Let's talk about plagiarism

Okay, there seems to be consensus that Cassie Edwards is too old to beat up on. She even puts her age on her MySpace page, 71--the page is all in pink, by the way. Naturally.

The issue stealing from other authors is being chatted up all over the internets now, with this poor senior lady at its center. So the question becomes, "What is plagiarism?" Crediting sources? Footnotes?

I'm working on a novel with lots of historical references now, and I'm certainly keeping a bibliography, in case I need to re-check something. Maybe--maybe that bibliography will go on the web page for the book, but it doesn't belong in the back of a piece of fiction.

Footnotes worked gloriously for Susannah Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, but they were part of the entertainment. They were funny and colorful and beautifully written. They had nothing to do with sources, and I don't think footnotes in fiction ever work unless they serve the purpose Ms. Clarke put them to.

It seems perfectly clear to me that plagiarism means lifting whole passages out of another author's work and putting them in your own. A little modification doesn't alter the fact that somebody else wrote the passage. And I don't think any writer--student, beginning author, or 71-year-old romance novelist--could mistake that for anything but what it is, stealing.

As has been pointed out on another forum, in science fiction we're all riffing off each other's ideas. Ideas are at the heart of what we do in sf, and there's no patent on them. Where we would get in trouble would be directly quoting another author without saying that we're doing so. Duh.B

ut gosh, I would hate, at the age of 71, and having published 100 novels, to have my career falling around my ears in such a fashion. I think I'm feeling more sorry for the lady in question than outraged. Her pride must be in tatters.

My pride, I feel sure, would have forestalled me doing any such thing in the first place.