So the twit got caught plagiarizing from three different authors so far, and her publisher dropped her. Little, Brown canceled its plans to published a revised version of her book, and flat out said it wouldn't publish her second one either. The kid goes to Harvard, so how stupid could she possibly be? Evidently, very.

For one thing, I never believed that ripping off a half dozen passages from a couple of books from the first author could possibly be unintentional. That's just too many for coincidence. The author of those books didn't believe it either, and "Copya Fishystorython" had to issue an apology. But when the ripped off passages from the second and third authors surfaced, even her publisher realized she no longer deserved the benefit of the doubt. And the Bergen Record, for which she did an internship while in high school is going back to check out her articles it published.

I can certainly understand emulating some stylistic elements of a favorite author or two, but not entire scenes or passages. You can't possibly rip off three authors in your chosen genre and hope to get away with it. She didn't, and deservedly so.

This is not the same thing as taking, say, the song lyrics for "Little Red Corvette" and making it "Zippy Blue Chevette" then singing the spoof at a pool party in your backyard for your friends. Doing something like that almost demands that people are familiar with the original song and get the joke and irony in the revised lyrics. Heck, if I was caught doing 95 by a cop, I'd want to be driving a Chevette, because no trooper would ever believe a Chevette could go as fast as his radar gun indicates. Nor is it the same thing as singing "Happy birthday to you. You smell like a zoo. You look pretty nasty, and you act that way too."

I really don't understand this plagiarism thing the kid did with her novel. Seems like it would take me a lot more time and effort to go look up someone else's passages than it would be to simply write my own words.

From the FoxNews article:

In Cabot's "The Princess Diaries," published by HarperCollins, the following passage appears: "There isn't a single inch of me that hasn't been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized. ... Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blond highlights."

In Viswanathan's book, page 59 reads: "Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized. I didn't look a thing like Opal Mehta. Opal Mehta didn't own five pairs of shoes so expensive they could have been traded in for a small sailboat."

Viswanathan could simply have said something like "Opal thought she was living in a scene from the book "The Princess Diaries" in which the heroine got a complete makeover, and no longer recognized herself."