you need to talk to somebody.

(Q) And the book itself?

(A) Those who get it, get it, because the magic is in the book itself and how it impacts you. That was one of the philosophical premises for writing it in the first place, to clarify for all the guiding principle I cherished then and still do …… that art itself is magic, or a form of it. And I believe you can experience this in Li Po…..if you let it, that is. What I must stress here is that Travels with Li Po was never intended to be anything but the mould from which the series would be cast. I would certainly not have published it in its present state. Its purpose was to showcase the VISION I had without giving too much away. I was dealing in simple ideas and themes that I knew full well could so easily be pilfered.  Li Po is conspicuously a BLUEPRINT of a VISION;  and I stressed  to just about every publisher to whom I sent my customary three chapters and synopsis, that it bore “little resemblance to the finished version.”  We published it as is because we wanted to make that abundantly clear. Its present form is its original form and would not have been its final form. It doesn’t follow, mind you, that I would have purged everything that is already there. The text  would have remained mostly, if not entirely intact, but certain features of it and especially the personality of the hero would have been amplified. That is because what I did and had to do at the time was underplay very significant elements of character and plot and often only hinted at things I intended to elaborate on greatly later once I had been given the green light.

As it transpired, certain people plied me with questions about it because they knew this was the actual BLUEPRINT for a series quite outside their usual experience of children’s stories and they wondered how they could make their own version. Like a bunch of delinquents who have spotted a Golden Eagle glide into their back yard, they just had to snare it. They smelled money in it and very little else and knew damn well that, given the critical approach to society that I intended to take and had already made clear, I would have problems getting into print. And with my central character an Irishman? Place your bets. In the end, they stole the entire VISION, scaffolding, tools, bricks, mortar, the lot.  “And they rejoiced in their wickedness,” as the Bible puts it. If you read Li Po again with all this in mind you might get the magic of it. If you are conditioned with Fugleman Potter you are likely beyond recall. If you care not for the truth you probably have other reasons for reading thus far. Whoever you are, take the advice of a wise old man; – “trust nobody in the publishing industry unless you can get them to sign a contract promising you their organs should you require one!” Even then…………….

Will teaching his writing class.

William Kelly – author of Travels with Li Po.

William, one of  the trio of muralists known as The Bogside Artists and their press officer, has always been interested in writing. “I still write,” says he. “But my faith in the publishing industry and their agents is now zero and I see no reason to change my attitude. A Wilde or a Shaw would be an impossibility these days given the power agents have garnered for themselves  from gloabilisation and the mass marketing it affords. These tin gods manage their charges the way a general manages his tanks not with a view to throwing new light on the human condition but to fill their pockets in the service of a world view that would make a suir rat cringe with shame. Basically, it is every man for himself, to use whatever method comes to hand….. and to the winner the spoils. If that is not the main disease of this world outstripping all other contaminants you care to mention I would like to know what is. And what exactly  this socially accepted ego-serving attitude has to do with the fruitage of the human spirit we call  ‘literature’  beats the hell out of me. Wilde and Shaw, if they were alive,  would have been swiftly and mercilessly ruined by  defamation lawyers  -those guardians of the collectively espoused fiction called ‘character’  -  for exercising their creative freedom in criticizing public figures, a service that they rightly considered the singular most important responsibility of their profession.  The theatre of ancient Athens incidentally not only allowed such criticism  but encouraged it. That means that professional ethics and honest reportage have been swept aside and made redundant in the face of the Gadarene rush for profits. Culture, as we know it, is banjaxed you could say. What Marx called the “falsification of consciousness” rules in exactly the same way as aggressively repetitive brainwashing strives to perpetuate  itself as  ’music’. The sacred has disappeared from the fine arts and truth, for want of a better word, from popular creative fiction. There is no money in truth any more than there is money in good health. Society maintains its necessary quota of sick citizens by keeping them hoodwinked, brainwashed and misinformed.  Travels with Li Po was my humble attemtp to bring all this to the intelligence of the young. Many writers these days don’t even write to be read by the average Joe  but specifically by movie executives who are to  juvenile sex-driven plots and gratuitous action-scenes what pigs are to  truffles.  They pilfer and eploit the collective memory, rehashing the same old stuff over and over in ever more devious forms of disguise, with about as much conscience as a fox in a chicken coop. Posterity, at any rate, will find it a whole lot easier to sift the wheat from the chaff because the chaff is everywhere.  My autobiography is about the only literary endeavour that interests me at present. What I have to say about writing, art, philos0phy  and the craziness of the world I was born into, will be expressed there.