“Ooops, you caught me passing off someone else’s work as my own.”

From The Independent

Shortly after Ms Hegemann’s book appeared, a blogger pointed out that passages of it bore an uncanny similarity to Strobo. In one case a whole page had simply been lifted from Strobo and planted in [her book]. …

“There was really no need for her to copy me,” insisted Airen in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. “But she borrowed entire passages of my dialogue. I feel that my copyright has been infringed.”

In an artful attempt to steal their critics’ thunder Ms Hegemann and her publishers have gone on the offensive. They have managed, in part, to turn what at face value appeared to be a clearcut case of stealing somebody else’s words into a wide-ranging debate about the meaning of plagiarism in the online era. They argue that [her book] is merely an example of modern ” intertextual mixing“. [Comment: Oh. That’s OK, then. Thanks for explaining that. (Not!)]

Interviewed last week about the charges, Ms Hegemann’s defence was simply “I cannot understand what all the fuss is about.” [Comment: Then grow up!]
While she acknowledges that she used numerous “sources” for her book, she also claims that she is a member of a different generation of writers which is used to adapting and using the abundance of information available online for its own creative purposes.

“I remember sentences my friends tell me just as much as I take on the ideas of the Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek,” she told Der Spiegel, which described her as a “know-all”. “I went everywhere I could find inspiration,” she said about her book, and added:
“There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity.”

That last line “There is no such thing as originality anyway…” is pretty easy to say from that side of the equation, don’t you think?

Hey, we’ve all been inspired by other writers, and even consciously or subconsciously adopted something from somebody somewhere… but word-for-word, image-for-image, point-by-point is OUT, unless you say where you got it, in my opinion. Acknowledge your sources.

Let’s call a spade a spade: she’s a plagiarist.
‘Online age’ ‘new generation’ poppycock makes no difference. That blogger published his work, she pinched it (without attribution)… which is exactly what got Witi Ihimaera into so much mal odour.

Case closed.

Another good view of it from Laura Miller at Salon.com:

This would be more plausible if Hegemann had acknowledged from the beginning that she’d included work from other writers in [her book] but by all indications, she did not.