For a convenient short-hand, here’s how a program like “Turnitin” might recognize plagiarism in a piece of academic writing or a student paper. Obviously, this isn’t 100% the same for fanfiction writing, but perhaps this might be useful to anon and others to get a sense of how plagiarism is talked about outside of specifically fannish spaces.
The 10 types listed below are taken from the Turnitin website, at this link here, and that site also provides good textual examples for reference. I’ll repost the categories here for convenience:
1) Clone: Submitting another’s work, word-for-word, as one’s own
2) Cltr+C: Contains significant portions of text from a single source without alterations
3) Find & Replace: Changing key words and phrases but retaining the essential content of the source
4) Remix: Paraphrase from multiple sources made to fit together
5) Recycle: Borrows generously from the writer’s previous work without citation (or self-plagiarism)
6) Hybrid: Combines perfectly cited sources with copied passages without citation
7) Mashup: Mixes copied material from multiple sources
8) 404 Error: Includes citations to non-existent or inaccurate information about sources
9) Aggregator: Includes proper citation to sources but the paper contains almost no original work
10) Re-Tweet: Includes proper citation, but relies too closely on the text’s original wording and/or structure
Some of these (6-8 for example) aren’t going to be as relevant for fanfic, but aside from egregious cases (1-4) which would be obvious forms of plagiarism, even for fanfiction, I think 9 is interesting, and where it gets complicated. What it does is help flip the question on its head: it’s not a question of whether or not the text (say, a fanfic) has unoriginal content (tropes etc), but whether it contains enough original content to count as a separate contribution / original work. In academic writing a mash-up of someone else’s research (whether from a single or multiple sources), when done properly (i.e. with proper attributions and citations), would be called a lit review – and it’s not in the same category or genre as original research. When done improperly (no attributions), it’s plagiarism.
For, specifically, attribution: again, in academic writing (and this probably could count for fanfic too) – it is possible that the argument in your work has been made before, by another writer or researcher. The responsibility is on you to be familiar with your field, and cite your predecessors and fellow travelers. But, of course, lapses are made – and a reviewer will point out that “here, author should take at the work of XYZ for a very similar argument/method etc). Obviously this is not quite the same ethos as fanfic. However, where it IS the same ethos I think, is when you KNOW a similar argument or idea has been developed by someone else, you’ve read that work before starting your own, and you willfully chose not to cite them. That sort of plagiarism is hard to verify, but, again, if one does that, they open themselves up to call-outs from one’s peers (or the author of the other text), along the lines of where’s your citation/reference?
TLDR: (1) Don’t do points 1-4, that’s plagiarism however you cut it. (2) If your work is inspired by or borrows from another work, don’t be an asshole, and reference.
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