Can You Self-Plagiarize?
And what are the consequences, if you can.
Plagiarism has been on my mind this week. After looking into the Jayson Blair scandal, it got me to wondering about some other ways that work can be copied. One question kept coming back to my brain:
Can you actually plagiarize yourself?
There is a contingent of people who say that it is impossible for an author or creator to plagiarize themselves. The reasoning these people use is that the definition of plagiarism says that it’s the act of stealing/copying someone else’s work.
It’s a fair, if flawed argument.
Where does the flaw come in? It depends on who controls the copyright to the piece in question. Most large publications insist that they own the copyright to the material published on their platform.
So, if an author published a piece in The New York Times or Vanity Fair, those publications would control the copyright. The same goes for traditional publishing houses and books.
In that case, yes, you can plagiarize yourself. And there can be consequences for it. Publications can drop a writer if they are found to be reusing works that are owned by someone else.
Jonah Lehrer reused samples of his writing across some very large publications. When the editors discovered what he had done, they sat down with him and talked to him about the self plagiarism.
He apologized for what happened. And those sites still show his work; however, there are editors' notes detailing the plagiarism that occurred.
And his book publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, told The New York Times: “[Lehrer] owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work."
How does that work?
Details of the deals Lehrer worked out with the various publications he worked with are not public knowledge. However, given the stance of his publisher, an educated guess would be that he took a lower fee in exchange for maintaining his copyright on the articles he wrote.
Not unlike what most indie authors do. Many work on multiple platforms like Medium, Substack, Vocal, et al. This allows the copyright to stay with the author and in theory gives permission for them to repost their material on various sites.
But there can be unseen or unintended consequences.
Google will see that there are multiple articles with the same verbiage and begin to suppress the SEO of the author and the platform they are on. The search engine will flag these posts as plagiarism and won’t show them in search results.
Which hurts the income of the writer.
What some writers have started doing is simply rewording their articles. This shows it as fresh and helps drive traffic to their profiles on various platforms. It seems to be a win/win all the way around.
Except some platforms are getting wise to what is happening. They are asking writers to label if something was posted on another platform so that the audience is aware that it is available somewhere else.
And they can kick writers off for failure to comply.
What is the correct answer?
Facebook creators are shown the correct way to make content for the Meta sites. That organization does not want anything that is posted on any other social media platform, if at all possible. Sure, some bigger creators will still share their videos or statuses on Facebook and all, but they will also say that their content is suppressed on the platforms.
Medium has a rule that if a writer reposts an essay or article that was already published, it needs to be completely rewritten. Failure to do so can result in them terminating that person’s profile. There was some pushback from writers initially but the policy held firm.
What can writers and creators do to prevent this?
One idea is to work on different genres or niches on different platforms. Though, this is not always entirely possible for everyone.
Another is to break up the idea and spread it across the platforms. This works well with listicles and humor pieces. It can be done to brilliant effect and can create fresh content for everyone involved.
The last idea is to just label the content as published somewhere else. While the suppression may hurt Google traffic, that doesn’t mean a writer/creator’s fans won’t still find it and enjoy.
What do you think? Can you self plagiarize? And how do you handle that situation?
It's such a maze really. And not only that, we have to navigate international laws, such as what is classified as fair use, etc. I find I enjoy rewriting my articles anyway, combining them with fresh research.