Whoa, that's thorough. Damning, easily replicable, overwhelming evidence that this guy is indeed a fraud.<p>> 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.<p>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.
This is plagiarism by any <i>academic</i> or <i>artistic</i> standard, but as a <i>commercial</i> or <i>legal</i> matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.
What 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.
I'm not really convinced by this or several other recent plagiarism scandals.<p>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".<p>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.
Normally 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).<p>Not OP. Just food for thought.
Off 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.<p>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).
If it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play.<p>If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work.<p>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.<p>Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
Not 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.
Related: 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<p>So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
The 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.<p>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.
I 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.
One 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: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/comment/kfep9wj" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/comment/kf...</a>
I've read a couple of Dawson books in the <i>John Milton</i> series but gave up as <i>The Grey Man</i> covers similar ground and seems mostly better crafted.<p>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.
Seems like someone could write a script that analyses a massive book torrent library to highlight plagiarism like this.<p>Am a little surprised it hasn't been done yet tbh. Might be a fun project.
I 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?<p>The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized.<p>Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using this? Would that be plagiarism too?
I 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.
Hmmm... Weird.<p>I originally saw this posted on the writing subreddit[1]. Looks like it picked up more steam on the books subreddit.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestselling_author_mark_dawson_plagiarize/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestse...</a>
I’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.
I 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.