Internet, plagiarism and Kaavya Viswanathan

In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice from NYTimes

Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.

But last week, not just petty gadflies fueled by schadenfreude and bloodlust (though there was that), but also armchair defense attorneys and the merely curious were discussing the books — as well as whether Ms. Viswanathan's status as a) immigrant, b) minority, c) child of privilege or d) hottie — played a role in her treatment.

Many online commentators detected an underlying racism, for instance, in even good-natured rants — perhaps typified by Gawker's cheeky (and occasionally misinterpreted) comment on Tuesday: "Isn't it kind of awesome to see an overachieving Indian kid finally do something wrong?"

But others pointed to the fact that Ms. Viswanathan had only one week earlier told The Newark Star-Ledger that "nothing I read gave me the inspiration" for the novel, but now, under scrutiny, suddenly recalled adoring Ms. McCafferty's books and claimed to have unconsciously channeled them. Given that, her critics charged, she was being treated better than other fabulists of late.

"If Viswanathan weren't young, attractive and a student at the best brand name in higher education, wouldn't she be James Frey II?" Jane Genova, a marketing consultant in Connecticut, wrote on her blog (janegenova.com) on Thursday. "You bet," she continued. "The pile-on would have been fast and massive."

But what if she had been deaf and blind?

That was a question raised in a discussion at Metafilter, where Andrew Shalit, in a defense of Ms. Viswanathan's claim of unconscious copying, pointed to the Helen Keller archives at the Web site for the American Foundation for the Blind.

There, in her autobiography "The Story of My Life," Ms. Keller describes how, at age 12, she wrote a story — "The Frost King" — that created her own publishing scandal.

"Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports," Ms. Keller wrote (Chapter 14 at afb.org/mylife). "This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism."

It was surmised that Ms. Keller must have heard Ms. Canby's story read to her as a child and unconsciously retold the story years later as her own, an event that left her in dread of trying to write anything original again.

Back at Metafilter, Keith M. Ellis wondered if Ms. Keller would have received a fair shake in the rush to judgment that is now de rigueur in the Internet age.

"It seems to me we give zero consideration to the possibility that it might be plagiarism, but unintentional," Mr. Ellis wrote, adding: "If we changed the name and obscured the disability-indicating details, would we still be willing to consider innocence?"

A piercing question, that — though so, too, is whether Ms. Viswanathan's case warrants a comparison to Ms. Keller's. And as mercenaries stampeded to eBay to peddle copies of Ms. Viswanathan's suddenly scarce book (a first edition was selling for $80 on Friday), the hope for any larger lessons in the "Opal" episode began to dim. Yet here, too, the Internet presented something of a solution.