FYI.

Cheers,
       Madiba.

 Johannesburg, South Africa. October 26, 1999

Robbed of my good name

Plagiarism is theft and should be punished as such, argues JOHN MATSHIKIZA

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"WHO steals my purse steals trash," says Iago to Othello: "'tis something,
nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: but he that
filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and
makes me poor indeed."
Theft takes all sorts of forms in this fine South Africa of ours. Mostly it
is theft of physical property. Earlier this year I told the tale of the
doors that had been looted from my house and later showed up in a so-called
antique shop in the Jo'burg suburb of Kensington, waiting to be sold on to
northern suburbs yuppies who didn't care whether they were hot or not, as
long as they looked nice. It is not a new story, and every South African
now seems to accept that this is the way of things around here, with no
prospect of improvement.

But to return to the Iago point of view, there is another sort of theft
that is equally rampant, and is seemingly even more difficult to get
redress for, even in the unlikely event that you should catch the thief
red-handed. This is the question of theft of intellectual property.

What I write belongs to me -- or to whatever journal publishes it. It is my
construct, my angle, the product of whatever knowledge and skills I have
acquired over the years. Because it has my name attached to it, it
represents part of what I am. It is me -- a facet of my "good name". Parts
of it might be informed by or adapted from other sources, but in the making
of it, and in particular because of an identifiable way of writing and
choice of words, it is mine.

In September last year a major story I wrote for the Mail& Guardian on that
schizophrenic Afro-German Riviera city called Cape Town was substantially
recycled, word for word, in a certain well-known Sunday newspaper belonging
to the Independent group. After a meeting with the editor of that paper, my
editor, the thieving scribe and myself, the matter was finally recognised
as being a serious one, the scribe was admonished, and an apology was
printed in the offending publication.

However, the scribe continued to protest her innocence. She was merely
quoting another source, she insisted, and had a tape to prove it. When we
listened to the tape, sure enough, there was a strange voice laboriously
reciting my words. It was a farce. But it was still blatant theft of my
intellectual property.

Two weeks ago, it happened again, and strangely enough, in another rag out
of the Independent Newspapers stable. A journalist on the Pretoria News,
this time, copied substantial chunks word for word from this very column
and peddled them as his own. He was purporting to describe an interview
with Jonathan Morgan, co-ordinator of the project that turned into a book
called Finding Mr Madini, but instead of doing his own thorough interview,
he took my published words and put them into Morgan's mouth. It was the
appalled Morgan himself who drew my attention to this travesty when he
chanced upon a copy of the issue that contained the offending piece.

Thus far there has been no reaction to a lawyer's letter sent to the editor
of the Pretoria News, and as far as I can tell Craig Canavan, the thieving
hack in question, is probably still going gaily about his business.

Should these little thefts be taken as a compliment to my writing? They
would be if I was credited, which is not the case. They are a cause of
severe annoyance.

Plagiarism is a grey area of public thieving that has little legal
protection in this country: in Europe and the United States this kind of
larceny is punished with hefty fines. Here, the general attitude seems to
be, "That's how it goes, just grin and bear it. The Freedom Charter says:
The People Shall Help Themselves."

In the US of A some years ago, Eddie Murphy had to pay substantial damages
to that witty columnist Art Buchwald for stealing his original screenplay
and putting it out as the movie Coming to America, claiming for himself the
credit for the storyline and characters.

In England, Beatle George Harrison was embarrassed to find that My Sweet
Lord, a song he thought he'd written, was actually someone else's
composition that he had wittingly or unwittingly copied. The latter case is
where things go a bit grey, since it's hard stop a tune or an idea you
heard somewhere lodging itself in your brain, and coming out years later as
your own.

But these cases of blatant theft from one newspaper to another are
different, because the appropriation is done completely without
sophistication. Unlike Antjie Krog's tale of that fellow in the Boer War
who stole another fellow's horse and thought he could get away with it by
dyeing it a different colour with shoe polish, these untalented individuals
don't even try to make the pilfered material look as if it's their own.
They see someone else's phrase, sentence or even a whole paragraph, decide
they like it, and drop it wholesale (and out of rhythm) into what they have
been struggling to write.

I think it's time that a precedent was set in this lawless country, and
that someone was made to truly compensate for this kind of behaviour, in
the same way that Murphy was obliged to give restitution to Buchwald, even
though it was long after the fact. I'm checking out my options, but this
time round I'm not prepared to take it lying down.

-- The Mail & Guardian, October 19, 1999.
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