Cristiane Serruya Is a Copyright Infringer, a Plagiarist, and an Idiot | Hacker News Reader

Cristiane Serruya Is a Copyright Infringer, a Plagiarist, and an Idiot

courtneymilan.com

25 pointsilamont15 comments

Serruya has been replying on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/CrisSerruya/status/1097903134108774403

Seems to place the blame on a ghostwriter hired from Fiverr:

> I'm deeply sorry. I'm taking down works I did with Fiverr ghostwriter that contains plagiarism. B assured I'll fix this w/ damaged authors. I'll not eschew my responsibility + I'll prove my innocence since my entire career is in peril @courtneymilan @romancewriters @TessaDare

If your career as a writer depends on paying strangers rock bottom amounts to write stuff that you then publish under your own name, it deserves to be in peril.

I hope she expands on her use of Fiverr writers. I wonder what her workflow is with them if it's like she provides an overall theme and plot, or if the whole thing is just written by a ghostwriter. I can't imagine putting something so core to my work into the hands of an underpaid gig-economy worker.

Or that she hired ghost writers is just a desperate attempt to shift responsibility. She probably won't publish much under her real name, but I guess she will continue under aliases.

On further investigation, the author has a, shall we say, distinguished legal career.

Of all the people to plagiarize from, picking the one that was a professor of IP law at a law school and has clerked for two members of the supreme court seems catastrophically stupid.

The site appears to be down. Here is an archive.org copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219080209/http://www.courtn...

I don't understand why someone would believe they'd get away with such blatant plagiarism.

I've heard of programs that look for plagiarism in academic papers, but is there such a beast for works of fiction? If not, perhaps there should be...

Reading the examples on that blog post, it almost seems like someone has trained an ML to turn out dreck and is hiring it out on fiverr as a ghost writer.

Serruya is also a lawyer, according to her Twitter bio.

Separately, I find it amazing that Amazon doesn't perform some sort of plagiarism check on all ebooks uploaded to the Kindle platform. Yes, I know such systems can be fooled and there are a lot of false positives (or legitimate fair use/PD scenarios) but something like this would have at least been caught at a much earlier stage.

This also surprises me. If for no other reason than I would imagine that authors who are not guilty of plagiarism are interested to some degree in verifying that their original works do not contain anything that could look like plagiarism.

Wow, allegedly plagiarizing more than one author: http://www.pajiba.com/miscellaneous/romance-author-cristiane...

Why does a writer outsource writing?

Romance novel authors aren't D'Arrigo taking 25 years to write Horcynus Orca. Their reading public isn't highly discerning about the quality of the prose (while often having exacting requirements regarding the specifics of the content), so it probably makes economic sense to publish drivel as fast as possible.

Because the name is a brand that sells books so long as the books are good enough.

I find it hard to believe there is any novelty in romance category to begin with. I bet she is not the first one and won't be the last. Better to leave this category into hands of ML.

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