COPY+PASTE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD FOR PLAGIARISTS.

Plagiarism has always been a complicated issue, and our increasing reliance on technology has only made it more elaborate Sabrina Maddeaux

All is not well in the world of genre fiction. The close- knit community of romance writers and readers is awash in scandal after Courtney Milan, one of the genre’s best- selling authors, called out fellow romance bestseller Cristiane Serruya for being “a copyright infringer, a plagiarist and an idiot.”

In a blog post, Milan accused Serruya of stealing multiple passages from one of her books. Online fervour ensued, and digital detectives discovered a litany of lines in Serruya’s novels that appeared to be copied from other well-known romance writers.

Romancelandia isn’t the only community dealing with a highprofile plagiarism scandal at the moment. The world seems suddenly plagued by copycats.

Earlier this month, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was accused of plagiarizing from several sources in her book Merchants of Truth. Diet Prada, an Instagram account that functions as the fashion industry’s de facto watchdog, recently accused Kim Kardashian of leaking outfit details to fast-fashion brands before she wears them in order to facilitate the quick release of knockoffs. Ariana Grande is being sued by Russian-American artist Vladimir Kush for allegedly ripping off two of his paintings in her “God is a Woman” video. YouTubers complain their original content is often re-uploaded by illicit accounts seeking to profit off their popularity.

Even the Roman Catholic Church has been implicated. Late last week, Father Thomas Rosica, longtime English-language spokesperson for the Vatican, admitted to plagiarizing sections of multiple speeches and columns over the years. “What I’ve done is wrong, and I am sorry about that. I don’t know how else to say it,” he told the National Post’s Joseph Brean in a phone interview.

What’s behind this plague of plagiarism? We live in a time where internet detectives gleefully scour the internet for their next takedown and hyper- connectivity almost guarantees reports of copycats will make their way back to original creators. Anti-plagiarism technology is readily available. Verifying the originality of a line of text or photo is a quick Google search away. It’s seemingly harder than ever to get away with copycatting. So, why risk it?

Ironically, as much as new technology discourages plagiarism, it also encourages it. Plagiarism can essentially be divided into two camps: intentional and unintentional. Our tech-driven world fosters both types.

When it comes to truly uninten- tional copying, our brains may be working against us. According to Morgan Barense, cognitive neuroscientist, associate professor of psychology and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, memories have many different components. When, for example, you read a tweet, your brain catalogues the content of the tweet as one component and the source of that content as another. “The two different components are forgotten at different rates. You can remember the content, but forget where it came from,” says Barense.

This can result in a psychological phenomenon where we think an idea or phrase is our own, with zero recollection that we’ve been exposed to it before. It’s called cryptomnesia.

Joshua D. Landau, psychologist and associate provost for student success at York College of Pennsylvania, published seminal research on cryptomnesia and plagiarism in psychology journals throughout the 1990s. On the phone from Pennsylvania, he tells me, “In a genuine memory error, people could easily reproduce something that they’ve seen or heard before without realizing that they’ve seen or heard it before… you have to be careful. You have to have the time and desire to stop and think, ‘is this really mine?’”

The 24-hour news cycle, endless streams of information on the internet and competing social media feeds increase the likelihood of cryptomnesia. “Memory has limited capacity. Constant bombardment of information and multitasking increases interference and diminishes the extent to which we pay attention and properly encode sources of information,” says Barense. She explains that switching rapidly between streams of information — for example, between reading an article, viewing photos on Instagram, scrolling Twitter and listening to a podcast — puts us at the highest risk for unintentional plagiarism. “It’s like taking in information from a firehose, and our brains can’t encode it properly.”

When it comes to purposeful plagiarism, technology is aiding and abetting that too. Like many other problems borne of the internet, the issue stems from how algorithms encourage users to behave.

Take, for example, users of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which allows writers to self-publish books on the Kindle platform for free. Being an Amazon writer, like the aforementioned Serruya, can be incredibly lucrative. On top of book sales, authors receive bonuses when their work is read via Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service (like Apple Music or Spotify for books). According to a 2018 article in The Atlantic, successful writers can earn as much as $25,000 a month in bonuses alone.

It’s widely recognized that Amazon rewards authors who publish books more frequently and consistently. Many blogs and books about how to maximize profits on Amazon reference what’s known as the “30day cliff.” Essentially, once a book has been available for 30 days, it no longer appears on the list of new releases. When it drops off, many authors notice a large decline in sales. The most commonly prescribed solution to this is to publish a novel once a month to always have a book in the new releases section. Considering many print books take well over a year, if not years, to publish, this is a patently absurd expectation.

This strategy is dubbed “rapidrelease publishing,” and begets a whole host of problems. Rushed authors slapping books together, authors hiring cheap ghostwriters to write books for them and fake authors literally stealing entire books or stories found on sites like fanfiction. net and Wattpad then republishing them under another name. As for Serruya, she ultimately blamed a ghostwriter for her plagiarism scandal.

While YouTube keeps its algorithms a secret, YouTubers fervently believe the platform rewards consistent, daily uploads. Digital mar- keting agency Social Buddy encourages posting on Instagram one to three times per day for ideal growth, advising on their website, “The more frequently you post on Instagram, the more likes you’ll receive. Posting more increases engagement and also earns you more followers faster.” The pressure to be consistently original, creative, funny, witty, thoughtprovoking or inspiring is simply too much for many trying to maximize their social media standing.

“Freebooting,” a term dubbed by video journalist and YouTuber Brady Haran, refers to the practice of downloading someone else’s video or photo, then reposting it without credit. Not only is this a moral issue, in a social media landscape that monetizes views, likes, followers and subscribers, it’s a monetary one. Original creators lose potential income while copiers profit from someone else’s work.

Apart from YouTube, which rolled out a “Copyright Match” tool to identify reposted videos after years of complaints from users, major social networks have shown little to no interest in combating freebooting. Angry content creators accuse Facebook and Instagram of ignoring freebooting because more posts draw more views, which equal more ad impressions.

In 2015, Kurzgesagt, a popular Munich- based YouTube channel that creates short videos explaining things with “optimistic nihilism,” published a video entitled “How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views.” It now has over five-million views. The video’s narrator says that, in the first quarter of 2015, 275 of the 1000 most popular videos on Facebook were stolen, “amassing a total of 17-billion stolen views.” He continues, “contrary to popular belief, this gives creators close to no exposure at all. Only the thief and Facebook profit from this.”

There’s also the simple fact that technology has opened up an entire world of content to copy. “The thing that’s changed over my professional career is access,” says Landau. “When I started in psychology, there were CD-ROMs where you could go look up articles, but now there are entire articles sitting on the web.”

I n t e r e s t i n g l y, while most of us are still debating what does or doesn’t constitute plagiarism and how to penalize it, many software developers are sharing open-source code on platforms like GitHub, GitLab and Codepad. The idea being that one developer ’s code can inspire another developer’s project and be used as a building block, promoting innovation and saving everyone from reinventing the wheel over and over again.

While corporations in other industries would never dream of sharing their intellectual property, Microsoft, Apple and Google are among the big tech players that host websites where they openly share millions of lines of code from thousands of projects. Google’s site states, “Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real world problems.”

No one advocates copying programs and passing them off as your own unique creation — that’s still plagiarism — but the notion that snippets of work can and should be used by other creators to encourage collective progress is a novel one that may merit consideration in other industries. Is it possible our obsession with plagiarism is actually holding us back?

Plagiarism is a complicated issue, only made more arduous by modern technology. Of course, perpetrators must still be held accountable for theft of intellectual property, but there remains a lot of nuance to consider beyond the condemnation that the act seems to immediately trigger in our brains. Perhaps if we hope to quell the growing plagiarism problem, we should consider confronting it as a collective crisis rather than an individual crime.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE THE TIME AND DESIRE TO STOP AND THINK, ‘IS THIS REALLY MINE?’