Plagiarism, and how I deal with it

When I wrote my first book, The Leaders Workbook (http://TheLeadersWorkbook.com), it started out as a co-operation with a business parter and friend. My friend was a teacher of entrepreneurship, a developer of mentor programs, as well as an author. I looked to him as someone with expertise, knowledge and understanding of how to write books.

We worked out the concept, decided for a structure, and started to write. Me being me, I said the book must be written in English, and that there will be no compromise on quality. Now, my friends English skills were not something to brag about, and after some trial and error, we agreed that he would write in Norwegian, and I would translate to English as soon as I had finished writing my part.

One day we were working together, he showed me a couple of chapters he had written. These chapters were of very high quality - both from a language perspective, and from a content perspective. Right to the point, discussing the very topic. Knowing what he had produced previously, I was very positively surprised, and let him know that I liked the writings very much. I told him that these only need translation, no re-writing, as most of his other work would require.

My friend said thank you and accepted my honest praise.

We kept on working for some time, and when I needed a break, I picked up one of the magazines he had laying in his office. Leaning back, sipping on a cup of tea, I indulged myself to being inspired by the magazine.
In the magazine was an article about one of the topics we were having in the book, so I started to read it. I must have come half way through the article before all my alarm bells sounded. Loud and clear. To have my suspicions verified, I went over to fetch the chapters he had proposed for the book. It took only a few minutes to verify that both the chapters were direct rip-offs of two different articles in the magazine.

Upon confrontation of the fact, he just said «You know Kai, this is how I work».

I was shocked. It did take a while for me to actually admit that I was shocked. This was not the first time we had the same talk - being a teacher in a Norwegian school, you can «copy» parts of publications for use in the teaching. And I had explained, at least in my opinion, loud and clear that in a book, copying is not something we can accept.

Plagiarism, or the act of presenting someone else’s work as your own, is illegal and considered unethical in most cultures. If you have ever been an academic, you know that your thesis work should state references to almost any source that you have been in touch with during your thesis work. The collection of references can be tedious work. The adding of foot notes and quotes can seem like a waste of time.

It is not.

Using someone else’s work, and promote it as your own, is wrong. Most of us will agree on that. Some, though, seem to have the idea that it is wrong only when someone else does it. My friend would be very angry if someone would use even small parts of his book on mentoring without actually buying the book. Yet, he saw nothing wrong in ripping off someone else’s articles, and present them to me as his own.

I have no explanation to this behavior, if you have, please share in the comments below. What I do know, is that I strongly disagree with such methods. It may slow me down in my writing, the fact that I force myself to write each word by myself, and that I try to add references when relevant and when using something from someone else. Of course, I may fail to add all references from time to time. I am human, after all. But if I discover an error, I do my best to fix it.

Like I did with my second book - The Cloud Security Rules (http://thecloudsecurityrules.com) - when we discovered that one of the co-authors had delivered content that was clearly plagiarized, we immediately pulled the book from the market, and started a re-editing process to change the affected materials and add non-plagiarized content instead.

Today, my friend and business partner no longer is a friend of mine, nor a business partner of mine. I decided that the quality of his work was not at the level I wanted, and I did not want to risk that some of the content of the book would have content copied from somewhere else. After all, I plan to sell a million copies, so if there is something stolen in it, someone is bound to find it. Besides, it is just wrong. And illegal.

So, I pulled him off the project, explaining my point of view. I was then totally surprised to discover his anger, his rage towards me. Perhaps I am naïve, perhaps I just think people are better than some turn out to be. But his anger threw me off my feet.
I thought he would calm down, and accept the choice I made. I thought he would be possible to reason with.

A few weeks later, we decide to meet. A meeting where he accuses me of stealing from him. He has the nerve to accuse me of ripping off content he wrote, and use it in my book. I guess I should have seen this coming, and have been prepared for such allegations. I explained to him that non of his content had made the book (I did not tell him that it was because I found it too sloppy, and that I did not want to spend my time rewriting it all), and that I could not take the risk of being associated with (his) plagiarism.

I even invited him to go through the whole book, so he could see with his own eyes that the content was mine, entirely. And I said that if he found anything that he had written in there, I would be happy to add his name as author. Of course he could not find such content. He knew, I knew. And I thought the problem was solved.

Only to discover some months later that the same friend and business partner (past sense by now, mind you!) was talking to my other friends, partners and network, telling them I had ripped off his book. I only learned about this because some of my friends are more honest than others. And they came to me, and asked for my point of view, my story.

I learned something very important in this process. Not all your friends will stay by your side when you need them. Some will actually stab you in the back instead. It may be my selection of friends. Only a handful actually came to me with the story. Most just accepted the allegations at face value, and did not even bother to contact me.

For the past year, I tried to keep the story of my previous friend close, thinking I would try not to ruin his life even if he obviously does his best to make mine a challenge. Then, last week, another co-author of mine was caught cheating, and I felt the whole story come crashing down again. I made a post earlier this week explaining The Roer Group view on plagiarism, and I realized I also had to share this story. You will notice that I have not named my previous friend, knowing that those of you who know me will have no hard time figuring out who he is. When you do, please keep it to yourself. I do not want to see a flame war. I just want to share my side of the story, and my take in plagiarism.

I am no fan of plagiarism. Just like I am no fan of unethical behavior. I do what I do because I believe it is possible to change the world into an even better place. I believe there is hope also for those who are too afraid to confront and investigate. While I wait for them to wake up, I weep. Make no mistake, it does hurt to have your integrity questioned. And even more so when people you consider close, question you.