If you're going to infringe someone's copyright, choose more wisely

February 19, 2019 7:10 AM

Courtney Milan -- aka Heidi Bond, former professor of Intellectual Property Law and first accuser of Alex Kozinski -- has uncovered another "author" plagiarizing from one of her books. I use "author" loosely, because Christiane Serruya's defence is that the Fiverr ghostwriter she hired to actually write her books did the copying.
posted by jacquilynne (40 comments total)

Heh. The post title pretty much says it all, save for the chuckle I got reading Serruya's "defence".
posted by gusottertrout at 7:25 AM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is actually reminding me of something I could have sworn would have been covered in another FPP, but to my great surprise doesn't look like it was -

A team of romance novel fans discovered that one romance novelist plagiarized from many and varied sources for her works - including quoting entire sections from an article about black-footed ferrets in her characters' post-coital pillow talk.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:47 AM on February 19, 2019 [7 favorites]

I love the Duchess War, in part because it is so emotionally real and raw. It’s perhaps the worst book to plagiarize - it’s so recognizable. I hope Courtney Milan rips her up one side and down the other.
posted by corb at 8:06 AM on February 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

Dang, this took me quickly through the five stages of grief regarding bad acts on the internet, from denial ("no way anyone could be foolish enough to steal from one of my favorite romance authors who happens to be a former IP law instructor!") to anger ("she's blaming it on Fiverr ghost-writing???") to bargaining ("...okay, hopefully she's the rare plagiarism unicorn who didn't steal from others") to depression ("gdi") to acceptance ("welp").
posted by sgranade at 8:24 AM on February 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

While I know ghostwriters are a real/legit thing, gig economy, etc. - my evil side is mwahahaha'ing mightily.

Best not miss, as they say.
posted by cage and aquarium at 8:25 AM on February 19, 2019

I read a ways down in the #copypastcris tag this morning, and she's also stolen from Tessa Dare and another romance novelist as well. It's not a good look.

Romance writers are well-connected to one another, and tend to be pretty frelling smart. As are many of their readers! One would do better stealing from some obscure literary novel than something by Courtney Frelling Milan.
posted by suelac at 8:29 AM on February 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

The "black-footed ferret" plagiarist is Cassie Edwards, who wrote a lot of very problematic "native American" romances
posted by librosegretti at 8:46 AM on February 19, 2019

My main memory of the black-footed-ferret plagiarism reveal was how delightfully bemused the field scientist whose article got plagiarized from was, as romance fandom pledged money to whatever non-profit he was working for in support of the endangered ferret, not to mention calls for field-scientist-romance-heroes in his honor.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:19 AM on February 19, 2019 [18 favorites]

Here's Ferret Guy's first-hand account of the experience, which made me laugh this morning when a friend sent it to me. I'm new to the romance world and so had missed this completely at the time.

I've been glued to this new situation unfolding on Twitter this morning, and have just been shrieking all morning with friends about the ghostwriter from Fiverr. Which is barely more acceptable than "an actual ghost put that plagiarism there!" as an excuse.
posted by Stacey at 9:24 AM on February 19, 2019 [12 favorites]

Now Lynne Graham too.
posted by suelac at 9:46 AM on February 19, 2019

My favourite part is the tweet where she declares she's going to prove her innocence. Her innocence of plagiarism, for which her defence is that she didn't actually write her books at all.

"Your honour, I know the witnesses saw me punching that guy, but I'm not guilty of assault, because I shot him to death yesterday."
posted by jacquilynne at 9:51 AM on February 19, 2019 [10 favorites]

My writings have been plagiarized a considerable number of times over the years. Most recently and egregiously, the offender's sequence of excuses went thus, and previous cases have unfolded similarly:

1. We didn't do it!
2. Okay, my researchers/writers did it. Sorry they are terrible.
3. Okay, I did it. Sorry that I merely forgot to mention that you wrote it instead of me.
4. Okay, omitting credit implies that I wrote it myself. Sorry that you don't realize that non-fiction is not copyrightable.
5. Okay, non-fiction can be copyrighted. Sorry that you don't understand that it is Fair Use for me to steal content verbatim from you, a direct competitor with a much smaller audience.
6. Okay, I'll delete the offending articles/podcasts/etc. Sorry that you don't understand how the Internet is the "wild west" of copyright where it's totally fine to take others' work without credit. I'm just deleting these as a favor to you.

Blaming it on the ghost writer seems aligned with phase 2 of the standard plagiarists' non-apology.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:26 AM on February 19, 2019 [26 favorites]

You can hire a ghost writer for 5 bucks?
posted by srboisvert at 11:22 AM on February 19, 2019

same as in town
posted by lalochezia at 11:39 AM on February 19, 2019 [11 favorites]

On the romance boards I frequent, opinion seems to be split between those who don't use ghostwriters ("haha, hoist by her own petard!") and those who do ("yeah, you gotta watch out for fiverr, they're always plagiarizing").

The ghostwriting itself isn't surprising; romance is a vast and voracious market, and writers do what they can to put out more books more quickly. If you've got the money to put into it, you can easily buy a plot from one provider, send it over to a ghost to have your book written, send that over to your editor, and then it's out the door without you looking too hard at it. It's hard to sit around plugging away at your own books that you made up all by yourself, and watch as someone else publishes five times faster than you; getting a ghostwriter to do the heavy lifting is awfully tempting.

It just amazes me that someone would do this (assuming her version of events is honest) and not check the work for plagiarism, considering how frequently these scandals happen.
posted by mittens at 11:58 AM on February 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don't know why I'm surprised that romance "authors" use ghostwriters, but as a huge romance reader, I find that pretty distressing, tbh. I'd like to assume it's mostly shitty Kindle Unlimited / Kindle Direct bullshit, but that's probably naively optimistic of me.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:04 PM on February 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

You can hire a ghost writer for 5 bucks?

Fiverr was originally a site where workers could sell a service for $5, but they lifted the price cap to become a general freelance marketplace when people started to point out that $5 was way too little for most of the services workers were offering. The plagiarist ghost writer (assuming they exist) was hired on Fiverr, but probably was paid more than a fiver.
posted by skymt at 12:13 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

And now Loretta Chase.
posted by suelac at 12:15 PM on February 19, 2019

Re: the several “And now..’s” in the thread.

That’s the problem with broadcasting news of crimes like this — all the copycats come out of the woodwork.

/I’ve already shown myself out.
posted by notyou at 1:26 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

While I know ghostwriters are a real/legit thing

Real yes, legit no.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:30 PM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Ghostwriters make a lot of sense for me in a bunch of fields of non-fiction, and I sort of get it for James Patterson or VC Andrews or whatever, but for your indie romance? (Though I can see one about the author and the ghostwriter who fall in love etc.)
posted by jeather at 2:08 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, two ghostwriters have gone to Courtney Milan and said they were given a bunch of half-written scenes that needed "expanding", and the current assumption is that she gave the plagiarised scenes to the ghostwriters and hoped they'd edit the plagiarism away.
posted by jeather at 2:56 PM on February 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

Politics: "An intern tweeted this on my account without my knowledge."

Indie publishing: "I didn't know, I just hired a guy off Fiverr."

It happens with every scammy scandal in indie publishing: Book-stuffing and click-farming for Kindle Unlimited, bogus reviews, bogus packaging. Again and again, it's "I just hired someone off Fiverr." They're hardly the only bad actor in the field, but at this point casting the blame on them is hardly an excuse. It's just another way of showing your ass.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 4:50 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

If your name's on the copyright, it's your problem.

So, yeah, blaming the help ain't gonna cut it.
posted by jscalzi at 6:42 PM on February 19, 2019 [8 favorites]

Yeah, I'm afraid if you put your name on it, you gotta take responsibility for it. Even if someone else plagiarized it.

I took a class at a community college and halfway through the course realized that the powerpoint slides we were being shown were not written by the presenter. I started googling the phrases and found out that the *entire* course was plagiarized. I didn't pay close attention the rest of the course because I was pissed off I was being given stolen content. I told my classmates about it, but didn't confront the teacher. Until the final exam; as she handed my exam I told her that I wasn't happy that the slides she was presenting were taken from countless unattributed sources on the internet. She seemed nonplussed and explained that she had been handed the slides by the previous instructor, and wasn't responsible for them.

The kicker: she was a professional photographer (ie: in the business of creating intellectual property). While all the words were stolen, the photographs she used were actually hers.

I'm still pissed off about it.
posted by el io at 7:01 PM on February 19, 2019

Looks like Serruya has deleted her twitter? (I'm not on twitter myself, not sure if the 'Sorry, that page doesn't exist' page means she's deleted or just turned it private.)
posted by oh yeah! at 8:55 PM on February 19, 2019

I saw this on Twitter yesterday, but I was in before "it was my ghostwriter." It's Trumpian chutzpah, whoever is guilty.

This reminds me of when I received an editing project from a publisher I did freelance work for about a decade ago. I edited actual pages rather than on a computer, and this project came in a box about two feet high. It was about everyone who had been anyone associated with a particular globally known entertainment corporation (think: mouse). About four inches into the forest, I was having trouble making out some of what had been written, so I did some fact checking. It wasn't long before I was seeing the same Wikipedia and personal blog entries on my screen that I was supposed to edit on paper. I called shenanigans, and the project came to a screeching halt. The purported author was Spanish, and he blamed the person he hired as his translator. Could be, but it was well above my pay grade to ever know for sure. Needless to say, that one never saw print.
posted by bryon at 9:51 PM on February 19, 2019

This is not my field, but I read some of this this morning and it was something.
There were people, if I'm remembering right, who claimed to have found over a dozen sources and nearly every phrase stolen.
posted by bongo_x at 2:30 AM on February 20, 2019

I don't understand plagiarism, to the point where I almost feel skeptical of it. Obviously it's difficult to deny when it's right there in black-and-white, side-by-side comparison—but I just don't get it. It seems like it would be a ton of work to go through dozens of books, pull out elements and phrases that you like, then cobble them together into any kind of coherence. Why bother? Maybe writing original content is harder, but it's not like you're cheating your way to Beyoncé-level fame and fortune.

It's a little like robbing a liquor store; I'm immediately skeptical that the culprit had some kind of addiction or other medical condition, because why take that risk for a couple hundred bucks? If you think you've got a fifty-fifty shot at successfully taking down Fort Knox, then okay, I can see the temptation; but "mildly successful romance writer" doesn't seem like life's brass ring.
posted by cribcage at 8:14 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't understand plagiarism, to the point where I almost feel skeptical of it.

Consider the fact that people plagiarize fanfiction, a hobby where the only thing you gain is that people say nice things to you! And yet it's absolutely endemic. I used to follow an LJ that had as its mission to name and shame fic plagiarists, many of whom just found a popular story from another fandom and copy-and-pasted the names of their protagonists -- without changing anything else! It often led to nonsensical characterizations.
posted by suelac at 9:01 AM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

I can see the temptation; but "mildly successful romance writer" doesn't seem like life's brass ring.

I think for a lot of people, the idea of being a published author very attractive, even if it isn't the path to fame and fortune.

And the idea of being an author is a lot more attractive than the work of being a writer. And they're convinced they can write, right up until they realize they can't write that well. This is especially true in the romance genre, where some of the standards and tropes make people think 'Oh, I could do that'.

But it's actually a lot harder than it looks.

So, part of it is that they think they want this, that they can do this, and when they can't quite do it, they think, it's okay -- I'm not really hiring someone else to write this book, I'm just getting a little help along the way. People can rationalize a lot if there's something they really want, like being able to tell people they are a published author.

And in this case, I don't believe the "author" is a native English-speaker. Her bio says she's Brazilian and while she is clearly quite fluent in English, the grammar in her tweets is not always quite the grammar of a native speaker. Which means that when she tried to write books in English, she ran into not only the general difficulties of writing, but the difficulties of writing in her second language.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:39 AM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

I can see the temptation; but "mildly successful romance writer" doesn't seem like life's brass ring.

Romance is one of the biggest portions of publishing as a field. It has a huge audience share. It's kind of hard to stress how important the romance audience is from the perspective of publishing as a business. Given the size of that audience, being a "mild success" can mean a big deal for an individual person.

Also, I haven't seen any reference to a traditional publisher here. It's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around how plagiarism like this could slip by a professional editor at a traditional house, given the authors and books she stole from aren't exactly obscure. So if she's self-publishing, the money factor could be even more significant. Whether you're trad pub or indie, a flop is a flop and a hit is a hit, but in that wide spectrum of "mid-list success," the money you can get in self-publishing can be pretty damn good.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:39 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I don't know how much money this woman could be making, but I have some friends online who share an author name for what is basically fetish erotica, which they self-publish on Amazon at frequent intervals (too frequent for one writer). They do pretty well, all-told.

One of them, in fact, put herself through grad school by self-publishing erotica on Amazon. You can do well, if you can write fast and reasonably well, and cater to the market the right way.
posted by suelac at 1:00 PM on February 20, 2019

It's kind of hard to stress how important the romance audience is from the perspective of publishing as a business. Given the size of that audience, being a "mild success" can mean a big deal for an individual person.

From what I understand, self-published romance is also very much a volume business. That’s why I never really pursued it. You need to produce new content on a regular schedule in order to become and remain successful – not to mention all the work of promoting that content in order to attract readers – and the pace is probably pretty rough to maintain over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if this woman started out writing her own stuff and then gradually started plagiarizing and/or farming out work when it became clear she couldn’t keep up with the pace and still make a good profit.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:11 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

A list of all the copied books so far, with links to buy them.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:18 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

jeather: " I sort of get it for James Patterson or VC Andrews or whatever"

In Andrews's defense, she's been dead for 32 years.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:40 AM on February 21, 2019

Nora Roberts has a compelling blog post about this, her own experiences with a plagiarist, and how this experience hurts authors.
posted by gauche at 9:52 AM on February 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Huh, I don't think I realized the extent of the Nora Roberts / Janet Dailey situation. They are both incredibly famous and prolific authors within the genre. It would be like Patricia Cornwall suddenly deciding to plagiarize Kathy Reichs.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:48 AM on February 22, 2019

Nora Roberts wrote a second blog post. It's impressive.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 10:59 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Late capitalism has a lot of interesting consequences...
posted by suelac at 1:42 PM on February 23, 2019