In the book publishing industry, there are always stories of fake memoirs and unauthorized biographies full of bullshit, but it’s rarer to hear about a work of fiction being called “plagiarism”.  According to German magazine, der Speigel, the latest controversy to hit German publishing involves a 17-year-old writer who many now believe plagiarized her novel from a blogger’s posts about sex and drugs.

The blogger, who writes by the moniker Airen, once wrote about his crazy nightlife situation of taking drugs, and having random sex with prostitutes and transvestites. Later, he published a short volume about his exploits.

In her novel, the young writer used exact dialog from Airen’s writing, without permission or without crediting his work (which has since been acknowledged in the introduction).

People seem divided on Helene Hegemenn, the writer in question, because she did add so many of her own elements to the story and used his writing in terms of metaphor, when he originally wrote it to be literal, but I can safely say, that most bloggers wouldn't appreciate their work being stolen from them.

This particular story has received so much attention because of the age of the writer, her perceived great literary voice, and the simple fact that “Axolotl Roadkill” has been printed 100,000 times. Oh, and possibly the fact that the book is about sex and drugs, which is what everybody wants to read about anyway, right?

Just today, I came across an article in Slate considering another plagiarism scandal and listing possible "excuses for plagarism". This plagiarism scandal involves the news media. Apparently, a NYT reporter has been “lifting” from the Wall Street Journal. He has since apologized and claims that “he had not knowingly plagiarized”,  meaning instead that he had “accidentally” used parts of the story unknowingly or something along those lines.

Personally, I think a lot of plagiarism is just carelessness.

I am not a journalist for the NYT and haven’t ever had a novel published.

I do, however, write several articles each week, and the difference between what I do as a blogger and what they do may just be that I am not afraid to use quotation marks (or use a combination of bolding and italics to indicate a quote) or link to a source. In fact, we are encouraged to link to sources and I am confident that the other writers I “work” with do the same.

As a former English teacher, I routed out student after student for plagiarism with a highly sophisticated tool that you may have heard of: Google Search. Maybe the NYT should try it sometime.