Remember that post about Banksy plagiarizing his “On Advertising” piece? Well, it’s not that simple: Banksy actually gave credit to Sean Tejaratchi’s zine Crap Hound, in the back of the original publication, but when somebody retitled the piece and typed it out for the web, the attribution got lost. Worse yet, Banksy originally contacted Tejaratchi about using his work, but the contact got lost in the mail. Here’s Tejaratchi:
I realize “Banksy stole the quote!” is much more dramatic and satisfying than “Banksy made a poor stylistic choice in his book layout, causing confusion years later! He attempted to inform me but had the wrong address!” The man’s not an imbecile. This would have been an absurdly clumsy and doomed attempt at plagiarism. I will also say that in my recent, limited contact with Banksy, he’s gone out of his way to be clear, kind, and genuine, in every way the exact opposite of a twat.
So everything turned out okay, but it goes to show, you just can’t be 100% certain about claims of plagiarism.
I think Sean handled this well, but it reminds me that just minutes ago I saw illustrator Ray Frenden crying foul against David Pogue for Pogue reviewing some obscure Wacom Cintiq competitors a month after Frenden reviewed them. (It was brought to my attention by a twitter follower suggesting that Pogue read my book, which turned out to be a joke, but suggesting that reading my book makes you a plagiarist makes me a little touchy…) ANYWAYS…because there’s no actual cut-and-paste plagiarism, we just can’t be clear on what happened here until/if Pogue tells his side.
There are a number of possibilities, among them: 1) sheer coincidence 2) Frenden’s post made big waves and Pogue happened to get the tip through echoes of the post that didn’t credit Frenden 3) Pogue said, “Hey, this is a great review, I’ll rewrite it for my column.”
(The bigger question is: if #3 is true, do we/should we care? Nothing illegal happened, Pogue isn’t depriving Frenden of any livelihood, and whether good or bad, this sort of thing happens constantly in journalism…)
The internet—not to mention culture in general—is, of course, a gigantic copy machine and that which is posted will be copied. As always, I emphasize that reactions to a plagiarism (imagined or real) are always more interesting and tell you more about the parties involved than the plagiarism itself.
betzistar
