Google = The Ultimate Copy Protection
NEW YORK—A popular romance novelist alleged to have lifted work from other texts acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.
“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Cassie Edwards told The Associated Press, speaking earlier this week from her home in Mattoon, Ill.
Edwards then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.
“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.
Tip: if you’re going to copy from somewhere (like I did with the above from the Boston Globe) it’s probably a good idea to cite that source. Because a pox o’er your head if you don’t. That pox is Google, which knows everything. When somebody reads your work, and then reads something similar that predates your work, it’s over, man. You’ve lost.
I don’t buy the “I didn’t know I had to” defense from Mr. and Mrs. Edwards: successful artists, filmmakers, and writers know full well the intricacies of copyright law. Think your readers would have been dismayed to see a bibliography in the back of your *historical* romance? Cite your sources, come up with your own language: you’re selling a story, not a collection of other people’s work connected by a thin “romance” plot.
Much more on the story at (*sigh*) Smart Bitches Trashy Books
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Tags: Books
