How Much Can You Legally "Borrow"?
December 20, 2006

Several years ago, Natasha Alden, a research student at Oxford, noticed similarities between an autobiography she was studying and a popular novel she had just read.

The memoir was No Time for Romance, written by Lucilla Andrews, a best-selling romance novelist. The novel was Ian McEwan's best-selling 2001 novel Atonement.

Now that Atonement the movie is about to come out, these similarities are in the news. Two prominent British newspapers, The Mail on Sunday and The Times of London, have published stories with excerpts of the questionable texts.

In response to the uproar, McEwan wrote a lengthy article in The Guardian, admitting he used No Time for Romance for details of nursing and hospital conditions in Britain at the time his story was set. "I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author's note at the end of Atonement and ever since on public platforms, where questions on research are almost as frequent as 'where do you get your ideas from?'"

In a phone interview with a New York Times reporter, McEwan vigorously denied that he copied any of Andrews' language. Yet the published excerpts show close similarities. For example ...

From Atonement: "In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise."

From No Time for Romance: "Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains."

What are we to think of this? What do the professionals say?

I'm going to ask Matt Turner, Agora's in-house counsel, to write something up about this for tomorrow's issue of ETR. Meanwhile, here's what I've got ...

Erica Wagner, the literary editor for the Times of London, told the NYT that the idea that this is copying "is not a valid complaint at all."

Andrews herself seemed to have a similar opinion. When the similarities were pointed out to her in 2004, a year before her death, she said, "I don't give a damn."

A spokesperson for the Romantic Novelists Association, which awarded Andrews a lifetime achievement award last summer, said: "Although I can say that the nature of the borrowings is a bit startling, the overall impact of McEwan's novel and Lucilla's autobiography is very different." She described the accusation of plagiarism as "nonsense."

So it looks like McEwan is innocent of the plagiarism charges, even as far as the potential victim was concerned. And yet he's had to fight for his reputation.

As a working writer, it is easy for me to understand how McEwan's language is so close to Andrews. When you are writing and reading pretty much simultaneously, it's not infrequent to have a phrase come into your head that you think is original but is, in fact, a product of memory.

If there is one thing memory studies show, it is how frequently we forget and how imperfectly we remember. It's easy for me to imagine that McEwan, in using Andrews' book for details, partially replicated phrasing while attempting to reword it entirely.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that you have to be very careful about how you integrate research material into your writing. Although the borrowing may be minor or even irrelevant, the accusation of copying carries with it a severe social penalty.

What McEwan did was nothing close to copying, yet the scandal still got him into hot water. In the world of non-fiction, as we've seen repeatedly in the past few years, getting nabbed for stealing copy can bring with it a literary death sentence.

The stakes are high, even for minor offenses. And the chances of being "caught" are exponentially greater now that everything is input into computers. It's only a matter of time until there will be groups out there in cyberspace, literary fan clubs or legal snoops, who will be digitally comparing texts for the specific purpose of identifying plagiarism and making news and/or money from it. In fact, with the Copyscape website, you can actually find out if pages on your website are being used elsewhere on the Web.

The moral here? It is probably worth it to put the extra time into your writing to keep your wording unique and make all the acknowledgments you need to.

Read this post in Early To Rise

posted by M. Masterson @ 3:33 PM,

4 Comments:

At 6:35 AM, Anonymous Alice Flanders said...

I have been wondering about the legality of what can be published. I do a lot of reading. I have discovered NOTHING on my own, but have learned a lot from various sources. If I publish ANYTHING, I would be using ideas that came from other people. So do I wait till I have discovered something new on my own? thanks, alice

 
At 11:44 AM, Anonymous Jacquelyn said...

Alice,

You can print other people's ideas, but the wording must be your own (you can summarize or extrapolate or simply rephrase), and you must give credit to the source of the idea.

 
At 7:55 PM, Anonymous DGB said...

MM wrote, "What McEwan did was nothing close to copying". Pardon me. Three concepts in exactly the same order should not be considered copying? As well, a good thesaurus could have given him an alternative to "dab". He could have "dabbled" with the ideas and tweaked them till they at least were ordered differently. Maybe Andrews didn't give a damn but it's still looks like copying to me and obviously to a few others. I'm going to add MM's advice to my writing journal, "It is probably worth it to put the extra time into your writing to keep your wording unique and make all the acknowledgments you need to."

 
At 11:45 AM, Anonymous Jeff B said...

For a very smart, legally-based interpretation, see "Plagiarism and 'Atonement'" by Eugene Volokh published in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 12 (available to subscribers on wsj.com).

For nonsubscribers, his points are (and I am paraphrasing!): (1) McEwan acknowledged he was "indebted" to Andrews in the text of the book; (2) while such things always can be more prominent, McEwan's literary form (the novel) does not require extensive footnotes; (3) words that describe facts are in the public domain; without that, we could never say "the sun rises in the east" because someone else must have said that first and deserves credit.

Judge the article for yourself on wsj.com

 

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