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By Chris Meadows

hegemann There have been a number of cases in recent history of popular books turning out to have passages plagiarized from other books. Each time it happens, there is a nine-day-wonder of the press as readers and critics turn around and crucify the writer in question.

But it appears something else is happening this time. BoingBoing links to a New York Times story about Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old German author who copied some parts of her debut novel from another writer named Airen. But far from trying to hide or being ashamed of it, Hegemann explains that what she was doing was not plagiarism, but remixing.

At first glimpse, this seems to be little more than an excuse, and a fairly threadbare one at that—like a child insisting, “I wasn’t lying, I was just fibbing.” Certainly the commenters at BoingBoing, ordinarily a bastion of remix culture, seem to see it that way. “Crime and misdemeanors are just that,” one anonymous poster scoffs. “You would get thrown out of university for this in Australia. She calls it ‘mixing’? How bout she grows up and learns the phrase ‘mea culpa’.”

But actually looking at the article reveals something a little more interesting going on. For example, the book is a finalist for a $20,000 prize in the Leipzig Book Fair—and one of the prize jurors has said the panel was fully aware of the plagiarism charges before making the selection.

What’s going on here? Taking a closer look, “remixing” is part of the entire theme of the novel. It is set against the backdrop of a German youth culture that celebrates the remix as one of its premier forms of creativity. As Edmond, a character from the book, says, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.” The Times article notes:

A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog. The plot thickens, however, and shows that perhaps more than simple cribbing is at work. When another character asks Edmond if he came up with that line himself, he replies, “I help myself everywhere I find inspiration.”

In short, the book is about remixers, so it is in keeping with that theme that it should be, in part, a remix itself. Unlike those who plagiarize because they cannot think of anything original, Hegemann did so as an intentional form of art—a literary expression of the same form of creativity that caused Jonathan Coulton to mix “When I’m 64” and “25 or 6 to 4” together into “When I’m 25 or 64”.

Certainly, Hegemann is not incapable of original creativity; she has already penned the scripts for a stage play and a movie that have both been popular in Germany—neither of which has been accused of plagiarizing anything else.

Of course, one difference between a musical remix and a more literary version is that nobody will mistake a Chicago or Beatles song for one originally created by Jonathan Coulton. In written literature, it’s not so easy to tell—which is why we have footnotes and citations.

Hegemann apologized for not being more clear in her acknowledgement of the borrowed material, but explained this was because she had not understood the acknowledgement process and it was being fixed in subsequent printings.

“I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me,” Hegemann told the daily Berliner Morgenpost.

Her publisher is seeking an amicable settlement to continue publishing the book.

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick celebrates the literary remix as a new art form, and compares the controversies surrounding it to the same controversies that attended other art forms that have long since become part of our culture. Masnick also notes Amazon’s page shows a lot of people who bought Ms. Hegemann’s book also bought Airen’s lesser-known one.

Plagiarism has long been considered one of the Deadly Sins in writing, as it brings up trust issues: if a writer claims someone else’s work is his own, how can you trust that anything he writes is original? Promising young authors’ careers have been ruined by the discovery of rampant “borrowing” in their work.

Electronic media such as word processors and e-books make this sort of borrowing considerably easier, not to mention tempting—not just in writing books, but also in college term papers and other writing. Entire databases exist for the purpose of checking the originality of college papers.

But that does not seem to be the sort of “borrowing” that has happened in this case, and the fact that the novel is being considered for a $20,000 prize in spite of it is proof of that.

 
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