We Need To Talk... About Plagiarism

I certainly didn't consider myself a writer at the time. While I had a handful of writer friends, including a couple of professional ones, I hadn't written anything more than a D&D adventure or a character backstory in almost 30 years. The year before I published my first story on Literotica, I had spent some time writing for a videogame I'd been tinkering with, but that had maybe 10,000 words, tops. Probably less.

I didn't come up in the writing community. I never learned the unspoken rules of what is and isn't considered okay within it. Software development, videogames, comics, tabletop gaming: these were my stomping grounds. Those communities all had their own understandings of intellectual property and the ethical guidelines surrounding it, but they were each very different from what the forum participant expressed in that quote.

In comics, especially in professional circles, there's a solid chance a creator will cut their teeth working on someone else's IP. That's not seen as a bad thing; even if you were a writer or artist that created their own characters, you'd often have a "dream" character or team you'd wanted to work on since you were a kid. You'd write your own Superman or Batman or Spider-Man stories and put them on AO3 or draw art of the same and put it on DeviantArt, then branch out to make your own creations.

If you did make a Superman analogue later, everyone knew that's what it was. Flight, superstrength, invulnerability, maybe eyebeams or supersenses: congratulations, you've made a Superman homage. Now what are you going to do with him?

No one cared that you'd added to the long list of characters in that archetypal mold, as long as you didn't give him a sidekick named Timmy Holsen and a girlfriend named Sarah Street. Even then, if you were creating an outright parody, you could get away with it, as long as you did something interesting with it, because it's what you added to the idea that mattered. Want to make your ersatz Superman evil? Eh, it's been done. Overdone, for that matter. Find something new.

What about riffing on Shazam-himself a carbon copy of the Big Blue Boy Scout-but using his ability to change between two forms to explore trans identity issues? Or maybe make a burned-out demigod to examine the way immense power disconnects those that wield it from the people they're supposed to be watching out for? Now that's the stuff!

Videogame creation has a similar but subtly different vibe. As an example, you've probably heard of Doom. We call games like it first-person shooters now, but they had a different popular label for about ten years after its release: Doom Clones. For the decade after Doom came out, people did everything they could to take the concept of a first person shooter, dissect it, improve it, and try to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with this new type of game. We all knew who the king was, though.

That's a theme repeated throughout the industry's history. Someone has an amazing idea, and then everyone riffs off it, continuing to do so until another technology or improved gameplay design enables some new amazing thing. Then, later, maybe someone will come back and say, "Hey, there were some good ideas still left in this. Why did we abandon it in the first place?"

The current mania in the industry is the "Survivors" genre, games where you control a single character-or perhaps a small team-and run them through wave after wave of enemies picking up randomized powerups and skills, trying to survive as the enemies grow exponentially more powerful, inevitably overwhelming your character. The genre takes its name from its originator, Vampire Survivors, and there are literally dozens of games out there that retain "Survivors" in the title, both to honor the original and for marketing reasons.

Superman inspired Shazam and Miracleman and Captain Marvel and Homelander and Invincible. Doom begat Duke Nukem begat Blood begat Half-Life begat Call of Duty begat... Doom again in 2016, with tech that could finally match the gameplay the original creators wanted. Soulstone Survivors, Yet Another Zombie Survivors, Star Survivor, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and many more followed Vampire Survivors. Just one big ripoff after the next, right?

Except we all knew that those later creations were inheritors of an original idea. No one claimed that they'd created the original idea when they didn't at least have a hand in it; that way lay professional and social suicide. How can it be a ripoff if the people that made the original are so tickled pink that they actively support the people coming after them, to the point of sometimes offering mentoring to up-and-coming comic creators or technical expertise on thorny game design problems?

Those of us that cared knew those "originals" in both these arenas had forebears, too; the developers and writers and artists-the honest ones, at least-gladly admitted it. Doc Savage was the Superman before Superman, and Tarzan was part of the DNA of Doc Savage, and on and on, all the way back to Samson and Hercules.

Doom was the game that took the FPS mainstream, but it stood on the shoulders of giants: Wolfenstein 3D, MIDI Maze, Battlezone, Akalabeth, Spasim, and more. And Vampire Survivors wears its influences on its sleeve: Castlevania in its art style and Roguelikes (another genre name off of its progenitor, this one from the 70s) for its mechanical design.

Over in software development land, things are even wilder. Everyone uses code that someone else has written. Everyone. Anyone who says they aren't is either lying or doesn't know their junior developer has been panic-Googling "why won't this fucking thing compile?"

Stack Overflow and Experts Exchange are full to bursting with answers to difficult problems, complete with source code, all freely given without expectation of recompense or recognition outside of those sites. Just about every app on your phone incorporates at least a little bit of open source code. Failing that, they're using Node modules or boilerplate source or bread-and-butter libraries from a variety of providers.

Internet infrastructure is even more dependent on the kindness of strangers. There's an xkcd comic that always makes me laugh, part in amusement and part in horror at its accuracy, showing a teetering mass of blocks labeled "all modern digital infrastructure" supported near the bottom by one tiny, lone block on the right side labeled "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003."

It's not thankless, though; not really. The guy in Nebraska can whip that project out at any point in a job interview and say, "I maintain this." Same with the guys contributing to Node modules or open source libraries or the like. Being able to say, "Yeah, I've been maintaining Squizzybix for the last five years" guarantees a certain level of respect that's almost certainly commensurate with pay and benefits. More than that, though, it means respect within the community, something which is often a lot harder to come by.

I could mention other popular communities with wildly disparate attitudes towards intellectual property: hip-hop, knitting, Lego, and dozens more. Each of those groups treats original creations, attribution, and collaboration differently, and each has had a major blowup over one or more of those subjects in the last few years. And all that is before we get into nationalities, home states, career histories, or any of the other "big picture" stuff.

Everyone writing on Literotica comes from a different background, and we all can only count on this: we're here, writing stories for a free site, and getting paid only in comments and scores, in accolades from peers and the enjoyment of a well-told story.

Whether we like it or not, those stories are sometimes referenced by others, their tropes taken and remixed, and followups regularly created with or without explicit permission from the original's writer. For goodness' sake, there is literally an account called FinishTheDamnedStory that, before half of the writing team behind it passed away, created dozens of continuations that included only a link to the original as a nod to legitimacy!

The notion that "that's just something we don't do here, because we're writers" is laughable on its face. We're not all writers in the sense of having that as a defining part of our background. We're all people writing stories, but that's not the same thing.

I've talked to dozens of the people writing stories to publish on Literotica: IT workers, mechanics, doctors, editors, professional writers, military veterans, professors, students, and more. Most of us are writers only in the sense that we write as a hobby. Expecting all of us to have the exact same set of values is hopelessly optimistic.

You can see that even among the folks working to hone their craft alongside the larger writing community here. Posts regularly crop up in the Authors Hangout asking whether it's okay to continue a seemingly abandoned series from years ago, and they receive a wide variety of answers: it's okay across the board; it's never okay; try to contact the author first, then don't do it if they don't respond; try to contact the author first, then go ahead if they don't respond; you're a goddamned monster for even suggesting it.

Okay, maybe not that last one, but not far off.

People get heated about this stuff, which shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Even among professional writers, there's a broad spectrum of opinions about fanfiction out there.

It might sound strange to categorize the various unauthorized continuations as fanfiction, but I think it's apt, especially in the niche case of something like "February Sucks." Yeah, it doesn't have a fandom the size of Star Trek or the X-Men, but it's still well-known within readers and writers in Loving Wives. Look at its numbers, and you can see that it's probably got a following that at least matches something like a local band or an indie webcomic.

The story has a view count of 186K, which isn't much compared to some of the heaviest hitters on the site, but this is on a story that was published less than four years ago and runs for eight pages. If one were to compare it with the stories published within a week of it in either direction, only one beats it in views, and that one is the first part of a series published by an author who has over 200 stories on this site, 5000 followers, and who actively publishes and cross-promotes on other sites as well. If you look only at one-offs, though, nothing comes close. And in terms of favorites? It's the clear winner.

One can argue chicken or egg there (does it have a high number of views and favorites because of everything that happened after, or did it spawn so many followups because of its popularity?), but that misses the point: it was popular enough to spawn fanfiction, and even some of that fanfiction has spawned fanfiction.

A fair number of stories on Literotica have done so; it only takes one fan that's inspired enough to want to write the further adventures of a set of characters, or perhaps a prequel, or a side story, or an alternate ending. Once a story spawns one piece of fanfic, it's more likely to inspire others, if only because there are now two stories out there with "February Sucks" in the title, and one of them has a link to the original.

There are plenty of other stories in Loving Wives with alternate takes, too. In the thread about "February Sucks," a commenter listed dozens that had explicit alternate versions or sequels, and I think they even missed a couple. Other sections of the site are no different. I know of fan continuations in Group, Erotic Couplings, and several other categories. Hell, there's an entire category titled "Celebrities & Fan Fiction" to peruse, whose only additional rules seem to be "no noncon involving real people and don't piss off The Mouse."

So. If the site allows alternate takes, with the author's say so or not; if the authors in Authors Hangout can't agree on what constitutes an ethical use of someone else's work; if the readers often encourage alternate takes of the same story, to the point of complaining if a separate story has a plot too closely aligned to an existing one without explicitly naming it; and if the people coming into the community and posting aren't from backgrounds that have a unified attitude towards what does and does not constitute IP theft; then where does that leave us?

I think there are a few things we can all agree on. Taking someone's work whole cloth and claiming it as your own, whether that's here on the site or elsewhere, is clear cut plagiarism. Taking it and making trivial changes-for example, copying "February Sucks" and only changing the character names to Tim, Lydia, and Matt Cavalier-falls into this same bucket. Monetizing someone else's work, even if doing so in a somewhat transformative way-as in the YouTube channels that take Loving Wives stories, run them through a text-to-speech program, and accrue ad revenue-also counts as clear plagiarism.

But outside of that? People are going to disagree, even within our little community. Given that, I suggest that, if you have an opinion on the matter, state it in your profile. People may or may not begrudge your particular stance, but that's on them, not you.

If you feel very strongly that your work should never be given the fanfiction treatment, say so. If you feel that it falls under something like Creative Commons, say that instead. If you want to have a certain portion of your work treated one way and another portion treated differently, let readers know. Relying on "well, obviously you should understand what I'm thinking" is only going to lead to problems.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, I implore you: extend grace towards each other. I mentioned way up at the top of this wall of text that I felt spurred to write it because of an incident that occurred recently. Well, a similar incident occurred the morning that I type this section. I'm hurrying through this now because I want to do what I can to avoid any more of the same kind.

In late January of this year, a fairly new writer on the site published the first chapter of a story, comprising approximately three pages of a fifteen- or sixteen-page story. Its premise wasn't entirely novel; very little is, if we're being honest, but that's neither here nor there. However, it came too close for some to the story of an established, well-known writer in the Loving Wives category. The first part of the newer writer's story was reported and removed from the site as a result.

This newer writer chose to post a mea culpa, saying that they owed the more established writer an apology, even though he also wrote that his second chapter took the story in a different direction. Now, that's up to him. He's commented on a few of the stories I've written, so I messaged him, saying that I didn't think he'd done anything wrong. He didn't write back, and, while researching and writing this essay over the next two weeks, I started to ask myself, "Am I putting myself in the middle of a situation I shouldn't?" I'd been half-ready to mothball all of this, not wanting to cause strife where I didn't need to.

And then it happened again.

This morning, Valentine's Day, a repost of another story, "Choices," showed up in Loving Wives. I'll quote part of the intro (slightly edited for clarity) that the user, howmas227, added to the reposted story:

If you really read Loving Wives stories, you should understand that there's only a limited number of scenarios that uncover the unfaithfulness: strange car, home early, anonymous email, and dozens where smug bosses or rich egotistical lotharios steal them away. In stories like "Boss Seduces My Wife In Front Of Me" (2019), "February Sucks" (2020) and "He Used To Be My Hero" (2021). My story, "Choices," was returned accusing of copying another story. If mine was pulled, why wasn't "February Sucks" and "He Used To Be My Hero?" I closed that profile and have returned to this profile.

I don't know if it's an author that reported these stories or an overzealous fan. Hell, it might even be, if I'm putting my tinfoil hat on, a troll trying to create division; I know there's one or two of those types hanging around. But assuming it's a sincere wish to see a wrong righted, let me ask the people doing this: are you sure it's a wrong?

One of the commenters in that discussion about "February Sucks" on the forums stated:

For my own writing:

Nobody owns a theme. A plot, or writing device.

Like music, there are only so many notes... We can rearrange them, but they remain the same.

I have personally written several stories that covered common themes. They shared a theme, but nothing else. I took nothing from any other writers except their influence. I wrote my own stories. Used my own characters. Built my own plots around the theme.

While they and I disagreed on some things, that seemed to be a reasonable statement that I could agree with. It's a good place to draw the line, as far as it goes.

The problem, though, is that we sometimes think we deserve ownership of devices that were created before us, or that because we thought up an idea that someone else couldn't have arrived at a similar idea independently.

The first chapter of that story that got pulled in late January had a relatively simple setup: a woman has a shot at a promotion to vice president in her company that would otherwise be out of reach, at least without a longer tenure in her job. She's presented with an opportunity to advance quickly, but it comes with strings attached: while traveling, she must sleep with a mentor for the year or so that she will be trained to take over, and she and her husband must both sign a contract and an NDA to proceed.

She tries to talk to her husband about it, extolling all the ways it will improve their lives and how little, in her opinion, it takes away from them. She's reluctant, but also sees the possibilities. He does not respond positively, first leaving the house for weeks, then returning with an ominous comment that he has revisions he wants made to the contract. End chapter.

It's a fun setup. It's well-presented, clearly sets the stakes, and teases at an interestingly twisty story about divided loyalties, ambition, and corruption.

It's also been done before.

Cagivagurl's "Promotion Comes With Strings Attached" starts with a very similar premise. I'm very fond of that story, having read it a couple of times, and I can see the similarities, although I also see some significant differences.

Regardless, all that we've gotten to see of the newer story is the setup. The directions a story with that setup could go from there are endless: the husband decides to burn the business to the ground; the wife falls in love with the boss and the husband falls in love with someone else, and they all end up happier; the wife discovers it's all a scam, and she was always going to get the promotion. I could easily list a dozen more. You probably could, too, and there's a good chance they'd be different from mine.

Unfortunately, we aren't going to get to see at least one of them, because someone decided to report the setup chapter of that new story by the new writer.

I'm not fond of the tendency toward breaking stories down into just a collection of tropes. There's so much more to stories than just their tropes: point of view, person, tense, themes explored, focus, writing style, and more.

Tropes, however, are useful for breaking down story beats, character archetypes, and the like. They're useful as a shorthand to describe the basic building blocks of the story, in the same way that one can say, "chicken soup is made with chicken and hot water."