There is much to be said for the movement under way among leading South African media players to make plagiarism not only an acceptable practice in local journalism, but to ensure that it is also legal.
The stimulating argument being put forward by leading newspaper and magazine editors is that making plagiarism an ‘unforgivable sin” also tends to restrict the reproduction of ‘imaginative and interesting” material from international sources and which otherwise might not be printed at all. The editors say that the South African public, after long isolation under the apartheid regime, deserves to be exposed to the best that the wider world has to offer.
For these and similar reasons, the South African National Editors’ Forum has given its qualified blessing to the idea. A spokesperson for the forum said that ‘the great overblown media hoo-ha over Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s so-called pirating of material shoved us back on our heels. We couldn’t take proper stock until it had all died down. So Darrel made a few innocent and entirely coincidental paraphrases of a Bill Bryson book he’d read years ago. The net result was that a lot more people got to know and enjoy Bill Bryson’s unique work.”
This argument was backed, particularly robustly, by the editors of the papers where Bristow-Bovey’s work used to appear and which explains why they were so reluctant to cancel his brilliant columns. Quoted in an article published on the website run by the Wits Journalism Programme, Bristow-Bovey says he wouldn’t have lost his columns but for envious fellow columnists fanning the flames. Later, in the same article, Bristow-Bovey states that The Sunday Independent editor dropped his column ‘promising to pick it up again when the fuss had died down”. This surely underwrites the wisdom of the wise old proverb about dogs always coming back to their own vomit.
It is understood that formal approaches are being made to the justice department so that a reappraisal of existing laws relating to copyright and parallel matters can be made. While the existing South African laws relating to copyright are both sound and wide-ranging, they need to be very specific if they are going to categorise plagiarism as a legitimate exercise in journalism and broadcasting. Perhaps South Africa could pioneer a new type of ‘generic” journalism; something that replicates all the benefits of the expensive and patented original by means of acceptable cheap imitations. Bristow-Bovey should take a lot of the credit for having shown how this can be done.
In any event, we can’t have a system whereby every journalist is terrified to write something which, by nothing but pure coincidence, is exactly the same as some writer in the United States or England. These sort of strictures would be most unfair to local talent and could lead to a loss in jobs.