The Lori Jareo flap has begun drawing the attention of the mainstream print media after raging in the blogosphere for the last week. As the Dayton Beach News reported:
After it was pointed out by writer Lee Goldberg and spread around by a
growing network of bloggers it became very obvious that Ms. Jareo’s
circle of friends, family, and acquaintances was about to include the
entire LucasArts legal team. Reading the assorted posts this weekend
was like standing amongst a crowd of people watching a swimmer
cheerfully strap on raw meat before diving into the shark tank.
The newspaper notes that her biggest critics were fanfiction writers themselves, who worried about the implications for them of her stupidity.
When you know that what you
are doing is, at best, tolerated by creators you respect who can make
you stop at any time, you get very annoyed when someone walks up and
slaps them. All it would take is for enough authors to start yelling:
"That’s it, everyone out of the pool," and the online world of fan
fiction would fade away.
The more likely result, as Publisher’s Weekly notes, will be more intense scrutiny of POD titles by online booksellers. So far, only one person has come out publicly in support of Jareo, NPR commentator Lev Grossman, who dubbed her an "unsung hero" of the wired universe. Jareo has remained silent.
“Unsung hero?”
Yeah, sure…that makes a bunch of sense.
Her stupidity consists mainly in contradicting herself, not necessarily in publishing her fanfic. Whether or not creative works like Another Hope are plagiarism is up to the courts and the court of public opinion. With the technological and creative cultures moving towards a more open source and individualized notion of content, our copyright standards are also evolving. And that’s a good thing.
The NPR piece was probably the most wince-worthy thing I’ve heard them air. Bad enough that with lots of potentially interesting things to discuss between Jareo, Viswanathan, et al they did a puff piece. But okay, puff pieces have their place. I do think it’s reasonable to ask for internally consistent puff pieces, and this one missed the mark by a long shot.
How Opal Got Pulled, Got Shredded and Had the Advance Recalled
Link: No Encore for ‘Opal’ – 5/2/2006 – Publishers Weekly If you thought the whole Lori Jareo thing was bad (Lee Goldberg has the skinny on that scandal), well the latest in the plagiarism saga concerning Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal
um, Aston, it’s not really plagarism (which is stealing words not your own); it’s more along the lines of trademark and copyright infringement (which is stealing ideas not your own).