the great australian plaigiarism scandal

Well, that's interesting. I don't think I buy Mr. Hughes' defense, though.

 

Just ... wow!

From the first link:

If you believe that, could I interest you in a great deal on a bridge in Brooklyn?

 

I couldn't even get through his excuses. His example of something that other authors did has nothing to do with his own copy/paste, and to say that writers recycle stories is true, but he's not being accused of pulling something like West Side Story out of Shakespeare without acknowledgement. And he wasn't referencing, like in The Bridge when Iain Banks' MC tells himself, while driving home one night, not to think about red sharks or white whales (from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), he was just stealing lines of prose that worked well when someone else wrote them.

Nope, utter bullshit.

 

I'll probably write more about this, but the author's opening statement is ridiculous. To defend his instances of almost word for word copy and pasting, he cites this:

Now, I'd say the differences between the two passages are enough to where Marquez's passage is not plagiarism but enters a possible 'homage' territory. At worst, it's debatable whether it is or isn't plagiarism and I'm sure there would be a large percentage that would say it is not plagiarism, equal if not greater than those claiming that it is plagiarism. I'm not sure if there would appear to be more similarities in the original Spanish, but I doubt that would change much.

But that's far from Hughes' many offenses, most of which are similar to this one:

Fitzgerald, from 'The Great Gatsby':

"He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor."

Hughes, from 'Dogs':

"She smiled at me then, one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you might come across once in your life, if you were lucky. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour."

I don't know how anyone can claim these similarities are anywhere close to being comparable to the Marquez/Buendía passage.

Sidenote: My auto spellchecker just gave me a thought inspired by the movie 'Secret Window' (not sure if it's in the book). A crazy novelist begins to stalk Johnny Depp's character for plagiarizing his story, and he yells at him "I don't know what's worse, you stealing my story, or changing the ending!" and I just had an image of Fitzgerald rolling over in his grave yelling "I don't know what's worse, Hughes stealing my work, or changing my words back to that annoying British spelling!"

 

And here's how Isaac Asimov handled some probable inadvertent plagiarism:

 

Mr. Hughes' defense (??) strikes me as more of an admission that he has been plagiarizing for his entire career, and is mightily chagrined that he has finally been caught out.

 

I admire him. He's so inspired that he's inspired on a word-by-word level!

Previously a great Aussie plagiarism scandal was in the horror community. A famous poem had a fresh line written in response to each existing line, so like an abababab arrangement of the original poem and the author's new material. Their intention was to then delete the original lines and see what was left. Only...they forgot. And submitted. And had it published. And...well, drama.