[ilds] Copyright

[Bruce Redwine]

Copyright laws were mentioned when the issue of Durrell’s plagiarism was first raised many years ago.  The point at that time was that Durrell was subject to them when he began lifting other people’s words.  He was surely aware of the laws of British copyright, and I do not think Faber in 1945 would have taken kindly to Durrell’s misuse of Sophie Atkinson’s prose in her Artist in Corfu, which I believe was copyrighted, although I do not see any indication of such in her book.  The copyright symbol Ⓒ may or may not have been required in 1911.  (The 1945 first edition of Prospero’s Cell simply states, “All rights reserved.”)  The major point, I think, of this discussion is not plagiarism per se, rather to what extent it represents something basic about Durrell himself, to wit, his dismissal of the idea of Truth, his penchant for telling tall stories, and his belief in multiple selves (which seems to me anyway as an easy way to absolve one of responsibility for one’s own actions).

Bruce





> On Dec 29, 2015, at 12:51 PM, mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org wrote:
> 
> "students and some academics value career  advancement over contributions to knowledge and nurturing learning. " - You bet they do, as I know very well. I have seen student essays in which the student, having lifted quotes from Wikipedia, didn't even bother to change the font!!! So much for intelligence, but (to be cynical) full marks for the effort to further their career. Since most academic work in the humanities at least, is paltry and contributes very little to knowledge or nurturing learning, it doesn't really matter whether or not they are cheating on each other - they haven't the spunk to cheat on each other in sexual matters, so they resort to doing it with other body parts - the body of the text organically transplanted fgrom one book to another. So much more cosy. Which in my experience is what a very high proportion of academics do too. Cheating doesn't stop when you get your BA or even your PhD. I have seen respectable books by academics anxious for "advancement" which show that their principal motive is NOT contributing to knowledge or nurturing learning - far from it, simply remarketing someone else's work as one's own. It can be done cleverly so that no-one notices. But all that relates to students and their teachers. What LD (and so many others) do is a completely different game. I'm reading Sisman's life of le Carre at present and it's clear that there are times when David Cornwell didn't know what le Carre was writing, or couldn't in his recollection distinguish between what "really" happened and what le Carre has written. And other times when he did know.
> I think it's remarkable that this discussion (LD's plagiarism) has gone on for so long before anyone mentioned the words "copyright" or "intellectual property". The laws on copyright are so fexible and vague that anyone can run rings round them. And they do.
> RP

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