kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lessons Apparently Never Learned. Sigh. We're back to the schoolroom again. Someone decided to "borrow" one of my jewelry designs without either asking or attributing. I'm grumpy. Not for the reasons that my little plagiarist imagines, but I'm grumpy. Look, we all get this in starting in fifth grade. You're assigned to do a report on dinosaurs. You KNOW you aren't supposed to copy the encyclopedia word for word. So you have to re-write it in your own words. And you know darn well that the teacher has Ways of Knowing If You Copy. So you don't do it. Or you do copy, and you get caught, and you get an F and the teacher calls your parents and you get in trouble. Later in school, you learn that actually, it IS okay to copy. In a very limited sort of way. You use quotes from the original text in your graduate research paper on dinosaurs, and you have to attribute the book and author and pinpoint the page that you drew the quote from. You're copying, yes, but you're not trying to pass it off as your own writing--you're quoting to illustrate your point. The bulk of the writing is still yours. So a month or so ago I worked out some bugs in a design I'd been working on, inspired by one of my internet-jewelry-making-buddies, and posted it on my jewelry-discussion board. Saying hey, worked out the bugs, here's my piece in the style of so-and-so. Got some nice commentary. And then three days later, a new post pops up from someone--"Hi, look at my new piece!" No mention of me, no mention of the person that I had mentioned as inspiration. And this person posted it a second time on another board that I don't frequent. Again, without attribution. My little plagiarist imagines that I'm upset because my design was copied. I'm not, actually--I've posted designs before where folks asked me if I minded, and I said no, and they made them. I was interested to see how they came out--wire usually has a mind of its own, and most pieces end up not looking alike. My plagiarist is feeling harrassed, because I've now gone to both boards and cleared the air with the truth--that it was my design, inspired by X and Y. My plagiarist seems to feel that I'm being unfair, because they have apologised to me for copying already, and I won't let it drop. They're apologising for the wrong thing. A Native American storyteller was once telling a story to an anthropologist. The storyteller spent fifteen minutes explaining to the anthropologist that the story came from his grandfather, who heard it in a bar in Minnesota, and the man in Minnesota in the bar had got it from his wife's cousin who lived in a particular part of the Yukon and got it from his da. And then the story lasted two minutes. The anthropologist asked why so much buildup, and the Native American said "How do you know it's real unless you know where it's from?" In jewelry, as in many other things, there is nothing new under the sun. We all learn and build on things from one another--you stand on what comes before. Thanks to a left/right learning disability connected to an inability to "picture" charts, I CANNOT learn a design from a tutorial--all of my designs are, by default, original. Still, I am limited to what wire and gems can do. Which is finite. But even though I know darn well that the way I work is original, when I am inspired by someone, I say so. If I think of a bracelet that really doesn't look anything like Bracelet A by X, before I put a picture up I write "This bracelet was inspired by Bracelet A that X did". I'm quoting a line or two, even though the rest of the paper on dinosaurs is my writing, you know? I KNOW where my work is from, and make sure to tell people. Sigh. My plagiarist doesn't seem to get that I don't mind that the design was copied, particularly. What I DO mind is that it was copied without my knowledge, and left for me to stumble on it in two locations in the internet--and that the apology rendered at the time completely and wilfully misunderstood why I'm grouchy about this. You attribute. You give credit where credit is due. You let people know that they inspired you, and you ask before you quote extensive passages on dinosaurs. As jewelry artists, as human beings, as storytellers, there is nothing new under the sun--and you legitimize your own work by acknowleging where it rests on the shoulders of others, by telling where it came from. And you don't sulk like a fifth-grader when you're caught copying the goddamn encyclopedia. 7:58 p.m. - 2002-12-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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