11 ms·
I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist
- mandmandam 3y agoSeems like someone could write a script that analyses a massive book torrent library to highlight plagiarism like this. Am a little surprised it hasn't been done yet tbh. Might be a fun project.
- unwind 3y agoI know there are systems like that for academia, student papers etc.
- taspeotis 3y ago(2023)
- mtmail 3y agoOne month ago (Dec/20th 2023)
- donatj 3y agoI’ve never understood why people on Hacker News feel the need to make these year comments? Particularly in cases like this where it adds nothing at all to the conversation. It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”? Beyond that, everything on that page has explicit exact dates. It’s Reddit. We can read the actual date and not just the year ourselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 3y agoIt's HN's mods' convention to tag articles in that style [0]. If we want to have a conversation about every eccentric thing HN's mods do to this site, and whether they make sense or not, we'd be talking for a long time. (That person's comment was benign, in my opinion, because the mods are going to manually hide this subthread anyway—it's a minor and short-lived distraction. It's a pretty common interaction on HN: there's a meta-discussion about the HN submission itself, "please edit the title / please change the URL to this one / please whatever", and 'dang steps in and says "Thanks! Fixed", and then he kills the subthread because it's no longer relevant. I feel this status quo is basically okay?) [0] Many examples, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=2023&dateStart=1704103200&dateEnd=1735700000&dateRange=custom&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=2023&dateStart=1704103200&date...
- taspeotis 3y agoIt was on the front page of Reddit a month ago. Why would it be interesting to read again one month later? This is Hacker News, not Hacker Olds.
- AlexeyBelov 3y agoI can't even tell if this is serious or a joke.
- Zandikar 3y agoNormally I'd complain about linking to reddit, but there's a level of rigor here that I think is worthy of attention and discussion. I'm not a mod or anything, but I've seen blog posts here with less effort and citation than this hit the front page all the time. It's also about a month old according to the reddit timestamps, so the discussion isn't really ongoing there (Though of course this hitting HN could revive it I suppose). Not OP. Just food for thought.
- rthkljlkrj 3y ago[dead]
- hnarn 3y agoStrictly speaking, linking to reddit isn’t necessary since it was archived around a month ago when it was published: http://archive.today/8gOZB http://archive.today/8gOZB
- isoprophlex 3y agoWhoa, that's thorough. Damning, easily replicable, overwhelming evidence that this guy is indeed a fraud. > He runs the Self Publishing Formula course and podcast, he talks at the 20BooksTo50K conference in Vegas, and he’s part of a new initiative called Fuse Publishing. He’s a pretty big deal in self-publishing, so what he does reflects on self-publishing as a whole. Like instagram "buy my course to learn how I got rich" finance-influencers, the same old quip seemingly applies to self-publishing..: don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are.
- gigatexal 3y agoOh these guys are so exhausting. My favorite was Grant Cardone — the real estate mogul who’s said he’d be ashamed if he made 400k a year. All of them and his ilk peddling this you can get rich fast stuff are disgusting.
- philshem 3y agoThis isn’t one of those get-rich-quick schemes. But guess what? I did! (An old TV ad that is etched into my memory)
- isoprophlex 3y agoHilariously, he's right in the strict sense of the word. For the average Joe, a get-rich-quick scheme doesn't get them rich quickly..!
- plagiarist 3y agoAren't some of these schemes actually possible but only if you are a scumbags? It's somehow always get a ballon mortgage to buy multi-family housing and raise the rents by 100%, or buy dilapidated shacks and get section 8 money while putting nothing in to improve squalid conditions.
- gigatexal 3y agoExactly. And especially with real estate and landording the quickest schemes are the most immoral / shady.
- gigatexal 3y agoRather compelling to me too. Let’s see what the author says in response.
- hayleox 3y agoThis was first posted to Reddit on December 20. As best as I can tell, Dawson hasn't made any public reply. He hasn't tweeted since December 8 (https://twitter.com/pbackwriter https://twitter.com/pbackwriter). Here's someone else who was trying to find a reply two weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stevemosby/status/1743002959925883073 https://twitter.com/stevemosby/status/1743002959925883073
- gigatexal 3y agoI wonder, now, how many “authors” in the same space or similar spaces, are guilty of the same thing? I wonder how widespread this all is
- keepamovin 3y agoAll the pulp greats are. Tarantino just embraced this and lifted it, p-adic style, to art. Good artists borrow, you know the rest la hahaha :)
- perihelions 3y agoOff-topic—what does "p-adic style" mean in this sentence? Is it a math pun?
- keepamovin 3y agoIn the context of p-adic numbers and p-adic analysis, "lifting" generally refers to a process where an object defined in a simpler or more restricted setting (like modulo a power of a prime number) is extended or 'lifted' to a more complex or complete setting (like the p-adic numbers).
- tyingq 3y ago"In number theory, given a prime number p, the p-adic numbers form an extension of the rational numbers which is distinct from the real numbers, though with some similar properties"
- karencarits 3y agoRelated: the Norwegian press is now examining the theses of Norwegian ministers and politicians after a Twitter/x user found plagiarism in the Master's thesis of the Minister of Science - she had to go on the hour and may lose her degree. Other ministers are now being scrutinized So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
- ramraj07 3y agoGood. While this presenteistic witch hunt looks like a bit much, I feel finding and shaming plagiarists is a great idea. I’ve known a few from my academic life including some of the smartest people I worked with. Thus it’s no measure of intellectual frailty. Just a moral one. Any public figure is totally justified to be shamed for plagiarism IMO.
- 7thaccount 3y agoDid they find real plagiarism that was obviously fraudulent or did someone cite an author improperly. I know in academic circles it's basically the same, but some things I've seen recently accusing people of plagiarism are just draconian IMO like they cited the person, but screwed up the quotes somehow.
- karencarits 3y agoMore than 20% of her thesis was copied almost verbatim from other sources [1], including typos [2], mostly without citation. This wasn't discovered at the time (2014) What's more - self-plagiarism has been a huge topic in the university sector and the Minister has been quite strict towards students re-using text on exams without citation (to their own previous exams), with several cases going to the court. [1] https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/wA1Kvo/saa-mye-av-sandra-borchs-masteroppgave-er-kopiert https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/wA1Kvo/saa-mye-av-sandra-bor... [2] https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/y6Wzw2/deler-av-forskningsministerens-masteroppgave-identisk-med-tidligere-studenters-tekster https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/y6Wzw2/deler-av-forskningsminis...
- 7thaccount 3y ago
- iLoveOncall 3y agoI have no idea about publishing or book writing or anything, so please enlighten me, but how much of that is plagiarism and how much of that is what would be called "fair use" in other domains? The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized. Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using this? Would that be plagiarism too?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asadotzler 3y agoThere is no fair use carve out for stealing sentences from other books to put in your books to sell for a profit. If he wasn't selling it, maybe.
- lencastre 3y agowikipedia articla here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dawson_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dawson_(writer)
- isoprophlex 3y ago> In 2020, Dawson's book The Cleaner reached number 8 in the Hardback Fiction section of The Sunday Times' bestseller list after he purchased 400 copies of the book, seeing it to have previously been in position number 13 The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!
- jspash 3y agoIs that all it takes to get from 13 to 8!? I guess nobody reads anymore.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThat sounds more serious. That's literally fraud, unlike taking random sentences you liked from other books, which is quite benign, in my opinion.
- burnished 3y agoHow is that fraud?
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoArtificially inflating sales numbers to get higher on bestseller lists seems like an intentional deception to secure unfair gain. How is that not fraud?
- tyingq 3y agoThere's no automatic connection from immoral to illegal. I can think of lots of intentional deception that secures unfair gain that is not illegal.
- dan-robertson 3y agoWhat strikes me from the examples in the OP is that this method of plagiarism doesn’t seem very easy. How would you produce this kind of thing? Eg maybe you read a lot and collect a large number of flowery phrases to use over time or maybe you just pinch phrases you like from whatever you read today. I guess I usually associate plagiarism with less effort than seems to have been required here.
- Erratic6576 3y agoIt’s a collage of flowery phrases taken from here and there. I don’t think it’s plagiarism, because it involves copying larger chunks than a convenient paragraph. Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines. If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google
- MattGaiser 3y agoWhen I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same. Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism. Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.
- nigamanth 3y ago> Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism. As a high school student, this is still true. People literally get suspended/expelled for plagiarism.
- Erratic6576 3y agoPlagiarism is a lack of citing sources. If you haven’t published your school work, you cannot cite yourself. Or can you
- 3y ago
- tompccs 3y agoNot defending the practice, but this guy writes the modern equivalent of pulp fiction. I doubt his readers care much, and he has no publisher to tick off. So what it comes down to is whether or not the people he stole from have a strong case to sue him for copyright infringement.
- w0de0 3y ago“The modern equivalent of pulp fiction…” is pulp fiction. It isn’t some antique term connoting a dross sui generis (as that’s an oxymoron). Pablum is literacy’s unalterable, insuperable attendant.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoIf we're going to be pedantic: No. Pulp fiction was fiction written for the popular pulp magazines of the 1900s through roughly the 1960s. Those magazines don't really exist anymore. The "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- which is to say, the modern equivalent of writing for the pulps, writing to earn a quick buck -- is self-publishing low-effort fare on Kindle Unlimited or something similar. So the guy you were responding to made an apt comparison, IMO. Interestingly, the pulps that are still hanging on -- like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and like various other fiction magazines -- are today characterized by a very high standard of literary quality. On average, miles better than the self-published Kindle Unlimited stuff that rates highly (for some reason) on Amazon.
- w0de0 3y agoThe medium doesn't matter: it's metonymy, pars pro toto. Pulp fiction remains pulp fiction despite literal pulp's retirement.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoI realize well how pedantic I am being, but let's say there are two ways to interpret the term "pulp fiction." (1) As a reference to the pulp stories on newsstand racks in the early-mid 20th century; (2) as you note, as a stand-in for low-quality mass-produced fiction. As such there should be absolutely no issue with somebody saying "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- because they're using the first definition. And it so happens that there is a perfect modern equivalent, which is essentially the author in OP's publishing style.
- holoduke 3y agoI have really never understood how you can fall for people with how to get rich guides. Just do your own thing. Dont look at others too much. Rich wont make you happy anyway.
- bejk22 3y agoWill climbing Maslow's pyramid make you happy?
- rerdavies 3y agoAccording to studies, rich DOES make you happy.[1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-biggest-lie-the-rich-ever-told-that-money-cant-buy-you-happiness https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-bi...
- holoduke 3y agoIf your attitude is to become rich and your current situation is unhappy you wont be happy. You probably wont get rich as well. Wrong attitudes causes a lot of people to remain in their bubble full of jealously behavior. Most rich people dont give a damn about money. They do care about what the do and most have some passion in that. Thats what makes you happy. Not the money.
- drakonka 3y agoI think this one is a little more nuanced than that. I haven't bought any of Dawson's courses and definitely don't plan to now, but this is not a person advertising a "get-rich-quick" scheme. At least not from the impression I've gotten from his podcast. Plenty of people pay for courses, coaching, etc in the tech space. Some of those are scammy, and others are people just legitimately teaching you what they know and not making flowery promises about it. It's the same in other industries. At the same time, I'm always suspicious by default of someone selling these kinds of things, even if they aren't obvious "I will make you rich" claims. If someone seems to be making more income from teaching people to do a thing than actually doing that thing, I get wary. Of course this has nuance as well - I would not be inherently suspicious of a university professor teaching full time. But a self-published author teaching you to run Facebook ads? Good educators _do_ exist in that space, but there needs to be a smell test there. As for "doing your own thing", if you have a goal-oriented reason for doing something you can benefit from seeing how other people successfully did that thing. Sure, you can bumble along on your own "doing your own thing" and eventually luck out or figure it out (or maybe not), but often that tends to be a bad strategy.
- avar 3y agoThe reason they're not accusing them of copyright infringement is presumably that a few sentences allegedly lifted with modifications from other books won't rise to that level. Perhaps UK law is different, but presumably this is just something that might make you unpopular among other authors and literary critics, not a civil or criminal matter.
- rerdavies 3y agoPlagiarism isn't illegal. Copyright infringement is. My guess: the award you get when somebody paraphrases your sentence doesn't cover the cost of litigation.
- hgomersall 3y agoIf this is done in the UK, I'd be very wary of receiving a libel lawsuit. Saying someone is a serial plagiarist is a damning accusation to an author, and examples I read (and TBH I got bored after the first 5 or 6) were rather tenuous: turns of phrase or even just a common adjective-noun pair.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI'm not really convinced by this or several other recent plagiarism scandals. I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so". The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted from that source. The rephrasing doesn't really make sense, which I feel is a bigger crime than lifting a sentence about a music scene from a factual music source to use in a novel.
- MattGaiser 3y agoAt least as how plagiarism was defined for me in school, it is a extremely unforgiving and sensitive standard. Having more than 5 shared words could be plagiarism. An idea taken could be plagiarism. Reusing work between classes that you wrote could be plagiarism. So I guess it depends on how plagiarism is defined and perhaps how we define it should be revisited, but whether it be Christine Gay, Neri Oxman, or Mark Dawson, by that standard they are all caught red handed plagiarists. On the other hand, only in cases of egregious and intentional plagiarism was it considered a major failing.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoThere's a lot of seemingly random instances though, like the first ones which seem oddly specific, flowery descriptions. I'm having a hard time believing those phrases coincidentally came out the same. If we're to believe op who claims they only checked the first couple pages of each book which were free to access, this seems quite damning. Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from stackoverflow. But then again I'm not a writer or expert on this, so I don't know how serious this is compared to a thesis or something where this would already cost you your title.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoI'm not a writer either and I know nothing about plagiarism, but it would seem harsh to judge a novelist by the same standard as an academic. Academics are expected to use citations, not primarily because reusing a 5-word phrase would in itself be problematic, but because it's important for other scientists to be able to trace the idea back to its original context. Novelists on the other hand can't just include a footnote reference at the end of each sentence. And borrowing bits and pieces from other artists is completely normal, even desirable, in many arts. It's how the art form evolves.
- nigamanth 3y agoI still don't see how this is a crime though, I mean sure, he has a sense of inspiration and borrows sentences and phrases from somewhere. But, that doesn't mean the entire plots of his books, or the primary reason they sell is because of him stealing a few sentences from others.
- tussa 3y agoI still don't see how this is a crime though, I mean sure, he has a sense of inspiration and borrows sentences and phrases from somewhere. But, that doesn't mean the entire plots of his books, or the primary reason they sell is because of him stealing a few sentences from others.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spuz 3y agoThere are two questions at play here: 1. How much of other people's work did Mark Dawson plagiarise in each of his books? 2. How much of other people's work would someone need to plagiarise before you consider it to be unethical? We can't answer 1. just yet, but if you are going to make a judgement about him here, at least try to give your answer for 2. The first question is a question of fact and the second question is a question of subjectivity so it's important to separate them out.
- matsemann 3y ago3. How many books have he really sold / people downloaded? Or is it all just a ruse to sell his courses?
- j4yav 3y agoI guess it would be the point where it reaches copyright infringement, since plagiarism isn’t really a thing as far as I know outside of academia.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoGenuinely asking: so if he basically copied the entirety of a Stephen king novel except he switched subject and verb ordering for all of the sentences, you don’t consider it at all unethical?
- j4yav 3y ago
- Havoc 3y agoIf it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play. If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work. Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar. Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
- rerdavies 3y agoNever copy code off stack overflow!
- stemlord 3y agoWhy not? What if the answer is linked to via comment?
- rerdavies 3y agoWhy not? Because, under the terms of use of StackOverflow, all posted code is licensed under a CC BY SA license. You could, I suppose, add a CC BY SA acknowledgement to both StackOverflow, and the person who posted the code for every snippet of code you copy from StackOverflow in license notifications in your own project. You must acknowledge both. But you know you won't. Instead, you will rely on the goodwill of every corporate overlord who will ever own StackOverflow, or inherit its copyright assignments for one Mickey Mouse copyright lifetime. Which seems unwise given that the current corporate overlords don't seem to be trustworthy. And seems particularly unwise now that the Millennial internet is passing away. There was some discussion about allowing authors to post code under a dual-use license when StackoverFlow first converted their terms of use to require CC BY SA licensing. But whenever I add dual-use license notifications to my StackOverflow posts, StackOverflow moderators keep editing it out without my permission! If the answer links to code on another site, then that code isn't covered by the StackOverflow terms of use.
- gumby 3y ago> Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow? How do you know it’s correct for your need without actually reading and internalizing it? It might even be correct…but not compute what you thought it does. Plugging code from SO into your program is like assuming that if your program compiles it must be correct.
- dmurray 3y agoThis is plagiarism by any academic or artistic standard, but as a commercial or legal matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.
- toxik 3y agoPlagiarism is not a crime, it’s an ethical foul.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoDepends on the country
- washadjeffmad 3y agoAlthough, I did find it odd the redditor suggested YouTubers and internet personalities as potential avenues for dissemination, since those are the people who make their careers not off the originality of their content, but their ability to do what Mark Dawson has done: quickly assimilate information and arguments, assemble into compelling narratives, and monetize amplification of engagement through networking and modern mechanisms.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoI wouldn't even be so sure that it qualifies as real academic plagiarism. Some of the recent newsworthy examples from Harvard, for instance, were close to full paragraphs. This example, for instance, is just a phrase and a cliche at that: “A majestic wrought iron gate brought in from a Southern plantation” The accuser can't even get little details like the number of books sold versus downloaded. I've sat on academic committees judging plagiarism and I would not consider these examples to be an obvious case. Not by any means.
- sireat 3y agoIndeed it shows that the author is a hack and would flunk out of an academic program but taking phrases from other authors is inevitable. Writers are allowed to write "It was a dark and a stormy night" over again. Maybe the author liked the expression "fur-trimmed Afghans" - maybe he had the other author's book in front of him maybe he read it the previous day who knows? As long as he is not copying whole pages verbatim and the end product is enjoyable this is not actionable. There are plenty of authors who might be good plotters but stink at character development and vice versa.
- matsemann 3y agoOff topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on the wagon and started checking everyone. A second minister is now also in trouble after not only having plagiarized, but then invented source interviews (aka science fraud).
- nefrix 3y agoI thought this is happening only in Romania, but looks like is been a common practice for politicians all over.
- lr1970 3y agoPlagiarism is a form of lying. Politicians are liars. No surprise that plagiarism in political circles is rampant. Quite often such MS and PhD thesis are written by "ghost writers" for a fee. Politicians are busy advancing their political careers and a degree is needed just for its title not its content. PhD as a modern form of aristocratic title :-)
- eesmith 3y agoThis loses its sting after you realize all fiction is a form of lying. Dante did not, it turns out, actually visit hell. Or, "I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
- _0ffh 3y agoIt seems nowadays a lot of politicians are effectively groomed for such a career from their teens when they see early success in some youth organisation. Sometimes a part of that process is to acquire some kind of academic background for them, justly earned or not. Ed. I checked and both Sandra Borch and Ingvild Kjerkol seem to have been active in party politics from an early age. Exactly fits the mold of groomed career politicians.
- mellosouls 3y agoI've read a couple of Dawson books in the John Milton series but gave up as The Grey Man covers similar ground and seems mostly better crafted. Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.
- smcameron 3y agoAnd The Gray Man (by Mark Greaney) was awful, just a series of events seemingly conceived to demonstrate that the protagonist was indeed a badass, over and over. After awhile, the protagonist became Steven Seagal in my mind's eye. Had to quit before I finished.
- mellosouls 3y agoNo, I disagree - a fine action series on the lines of Jason Bourne; though I listened on Audible which perhaps makes a difference.
- astura 3y agoHmmm... Weird. I originally saw this posted on the writing subreddit[1]. Looks like it picked up more steam on the books subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestselling_author_mark_dawson_plagiarize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestse...
- bhpm 3y agoI’m not sure I understand what Mark Dawson is supposed to have done. There’s only so many ways to say the thing he’s trying to say and fiction authors don’t cite other authors for turns of phrase.
- kamranjon 3y agoOne of the really interesting comments in the books subreddit chain was someone who was kicked out of his 20 books to 50k group. Apparently the group was discussing the idea of using Fivrr to get content for free - I think this context makes some of these examples much more clear - someone strapped for time just copy and pasting whatever they can in to get a gig. Here is the comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/comment/kfep9wj https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/comment/kf...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shantnutiwari 3y agoI dont get it-- he took a few words he liked from other places? While a bit slimy, it's hardly plagiarism.