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Contents 1 history or gossip? 2 style changes 3 Laptopgate 4 Quick spelling note... 5 General Observations 6 8th on New York Times bestseller list? 7 Removal of entire section on plagiarism 8 Working towards NPOV 9 Alleged plagiarism

[edit] history or gossip?

Hi, I'm new to this wiki so I'm still exploring. One thing I noticed was that the section on Continuing adventures of Cassandra Clare's plagiarism seems more like gossip than history, My reasons for thinkng this are as follows: a) it's very recent b) it's speculation that does not appear to be backed up by the text c) it's an opinion that has been (thus far) discussed and circulated among a limited audience. I'm sure there are any number of comments/criticisms of Cassie Claire but documenting all of them would be a herculean task. Is this particular one worth of inclusion on a fannish history project? --Secretrebel 17:25, 29 June 2006 (CDT)

Ummm. Blah. I saw it on Clairvoyant_Wank. Hence I editted in. It is arguable whether it is plagiarism or not and other older examples could probably be culled from various sources. I just was unsure what to add to what. I think the actions, rise and fall of Cassandra Claire in the context of the Harry Potter fandom are very important in terms of understanding that. And when her book goes to publish, well, the level of nastiness seems like it will reach epic proportions. It sure be more unbiased and it should better match with the related post on Heidi Tandy. *babbles* So yeah. I'm not quite certain where that page is going. Most other fandoms don't have people that influential or well documented. (Paula Smith and Diane Marchant really need huge fleshing out in terms of what is in there but I've been working on moving content.)

I'd half like the full original quotes to be included to give better context to why there is that bitterness. I half don't because of the bitterness that is and will go down. I'm thus probably going to be rather free with how it is edited, and let some of the Harry Potter pages go the way people edit them as they know more than I do.

Er. Yes. Hopefully, there is some logic there.

--Laura 18:05, 29 June 2006 (CDT)

(I replaced your blockquote with colon levels, which are more conventional on wiki talk pages. Also I wasn't sure how to reply to a blockquote without using weird levels of multi blockquoting. Hope that's okay.)

I think the Clairvoyant wank citing makes my point more effectively than I could myself. It's a prospective area of contention. I think there's enough material on CC generally without being too obsessive about minor bits of wank/snark. Minor in the sense that they do not reach/engage a wide audience. In fact I'd steer clear of too much detail in any issue that's occured within the past six months. To gain 'historical significance' time needs to pass. Adding citations/references to wiki pages makes sense because it might be more difficult to find them later but assessing the impact of an event to fandom can only be done over time.

I'm not even sure that Heidi8 is significant enough to fandom to need her own wiki page. She's significant to CC - but not especially to Harry Potter fandom, and certainly not to fandom as a whole. --Secretrebel 18:23, 29 June 2006 (CDT)

Fixing the formatting is fine. I was having brain lapse in remembering how to do that.

As for Heidi, my understanding of her importance is either as a SMOF and the person who is charged with protecting Cassandra Claire's legacy. With out her, you don't have FictionAlley. With out her, you don't have CharityGate and LapTopGate. You also don't have many of the CC defenders as Heidi set off parts of the original wankfest over that with her legalisms and justifications. She was the one who spearheaded the conventions. That's why she's signifigant to me. I'm also not necessarily adverse to mentioning people who aren't important. There are whole slews of people pages who aren't that well... important. The rational for that is that by putting that out there, it helps to offer a broader perspective culturally as to what was going on in the fan fiction community. That's probably more of a women's studies, Focault approach to history. It is one that I tend to go with because a lot of past movements are hard to see unless you know what others were doing. --Laura 18:45, 29 June 2006 (CDT)

[edit] style changes

I rewrote the beginning of the Cassandra Claire plagiarism section, because I found it very poorly worded. Since this page is one of the first to come up during a Google search for "Cassandra Clare," I think it would be worth rewriting this section entirely so that it is clearer to those who are new to the issue.

[edit] Laptopgate

Was that 2005? I thought that was 2004? Because it is on the timeline of 2004? --Partly_Bouncy 16:20, 18 August 2006 (CDT)

Whoopsy. I changed it from 2006 to 2005, but you're right-- it's 2004. -- Avocado 16:26, 18 August 2006 (CDT)

When you fixed it, I realized I had screwed up the date. Sources were right but date off. Stupid moment. And I've been known to cite things and screw up dates so I wanted to be sure. :) --Partly_Bouncy 16:30, 18 August 2006 (CDT)

[edit] Quick spelling note...

On May 6, 2002, Cassandra Claire opened a CafePress store to hawk merchandise based on the Very Secret Diaries. [16] How much money she made from the store is unclear as the finicial information is unclear.

Finicial should be financial.

Sorry, just caught my eye.

Fixed. --Partly_Bouncy 08:16, 20 August 2006 (CDT)

[edit] General Observations

I have to comment here that whoever has taken pains to compile this information has made an attempt to be very thorough. This is one of the first accounts I have come across on this issue. However, as a reader of Cassandra Claire (one who sometimes finds her quotes to be a bit cumbersome and not always as humerous as her original writing), I have to point out that this account still seems a little one-sided. The writer(s)[?] of this extensive article claim that she has made no comment or attempt to respond or adequately explain these quotations--but have, though somewhat de-contextually--provided plenty of quotation from Claire on the subject. As an English lit person, I've been working with citation for years now, and am glad that people are concerned with this issue--I think it is important. I was less impressed with the nifty graphs and tables (I confess I'm unsure what the "inner circle" graphs are supposed to be demonstrating, perhaps an elaborate conspiracy theory?) than I was with the issue of her citations, which I think improved once it became an issue. Her citation for chapter 9 needed to be cleared up. But if her citations (as suggested by this article) were always insufficient prior to the plagiarism event noticed by chapter 9 of Draco Sinister, then why didn't Fiction Alley express greater concern beforehand? As a reader, I supposed the kind of disclaimers and credits she had supplied in Draco Dormiens and the previous 8 chapters of Sinister were acceptable to Fiction Alley all along.

I have to say that I disagree with the portion of the article discussing the inconstency of Claire's responses to the Ipod event--her responses actually seemed extremely consistent. Some other thoughts on this and related issues: Is it unusual for those of us who write things like blogs and livejournals to post things like "how come everyone else has an Ipod?" without necessarily intending to solicite it from our readers? I agree that it is too bad if the results of the money for the laptops was not made public and accounted for, and would have liked for it to have been so. I am not sure exactly how problematic it was for individuals who create artwork based on the characters of Claire's story being availiable for purchase; I suppose since Rowling (or Tolkien) owns the original characters this can be an iffy situation, especially if Claire is getting money from it. However, artwork is created based on many sources owned by authors, artists, etc., and borrowed, and borrowed again, and frequently sold as reproductions or similar products--and with this understanding I remain uncertain to what degree that Claire or an artist selling work based on various forms of reproduction of these works is necessarily unethical or being handled in that fashion, as it is very definitely implied in this article. I think this requires further discussion. I also think there is nothing wrong with telling people they are welcome to donate to a specific charity instead of giving money directly to the people requesting donations. Again, I think this requires further discussion. I should also state, regarding the 'Mortal Instruments' portion, that many doctoral dissertations (officially published and not) are later expanded and to varying degrees re-written later for book publication, as are book introductions (take, as an example, Edward Said's intro to Kipling's 'Kim', which appears nearly verbatim as part of a chapter in his later 'Culture and Imperialism'), and other works prepared for publication. L.M. Montgomery wrote several short stories which later turn up in the plots of her novels. As a last aside, I notice that under "Donations" on the side panel for this article/site, we are directed to a convenient Paypal button. Out of curiousity, are the donations given here made transparent for the curious readers? Thank you for providing the opportunity to respond.

Nan Solomon

Nan, I think the key words to your first issue are "adequately explain". Yes, there are a lot of quotes from Claire because she has said a lot on the subject, despite that, it really hasn't been addressed completely. The FA article might give you some idea why they wouldn't be too strict on anything Claire did.

Making profit from artwork (or anything) based on someone else's work is copyright infringement. I'm not sure why this would seem otherwise to anyone, and I don't know how much further it can be discussed considering it isn't legal.

Regarding the Mortal Instruments self-plagiarism, I'm not really sure what your point is. Other people do it so it's not really self-plagiarism? I'm not sold on the concept of self-plagiarism, but I think where Cassandra Claire is concerned - considering her history for plagiarism - it's relevant for that section to be included. Grimwood 04:11, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

And there are other sources for this that confirm that the plagiarism was far more obvious than the examples given (which I think have been edited to make them look less plagiaristic - many sections of the original plagiarism as found on journalfen are almost word-for-word). --68.144.100.111 21:32, 13 October 2007 (CDT)

[edit] 8th on New York Times bestseller list?

Is there a source to verify this claim? Grimwood 03:48, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

[edit] Removal of entire section on plagiarism

Someone removed all of the text about plagiarism a couple of weeks ago. I attempted to revert this text to the last version Laura edited, by c&ping from her earlier version. This didn't entirely work.

Could someone who knows more about wikis revert this properly? Thanks.

I have stumbled upon this site and will confess my own ignorance to the full situation. I was however, a bit disturbed with the amount of bitterness and bias that seems to be written into an article that appears to be an attempt at a reference source. I understand the problems with plagiarism and why that is a serious issue, but some of the issues raised about CC adding quotes in from other sources seems a bit negligible. Some authors have used a technique like this to encode their own commentary on society into their works. An example of this is the Austrian post-WWII writer Ingeborg Bachmann. This idea of a "spot the quotes game" sounds very similar to something that accomplished Bachmann scholars become proficient at doing: spotting references and in some cases, rewordings of other authors, which leads to a deeper and sometimes radically different understanding of a section of her writing. The main difference here of course, is that CC is not receiving payment for her fan fiction, she is writing it out of her own enjoyment, unlike Bachmann who was published and highly acclaimed. I am of course not speaking of CC's published works in this statement. But that is neither here nor there. My main concern is that if this is an attempt to write a informative source about certain issues with this author, its bias is disappointing and misleading. -Miranda

I think that fandom in general is very concerned with theft of intellectual propert, or at least the idea of it. The fanfiction authors who I'm familiar with don't want fanfiction to be considered theft, and therefore are careful about giving proper credit where credit is due. Therefore I don't see a bias - Draco series is just fanfiction (and therefore not for profit), but taking quotes and plot ideas for other sources is still plagarism. -Jae, 6/6/07

Lots of babbling forthwith so please bear with me...

Plagiarism is one of those icky things. There have been professional authors who have equated fan fiction with plagiarism. It isn't. (Arguably, I would think that fan fiction is derivative which means it should be indepdently copyrightable... which means not plagiarism. But that gets in to the whole debate on the legality of fan fiction. And not what this is about.) Plagiarism has long been one of the hot button issues in fandom. Historically, it has NOT been tolerated. When people have been found guilty of it, fandom generally puts the smack down on it and hard. (Which is incidentally a mild concern of mine as at least one article here I wrote for Wikipedia and a lot of content was moved from Writers University and FanWorks.Org and my other writings posted to my LiveJournal. Again, seperate digression.) It isn't biased to call some one on it. It isn't biased to have examples. It clearly explains the position. In a historical context, credit is given where credit is due. Disclaimers have long been used in fandom. (I can think of disclaimers dating back to the 1970s.) Quotes have been cited. Authorship has been clear. Those issues are changing now. It makes it even more important that these things be documented so we can measure the changes in attitudes and events which demonstrate them. But the citations on the article I think are pretty reliable and not biased. If some one wants to take an attempt to remove the bias, then by all means they can. I unlocked those pages for just that reason. (They were all locked up at one point because of vandalism concerns.) --Partly_Bouncy 08:17, 7 June 2007 (CDT)

[edit] Working towards NPOV

I am currently working on making this article more Neutral Point of View. This is not a one-time-only process and will take time. Additional sources of information, suggestions or otherwise are welcome. Feel free to contact me either here on the wiki, or through any of the contacts listed on my User page. Thanks. SLWatson 13:27, 25 April 2008 (EDT)

I'm wondering about the stuff that's from Bad Penny. On the one hand, I can understand wanting the site to be comprehensive and have everything possible on it, but on the other, this page is full of amazing blocks of text. Would it be acceptable to take out the "story" of the plagiarism - leaving the details of which works she took from - say See Avocado, and provide proper summaries foreach chapter of that work on her page? It seems to me that the vast bulk of the grunt work on that was done by her for Bad Penny, and is up there in a much more readable format. /Or/ - perhaps a better or more acceptable solution - have separate pages for LaptopGate, CharityWank, Plagiarism, etc. I don't remember how much of those were covered on Bad Penny, though, so perhaps they would also benefit from linking and summaries. --Principessa 07:24, 1 May 2008 (EDT)

I think you have a point about maybe breaking up this page and making better use of sub-pages. I think that the actual information should be kept in-wiki (because I'm one of those people who're all paranoid about information-loss due to servers going down or something, and love backups), but maybe not presented right on this main page here, just linked to subpages. So, I'm for breaking up the different 'bad laundry' stuff into their own pages. If you have something I can do to help that doesn't require fandom knowledge, or intimate knowledge of this whole mess, I'll help where I can. Formatting or whatnot. SLWatson 12:18, 2 May 2008 (EDT)

It's such a grueling task that my mind can't properly comprehend it. D: I think it's just going to come down to rereading the relevant Bad Penny reports again and consolidating the information, unfortunately, and I can get a start on it soon. --Principessa 13:04, 3 May 2008 (EDT)

I have a piece I wrote for BP which was really badly done and would need to be fact checked that if you want, e-mail me at laura at fanhistory.com and I can send. There are also some CC timelines. (It would be nice to be able to redirect them or delete them.) They might be able to help. I just have a neutral POV problem in that I'm too close to it to be able to do it. And seriously, you have my many thanks for fixing things up. If you're ever in the Chicago area (or in San Fransisco next weekend.), I owe you lunch. :) --Laura 14:03, 3 May 2008 (EDT)

Thanks! So far I've considerably shortened StalkerGate and the Plagiarism on her main page, and created Cassandra Claire's Plagiarism with pretty much what was on Cassandra Claire. I'm going to do what I did for StalkerGate for LaptopGate and I've just written up CharityWank. And am now violently angry. :/ I plan to flesh out MsScribe as well, next.--Principessa 17:10, 3 May 2008 (EDT)

CharityWank is probably the worst of that bit of her history... and it really wasn't her so much as her surrogates probably acting out on what they saw as her desires or to get close to her rather than CC's own desires. And yeah. Thanks again for cleaning that up. :) --Laura 17:12, 3 May 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Alleged plagiarism

Rolled back the edit. That she plagiarized works is something that has been definitely proven. There are numerous examples on bad penny. --Betsyb 16:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)