Why plagiarize where there is no profit?

Are they gaining an audience to a blog or their website by having your works guide people to them through search engines? That’s my best guess @SmashTheState.

Okay, I“M SORRY. But no one draws kittens like you do, @SmashTheState and I was eager for all that adulation which you so richly deserve. Plus “kittens and pignolias” was a killer recipe.

@SpatzieLover Except my work is not exactly… mainstream. I specialize in erotic Lovecraftian psychological horror based on my literary and artistic theory that if a disparate group of people have a sexual fetish which is not physically possible, it indicates the presence of an archetypal manifestation of a powerful subconscious symbol which is otherwise not consciously visible. For example, the giantess fetish is clearly a repressed Oedipal power-accession fantasy using a Gaia earth-mother symbol, allowing me to deconstruct the tropes of their fetish and then reconstruct a story or picture using their erotic symbolism to inject a message directly into the unconscious without any superego editing. The result is a powerful and disturbing piece of art which I can use to disseminate an anti-authoritarian message which would otherwise be stopped by layers of evasion structure.

Do you really think this kind of work would bring in the big numbers to someone’s blog? I could understand if they were appropriating unicorns-and-rainbows or My Little Pony erotic slash fiction, but my work is a little outré.

Hmmm… Whith that knowledge, it certainly would make me ponder why, too.

I have a thought for you. Why not write a character who does this kind of plagiarism and find out why he or she does it through telling their story?

My guess is that the people who do this are probably male, young, with poor social skills. I think they are looking for some kudos from their crowd, who probably inhabit the place where you find the plagiarism. They do it for attention and status. The same reason you do it.

@wundayatta I guess I understand the why. As you say, it’s for attention and status. But I don’t understand the why of the why. That is, why would they want unearned attention and status?

For example, anyone can go out and buy a trophy and have hir name put on it for winning anything sie cares to have inscribed on it. People don’t, because it’s pointless. There’s no joy or thrill in displaying a big trophy which took no skill, talent, or work to get. If someone read my story and told the plagiarist, “Wow, you are an awesome writer,” the person receiving the praise would know it was empty; the praise is for the person who wrote it.

Can you explain what benefit a person derives out of unearned praise in the absence of financial reward?

Yes. I think I have some insight, there, too. FIrst of all, think about a person who actually would buy a trophy and have their name printed on it. They do put in their game room, or wherever. Like people who claim to be on a college team they weren’t on, they get the reflected glory of the achievements of that team.

Your fans are getting the reflected glory. Sure, they didn’t actually do anything to get that glory, but people are giving them the attention, anyway, and that is what matters. They look good. They look better then they otherwise would. Who knows? Maybe they are even getting laid off the stolen praise.

In fact, that could well be what is going on. Guys know that writers can get laid. Especially given the kind of thing you write, I suspect you would be a particular target for plagiarism. It is overtly sexual and that is probably exactly what the people who stole your writing are hoping. Frankly, despite never having read anything you wrote, I would not be surprised if it works.

Since you are a professional, published writer do you think they consider you “The State”?

Why plagiarize at all?

I think it has to do with needing to keep up appearances. Here’s a good article about plagiarism.

This also seems to be pertinent, but I haven’t listened to it yet. There’s a great interview I think Guy Raz did with one of GW Bush’s staffers about his extensive plagiarism, but I can’‘t find it at the moment. The staffer says he is prone to pride, and fell prey to this failing in himself – that he wanted to look like a good writer. He said there was no excuse for his plagiarism, and there was no pressure for him to have “written” the things he did – just that he wanted to look good to others.

Well obviously they like your work and perhaps they do profit. They are presenting this work as their own and gathering any kudos it attracts in that forum. I once had a guy take some short stories I wrote and send them around to people he was trying to impress. One of them had read my work previously and contacted me to let me know it was happening. It seems ridiculous to me but obviously he was enjoying any attention the work brought to him.

As a later author of those works that you brazenly claim as your own, allow me to just indicate my displeasure at the calumny implicit in the question.

While our creations may seem identical on the surface, they are unfathomably distant from one another on the scale of literary merit.

I shouldn’t have to explain this; it was laid out with admirable clarity by Borges in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote:

‘It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.’