I've long held the conviction that 'intellectual' and 'property' are two of the most boring words on earth. Put them together and they seriously make me want to die. And yet, despite copyright being such a murky and stultifying concept, I have to admit it's vitally important. People's brains are their own. You can't just go copying them and making money off them. OR CAN YOU.
As we all know, there's a fine line between lifting someone's work word-for-word and sampling it or mixing it. The music industry has been struggling with this for years. The folks in book publishing circles, on the other hand, have always been quite partial to bibliographies, footnotes, endnotes, sources, acknowledgements—basically, as you would know if you have ever written a school essay, attribution has always been a vital part of the writing thang. But that was before the Youth came blazing in, in all their thoughtless and narcissistic glory.
German teenager Helene Hegemann is obviously some kind of wunderkind—she's already written a play and a film, and
has just released this, her debut novel, at seventeen. It's called
Axolotl Roadkill, and can I take a moment to confide that, in the whole of the entertainment blogger's lexicon, the only harder word to spell than axolotl is Gyllenhaal. So, between trying to get you all interested in 'intellectual property' and trying to spell 'axolotl', the entertainment blogger has to wonder why she is even choosing to write about this story. Here's a picture of a Gyllenhaal while I try to gather my thoughts on the matter.
The facts are these: a teenager in Berlin wrote a book about a teenager in Berlin and it shot instantly to number five on the Bestseller List of German magazine
Spiegel.
Then, a blogger pointed out that the teenager had lifted some material from another book, which was written by another blogger, called
Airen. The
New York Times reports that, among other things, a whole page was lifted with few changes.
And
then the book got shortlisted for the $20,000 Leipzig Book Award, so now everyone is talking about whether cutting and copying has become such a way of life for all of us kids that 'the right to copy and transform' should sort of just be cool.
Hegemann, who has also been
accused of plagiarising a short story, has aplogised for not referencing the parts that were lifted from the other writer's work. 'I think there are good ethical grounds for giving sources for a
book,' she
says. 'And the fact that I neglected to do so reflects my
thoughtlessness and my narcissism.' Which is quite a brilliant defence, because a big reason why the book is a hit is because it traces the thoughtlessness and narcissism of youth.
It seems like this attitude is helping on the awards circuit too, with one of the judges of the Leipzig Book Award
saying that the copied sections are 'part of the concept of the book'.
See! Older generations love our wild, youthful, plagiaristic ways!
The publisher is releasing a second edition of the book with credit given to the original blogger/author of the lifted sections, Airen. And of course, using uncited sources is not new—
Axolotl
Roadkill has been compared to modernist classics such as
Naked Lunch by William S.
Burroughs and
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. Referencing is a huge part of our culture, but the importance or necessity of crediting sources, particularly from things that have originated on the internet, seems to remain murky for a lot of people.
Perhaps the final word should come from Hegemann herself: 'There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,' she says. Three cheers for authentic unoriginality then.