To Use Or Not To Use: Plagiarism Checker

Tazlima said:

Now compare those stories' differences to the genuine case of more-or-less-plagiarism between "The Lion King" and "Jungle Emperor Leo."

For those who aren't animation-history nerds: Disney originally tried to get the rights to "Jungle Emperor Leo." When the deal fell through they changed the characters just enough to avoid being sued, swapped in a new plot, and moved forward with the project anyway. As much as they altered, the similarities between the two are still obvious. Even that, however, doesn't quite qualify as plagiarism.

For an entire story to be "accidentally" plagiarized is improbable to the point of being functionally impossible.

Click to expand...

Simba was originally supposed to be white, but they decided that would be a... *turns up music* DEAD GIVEAWAY!
Now, if anyone's ever wondered about Nala's pinkish color... THAT is supposed to be white (white lions aren't strictly shiny snow white but more of a diluted color of their natural cousins).

jjdebenedictis said:

To me, the word plagiarism means the person copied someone else's work and tried to pass it off as their own work.

If you didn't know Fruits Basket existed, how could your work have been a copy of it? I'd call it synchronicity.

Click to expand...

Exactly that is why I was referring to accidental plagiarism: you're doing the same someone else has done and act all original about it, but you had no idea it already existed. I wonder though, would I get away with it legally? The project was cancelled and discarded as I realized it wasn't as innovative as I thought, but if I'd published it?

NaeimGiladisLegacy said:

Exactly that is why I was referring to accidental plagiarism: you're doing the same someone else has done and act all original about it, but you had no idea it already existed. I wonder though, would I get away with it legally? The project was cancelled and discarded as I realized it wasn't as innovative as I thought, but if I'd published it?

Click to expand...

Well, first of all, "people being animal-like and having to hide it" or "people turning into animals and having to hide it" it not a unique concept at all. Hell, I'm pretty much using the idea right now. Also, when I read your original concept, it sounded more like Maximum Ride to me than Fruits Basket.

Plagiarism is not actually illegal; it's an academic honor thing. It's copyright infringement that's illegal.

You cannot copyright an "idea." Two people can have the same idea (and honestly the two ideas don't even sound that similar to me) and it not be copyright infringement. Copyright infringement involves actual copying. There would have been no problem.

Well. I guess the OP has his(her?) answer...

The premises and plots of works of fiction are not copyrighted. Anyone can use the ideas. It is the actual text that is protected.

There are plots that several people have tried, and that have been published by major authors. The Prisoner of Zenda comes to mind. Edgar Rice Burroughs copied the plot in The Mad King, and one of the Flashman novels shares many features.

Hapax Legomenon said:

Well, first of all, "people being animal-like and having to hide it" or "people turning into animals and having to hide it" it not a unique concept at all. Hell, I'm pretty much using the idea right now. Also, when I read your original concept, it sounded more like Maximum Ride to me than Fruits Basket.

Click to expand...

Pfft. You guys just aren't original at all. Now me, I'm currently writing about animals that can turn into people and have to hide it. Mmm-hmmm. Bask in my originality!


Oh wait. "Wolf's Rain" totally did that...

Who cares? My story is completely different from "Wolf's Rain!"

If you think about it, attempting to restrict your writing to "things that have never been done before," is like saying "I want to be a painter, but I don't want to paint things that other people have painted." So you can't paint people, or landscapes, or plants, or animals, or Fruits Baskets (see what I did there?), etc. What's left?

Maybe you'll (general you) manage to find some super-specific and random subject to paint that no one has bothered with before, but what an uncomfortable and pointless self-restriction. Wouldn't you rather leave your options open and paint whatever the heck you want?

could happen while researching

So right now I've got 60K of novel, 25K of research. In the heat of battle, I sometimes paste in parts of Wikipedia or other sources, meaning to rewrite during editing. Technical explanations, location descriptions, how something works, travel blog info, lists. I highlight all the research in yellow. None the less, a year later the novel becomes churned and blended with thousands of edits. I don't think I've ever plagiarized in the final product, but it wouldn't be impossible.

But yeah, artistic plagiarism should never happen. Technical plagiarism? Maybe.

Roxxsmom said:

Huh? Accidental plagiarism? ?

Click to expand...

Having an idea that's similar to something that's been done isn't plagiarism, though it may come across as derivative. Plagiarism is copying someone's actual text or having such strong plot/characterization similarities that it's explicit. The chances of two people coming up with ideas about kids attending a magic school are quite high. The chances of both of them coming up with protagonists who are orphans with lightning-bolt scars are much lower.

Tazlima said:

Since the program couldn't analyze how the words were being used within the paper, any matching string of words would increase the percentage (including any quoted excerpts). The program had a field day with works-cited pages: it would pick out the longer titles, strings of authors' names, all that kind of stuff. Therefore, a properly-cited paper never came back at 0%.

Click to expand...

This reminds me--one of my professors had it set up somehow so that we could upload our papers to the plagiarism checker ourselves. This also allowed us to see the resulting report. It was very interesting. Like you say, it's pretty much impossible to have a paper that comes back 0%. Also, it was a Shakespeare course, and I found that sentences where I used multiple characters' names and/or referred to plot events were often flagged as potentially plagiarised from various Sparknotes-like sites that had plot synopses of Shakespeare plays. I remember using all four names of the main human characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream was enough to trigger it.

It is not automatically plagiarism to use exact wording from a public source. Isaac Asimov was once writing a book and was doing exactly this. I forget who it was, but some was watching and said, "All you're doing is copying out of the encyclopedia. Anyone could do that."

Asimov said, "Good. Then you sit down here and write the book."

As long as you don't try to pass the writing off as your own and cite teh source, which you should do every time you copy and past anything into a manuscript, you can use a LOT of direct quoting without it being plagiarism. Though I will say I'd never copy and paste directly into a manuscript unless I intended for the material to stay there.

Copy and paste into a manuscript without citing the source when you do it isn't accidental, it's a decision you make.

I don't use plagiarism checkers because don't see any point in doing so. As many here already said, if you wrote it - it's your own work and it's original. You can write on the idea that was covered billion times before but in billion other ways different from yours.
However, plagiarism checkers can be useful if you are writing huge texts for the Web (like SEO copywriter or something like that).