Oh baby. Tell me more about the conservation of their habitat. That gets me all hot & ready for more sweet prairie lovin’…
I really will have to see a cite for that $57 million claim.
You missspelled, “Aren’t you the one who has had previous disagreements over copyright issues with Dopers.” Not that it’s relevant to this particular argument.
But according to the original artist, they were not blown up or otherwise used to create art (e.g. Warhol’s soup), but were simply reproduced without acknowledgement. That’s going past re-contextualization and landing in the middle of theft of intellectual property. Which is what Edwards did.
You think there’s a moral, ethical, or legal difference between stealing non-fiction work and fictional work? Wow. Just wow. Well, she did steal from plenty of fictional pieces of work, including Laughing Boy and Hiawatha. Plus, citing your work without credit on a website isn’t even in the same league as taking your work and publishing it in a book and profiting from it. Furthermore, plagiarism isn’t just about the words used. Plagiarism includes stealing words and information. If it was just research, she should have included the references in her acknowledgments, which is easy as pie when you’re writing a book. Your examples don’t prove anything except that she established a pattern of lifting information if not exact wording. That’s plagiarism. Can’t you see that?
And $57 million is very believable. She’s written over 100 books. Romance is *the * biggest selling genre in publishing, and she’s one of the biggest authors.
It’s not the tiniest bit believable. She’s supposedly sold 10 million copies of her books (reported on Wikipedia and elsewhere), which are generally in paperback. Over time she may have averaged about 50 cents per book. So $5.7 million is possible. $57 million is a typo or hysteria.
In his own words with highlighting by Muffin:
OK, I went back and found the page where I got the 57 million dollars figure from. It was someone quoting another romance writer who had calculated 100 million books at roughly 68 cents per book, minus the agent’s cut. Assuming that Wikipedia is correct about it really being 10.25 million books, it looks like Exapno was right and the decimal point was miscarried.
$5.7 million dollars is still a hell of a lot of money, though.
Oh, I won’t deny that most people would love $5.7 million. However, Edwards has been writing for 25 years, so that averages out at $228,000 per year. Nice money, more than most writers make, but hardly wealth in this day and age.
Mea culpa. I remember studying that in the past, but forgot some major details. Turns out he’s another creepy post-post-post Modern wacko.
Carry on.
Of course, it’s still no more ethical to plagiarize yourself to $5 million dollars than $50 million dollars. True?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache was so assertive it had its own literary agent: File:Conan doyle.jpg - Wikipedia
It’s not ethical to plagiarize $5. I was commenting strictly on your “$5.7 million dollars is still a hell of a lot of money, though.” Not on how it was earned. I’m the anti-Evil Captor when it comes to plagiarism.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything. I just felt like I had left the conversation hanging, and it’s late so I phrased my response badly.
Sorry, I guess my little “joke” was out of place in this thread. But I did warn you!
A queasy stare is appropriate. I don’t know what came over me. It must be a train of thought that was sparked when I saw that the comic summary by Gennita Low (your link somewhere on the first page) mentioned the goatse picture (don’t google that one either) - another thing I would have been happily ignorant of if I wasn’t a poster here.
So, who do we make the check for $5.7 million out to?
If someone copies something from a work of mine and says it’s mine, those who read it and think “hey, that’s good!” may then go and look for my stuff. But if it doesn’t say “borrowed from Nava”, then the reader will never think of looking for the book from which it was taken.
So it would hurt me by not giving me due publicity.
Perhaps your definition of “Wealth” differs from mine, but I $228,000 per year (Australian or US dollars, either is fine) would be more than enough to keep me & my wife-to-be in a nice house, with nice cars, take expensive overseas luxury holidays every year, pay all the bills, have a vintage armaments collection that rivals the Imperial War Museum, and maybe even get some Monkey Butlers too.
In short, I’d be very happy with that sort of money, and would consider anyone who has that sort of income to indeed be wealthy. YRMV, of course.
The Smart Set all have Ferret Butlers nowadays, darling.