I’ve always been puzzled by this. Some big time author like Ambrose or Goodwin swipes entire paragraphs almost word for word from some other book, and thinks they’re going to get away with it. What makes them to think this?
I could understand if some obscure, little read author tried, this but these people are big players with lots to lose. Do they honestly think they’re going to slide by?
As I understand, they often do.
OK, well, I searched around for a bit to refresh my recollection of the Ambrose case but every link I found either required registration, had expired, or both so if I’m misremembering oh well. IIRC in Ambrose’s case he claimed that he relied on the notes of a research assistant who did attribute the lines in question but when the book went to press the attributions were inadvertantly left out. Follow-up editions of the book contained the attributions. Only problem with that explanation is that there were other instances uncovered with similar unattributed lifts. As to whether the lifts in any or all of these instances were intentional or not only Ambrose could say for sure, but if they were intentional I’d say hubris and reputation probably have a lot to do with it. He does it because he thinks his reputation is sufficient to shield him.
I’ve ofern wondered about this too. I think they have decided that the stolen material is so old, that evry few people will pick up on it. They may also suffer from a Reagan-like confusion, where they actually come to believe that they wrote it!
Take the late James Mitchener…he was interviewed once on PBS, and he let the cat out of the bag-he was saying that as a young man, he edited some of the later works of Sinclair Lewis…later, when I read “HAWAII”, I could recognized whole paragraphas and sentences lifted from Lewis’ works!
Of course, Mitchener was actually not an author-he actually mostly edited stuff that was prepared fo rhim by his staff…that is why his later novels read like they were written by committee.
Lastly, I remmeber a few years back, that an American author was caught-he had lifted wholeportions from a 1930 novel by Andre Gide…presumably, he (the plagiarist) had assumed that the source was so old and obscure that nobody would notice.
Actual full-blown plagiarism will wreck your writing career*, so no author will take a work in its entirety. As far as lifting sections, it’s sometimes unconscious, but more often – especially in nonfiction – the author is taking a section of an earlier work with the idea of paraphrasing, but gets sloppy (or pressed for time) and just copies text and forgets to properly credit it. IIRC correctly, in the Ambrose case, he was working on too many books and rushed things over a small point.
*There was a case about 10-15 years ago. The author involved has not published anything since it happened.
Reality Chuck may be alluding to the Amis-Epstein case in which Jacob Epstein ripped off sections of Martin Amis’s novel THE RACHEL PAPERS, turned 3rd person into first person, turned Briticisms into American in his novel WILD OATS, got caught, and never published fiction again, instead becoming a successful TV producer.
Or he may not.
They believe that they’re not going to get caught because usually they don’t get caught. Most cases of low-level plagarism (i.e., copying a few sentences without attribution) aren’t caught. In general, it’s only after doing this a number of times that it becomes likely that someone will see the resemblance of your writing to other people’s writing.
A book is now out on these plagiarism cases, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds - American History From Bancroft And Parkman To Ambrose, Bellisles, Ellis, And Goodwin, by Peter Charles Hoffer.
Once you read the book, however, you begin to understand what a slippery term “plagiarism” is in such cases.
In the first half, Hoffer goes over the history of history; i.e., he shows that the major writers of the 19th century did not make or even recognize the current distinction between primary and secondary sources. If B quoted A, then writer C could take A’s quote out of B without bothering to go back to the original. This was completely accepted. It was also completely accepted for C to do a close paraphrase of B’s words without acknowledgment. Facts were facts and a good description of them remained valid forever. The writers were knowledgeable amateurs, writing for a general public.
The 20th century changed this is two ways. First, it professionalized history. The standards it set itself required that primary sources were to be consulted and doublechecked and used as the basis for all work. This was a very good thing since it turned out that all too many times B didn’t quote A properly and had to be corrected. Writers wrote for other historians, usually in such technical and boring language that nobody else read them.
There was also the issue of Consensus History - the American story of heroes and Manifest Destiny and the Melting Pot and all that patriotic white men uber allus stuff - being replaced by the New History - a realization that history looked different when looked at through different eyes.
The second half of Hoffer’s book mooshes all this together incoherently. The authors in his title were professional historians, but the books that made them famous were popular histories. He keeps making this distinction yet simultaneously keeps saying that when professional historians write they must use the rules of professional historians.
And so we get to the “plagiarism” charges. What Hoffer calls plagiarism he also describes as “close paraphrasing.” Ambrose would find a good description in someone else’s book and use it in his work, changing it sufficiently to flow into his narrative. The source was cited in the footnotes, but only as a chunk of text, say pp. 34-48, rather than the particular page(s) used.
I’m a popular medical writer. My books were never allowed to have footnotes or bibliography. Yes, literally not allowed: the editors didn’t want either to add the extra number of pages or make the book appear to be less readable. I’m pretty sure I was guilty of close paraphrasing at times: a good description is a good description, just as Francis Parkman and other giants of history found. I did squeeze as much formal quoting and crediting into the text as my editors would allow. I also set up a web site with the complete footnotes and bibliography for people to check.
Am I guilty of plagiarism? I don’t think so. By the accepted “rules” of popular writing, certainly not. By Hoffer’s definition of popular history, also certainly not.
Were Ambrose and Goodwin guilty of plagiarism? That’s a more interesting debate, and it depends on both whether a professional historian should never do close paraphrasing, even when writing popular works, and also whether the amount of it they did, which in Ambrose’s case appears to be considerable, makes a difference. (My books would not have more than one instance from a source, while Ambrose may have used dozens.)
The issue is not simple black/white. Hoffer is confused to incoherent rage on the subject and us nonprofessionals are left to wonder whose rules are supposed to be applied when and where and by whom, and whether any rules really exist at all.
I will admit that I love Ambrose’s books. He writes wonderfully well and gives a better picture of history than almost any other historian. Many of Hoffer’s villains in his book are also wonderful writers of narrative history, like Daniel Boorstin. I hate to urge you to read what I think is a very flawed book, but Hoffer does at least give a picture of why history as a profession is in crisis.
I’m not. 
Wasn’t there a well-known romance novelist who ripped off another well-known romance novelist?
How could they tell the difference?
Janet Daily ripped off Nora Roberts . I really can’t imagine why she thought she could get away with it.
I was interested to see a while back that Bob Dylan had used lines from the really pretty obscure Confessions of a Yakuza, and someone eventually noticed. While I’m not a Bob Dylan fan, I own the book (and very interesting it is too, about the life of a pre-WWII yakuza–I recommend it).
And Paul McCartney ripped off the lyrics to Golden Slumbers from Thomas Dekker.
Rumor has it that Janet Daily had a pretty freakish marriage, with her husband/editor pretty much dictating everything to her for her books, and micromanaging her life to a psychopathic degree, when he died, she was under contract to write the book, had nothing to show for it, and couldn’t afford to give back the advance. So rather than perform a “mea culpa” and say that she’d been little more than a pseudonym for her husband, she ripped off Nora Roberts.
Do people really think he ripped off the lyrics? He admits they’re not his, but when he used to play it for his step-sister, and later his step-daughter Heather, he didn’t know the melody because he couldn’t read music. So he made up his own and it eventually ended up Abbey Road. I can’t think that’s anymore of a rip-off than covering “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Rock and Roll Music.”
Sigh. It’s a joke.
Matthew Reilly pretty blatantly steals plot lines and story ideas from Michael Crichton. But he doesn’t do it word for word… so is it not classed as plagiarism?
Well, given that Micheal Crichton tends to steal his own plot lines (I can’t be the only person who saw Jurassic Park and thought, "This was better when it was called Westworld.), it’s not like he has grounds to sue. 
They do it because even if they are caught basically nothing will happen to them. To many of the previous posts assume that something actually bad did happen as a result of being caught. In fact, it is extremely rare for blatant cheating to have a negative result.
My favorite example: Bob Greene used to do a column in “Spy Magazine”. In one issue his column consisted of “you might be a redneck if…” jokes. The next issue he apologized for not knowing the material had been lifted from Jeff Foxworthy’s act.
He Bob! You knew it wasn’t yours, what difference does it make who else wrote it?
He kept his column in SM and still writes newspaper columns, etc. An absolute clear blatant rip off and no harm to his career at all.
If you are immoral, you know you can cheat and will not be punished, the question is not “Why?” but “Why not?”