When Should Plagiarism Disappear?

According to a recent article by Zach Zamora at ScreenRant, the manga world has been rocked by a serious plagiarism accusation.

The story involves the one-off Manga Sayonara Wonder Rabbit by author Yuki Komuro, published on November 21, 2024. Shortly after its publication, readers noticed similarities between it and a 2017 American film, Brigsby Bear. 

According to the Japanese publication Jisin, Sayonara Wonder Rabbit is about a reclusive girl named Luna who loves a show called Wonder Rabbit. However, after she loses her parents in an accident, she learns that her parents created the show specifically for her and that it doesn’t exist outside of her home.

Brigsby Bear, on the other hand, features a young man who has lived in an underground shelter for 25 years. His only media is a TV show called Brigsby Bear. However, he learns his parents aren’t his real parents and that they kidnapped him as a baby. After they are arrested, he learns Brigsby Bear also doesn’t exist outside his home and was created by his (fake) parents just for him. 

Note: I used automated translation on the Jisin article, from which these descriptions originate. As such, the descriptions may be off slightly.

Shueisha, the publisher of Sayonara White Rabbit, quickly removed the manga from its Tonari Young Jump online magazine. According to the publisher, they determined that the editorial department had not adequately vetted the work and decided to remove it. They declined to discuss the criteria used for the decision.

With that, Sayonara White Rabbit was removed entirely. Other than pirated copies, there is no way to read the work. 

But is that the best response? Should plagiarized works simply disappear? While that’s often the result, there are arguments to be made for preserving, at least in some capacity, works of plagiarism.

How to Respond to Plagiarism

Note: Different publications have different rules. This section speaks more to general practices and not any particular case. 

Once authority figures have determined that a work is plagiarized, the next question is how to respond. This includes what action to take against the author and what to do with the work itself.

On the latter point, different fields have different approaches. 

In scholarly publishing, plagiarized works are (ideally) either corrected or retracted. If they are retracted, they don’t simply disappear. They remain online with a prominent retraction statement and a clear indication that they have been retracted on future article downloads. 

This means that others can still see the article and even cite it in some instances (though it is rarely advisable). 

Journalism follows a similar approach. Newspapers and other publications routinely place editor’s notes and clarifications on plagiarized articles but rarely remove them completely.

In both cases, this is about preserving transparency. If the plagiarized content is removed, it removes information from the public record. This, in general, is seen as unacceptable and as doing more harm than good.

However, things change when we look at more creative fields. For example, Kaava Viswanathan had her hit book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, pulled from shelves following a plagiarism scandal. 

Editors or authors routinely remove films, photographs and other media from circulation after a plagiarism allegation.

The reasons for this are complicated, but much of it concerns copyright.

The Intersection of Copyright and Plagiarism

To be clear, there are many reasons why creative and fictional works are more likely to be withdrawn following plagiarism allegations. There is less concern about maintaining the public record. There is a greater emphasis on originality. And audience expectations are different.

However, copyright also plays a key role. The more creative and expressive a work is, the more copyright protection it enjoys. This increases the risk of a copyright infringement lawsuit in those fields.

That risk is also increased by the norms in those fields. Academic publishers rarely, if ever, sue another for copyright infringement in a plagiarized article. Even if the copying crosses into copyright infringement, it seldom becomes a legal case.

The same is true for news publications. A plagiarizing reporter is rarely a cause for a copyright lawsuit. Instead, news organizations prefer to fight wholesale copying and use of their work, such as by scrapers and/or AI companies.

However, artists, musicians and filmmakers routinely face lawsuits over allegations of copyright infringement. Though the severity of these cases varies wildly, they are much more common.

Publishers, editors and authors are tasked with mitigating these risks. Once plagiarism rising to the level of copyright infringement is discovered, removing it is usually the best option.

To be clear, this makes sense and is often best for all directly involved. But what’s best for the public? As we saw with the film Nosferatu, removing a work from distribution can have dire consequences down the road. A key piece of cinema history was nearly lost, and many others have been lost.

While some have attempted to address this by granting libraries and archives greater copyright exemptions, this doesn’t change the fact that once some works are gone, they are erased.

That may be a cultural loss as even a plagiarized work can have merit and benefit.

Bottom Line

Usually, I don’t like raising a question without having at least some form of an answer. But I don’t have one here.

My sympathies automatically lie with the victims of plagiarism. Removing plagiarized works is often best for them and does the most to rectify the situation. However, that’s not always the case; sometimes, alternate resolutions can make everyone happier.

But that doesn’t mean I want to take removing the work off the table. Plagiarism is serious and needs to have serious consequences for creators who engage in it and editors who enable it.

However, a way needs to be found to ensure that plagiarized works are preserved without rewarding the act of plagiarism. I don’t know whether it involves a neutral party that stores the work for researchers to access (similar to what libraries do in other spaces) or something else altogether.

There has to be a way to balance punishing plagiarism, supporting victims and preserving history.

It’s not easy, but it is important to at least try.