It all goes back to what I always say. Don't talk to other students when you are in graduate school.

Don't even maintain an internal monolog.

What about an internal weblog?

That's fine, because people can plagiarize that.

I am regularly amused by society's frank admission that white men are beyond correction or reform, and its growing frustration with white women, who respond by trying harder but worse.

Sexism is bad. But occasionally hilarious.

Obviously, the best way to donate a kidney is to drop it off at the recipient's house without them seeing you.

Can I hate everyone? The kidney donor appears to be an irritating narcissist (although, you know, at least she channeled her narcissism into a genuine good deed) and a frivolous litigant -- right or wrong about the plagiarism, suing over it when there's no real money at stake makes you a maniac. The writer is a plagiarist and a giant jerk.

The Reddit invocation ESH (Everybody Sucks Here) seems apropos. But Dorland more.

Apparently Dorland actually pitched this story to the NYT, thinking she'd be gloriously vindicated.

I think Dorland's crazier and more annoying. I think the writer (is it Larson?) is meaner and more dishonest. Which nets out to worse, I don't know.

What I saw was a screenshoit indicating that "writer" Larson thinks Moby Dick is not about whales.
Regardless of personality, giving a kidney to a stranger is kind and requires personal sacrifice. Public criticism of such an act, especially if only thinly fictionalized isn't neutral, IMO needs a good reason. An american capable of such a deep mischaracterization of Moby Dick is not capable of recognizing a good reason, at least in general.

Personally, I see no need to read further.

The borrowing of other's public writing to characterize fictional characters who resemble them is an interesting and separate question, IMO better explored with a less morally charged example. Definitely timely, since public social media expression and its social meanings are new.

I thought the whale was a metaphor.

9: I think the barratry is what tips the balance for me. That's a concrete, harmful action, as opposed bad personal attributes.

I always have a relevant comic. (The comic itself, if I recall correctly, inspired by its author's anxiety that friends would recognize themselves in his writing even when that was mostly very different and only using bits of their circumstances as jumping-off points.)

Not the plagiarism/copyright violation and lying to cover it up? I strongly disapprove of pointless litigation, but the lawbreaking that made it technically justified is also a bad thing.

So, giving a kidney seems like a pretty big deal even if it would be better to not go on about it.

The comic seems about right.

Coloring my perception, I personally basically value keeping confidence in private speech pretty highly, even from people I don't especially like. During the spate of divorces that happened here as well as generally, nobody here dished about exes much, even if that's no doubt a potentially great source of closely observed humor.

Creating a public record of plagiarism in this instance seems sane to me. No idea if the donor is nuts or personally unpleasant, but IMO that's unlikely to be relevant.

Yes, I am procrastinating, why?

To switch sides on myself -- it's arguably plagiarism and copyright violation, but it's also very arguably fair use. Larson didn't take something with a commercial value and misappropriate it, she repurposed someone else's non-commercial writing into her own (also financially insignificant) art.

Not the plagiarism/copyright violation and lying to cover it up? I strongly disapprove of pointless litigation, but the lawbreaking that made it technically justified is also a bad thing.

I haven't read the article yet, and from the summary, Larson is going beyond the standard, "All Writers Steal."

But there is large grey area in which writers do steal, but trying to police it would cause more harm than it would cure. (An interesting article about some of those questions in the domain of popular music.)

Let us recall Joan Didion's line: "Writers are always selling someone out." But if you donate a kidney, no one can tell you shit, even if you are a writer.

I recall that line not to excuse any writer, but to condemn them all.

What if you donate a kidney to Trump?

Larson didn't take something with a commercial value and misappropriate it, she repurposed someone else's non-commercial writing into her own (also financially insignificant) art.

I would think commercial value of the original work is something you're obliged to ignore in assessing fair use vs. plagiarism (morally) and vs. copyright violation (legally).

The commercial value of the new, disputed work drawing on the original is relevant - does it compete with the original. Mad Magazine has commercial value, but doesn't compete with the movies and other popular works it parodies. And Larson's work did have commercial value, and in the same arena Dorland was vying in. In theory, her (tiny) success could have taken up the space needed for Dorland's success.

Not hardly in practice, though. I'm not sure how significant this particular plagiarism was, even morally.

I realize my second paragraph in 23 ended up conflicting with my first. Make that "the original work not selling does not automatically make something drawing on it fair use, legally or morally, not necessarily."

Yeah, I don't have a good feel for how the legalities play out -- I can see that there's at least a good faith reason to consider this wrongdoing, but not to have a strong opinion about whether a court would regard it as such.

Anyway, they probably both got the idea from a Simpsons episode.

Thanks to heebie for the post which explained to me why I'd been seeing the phrase "kidney twitter" float by with no other explanation.

Larson's work did have commercial value, and in the same arena Dorland was vying in. In theory, her (tiny) success could have taken up the space needed for Dorland's success.

But Larson's plagiarism was of a letter Dorland had written on Facebook to her kidney recipient, which was never (actually or by intent) in competition with Larson's work in a commercial or artistic arena.

I didn't read the link, because my desire to be annoyed by strangers is at low ebb, but I think anyone who donates a kidney gets to lord it over everyone who hasn't donated a kidney forever and ever. They can begin every conversation with "Remember that time I donated a kidney?" If later they fuck a goat, they can't become the punchline of that joke, because kidney-donating trumps goat-fucking.

28: Does she not have the right to adapt her own work, though? Again, getting very theoretical.

I agree that everyone sucks here, but I'm uncomfortable with how gleefully everyone (on the internet in general, not necessarily here) is mocking Dorland. Sure, she's cringey and annoying and apparently totally un-self-aware, but I don't think those character traits are as bad as being a total asshole, as Larson is.

OTOH, I somewhat agree with Larson re her menus and tombstones defense of "plagiarism." The Washington Post recently ran a story about a Jasper Johns painting that incorporates a kid's anatomical drawing. There was a dispute, which was resolved, and the museum wall text for the piece now notes that it includes a drawing by another person. But that doesn't make the painting any less Jasper Johns' work.

Now I know two things about Jasper Johns, the other being that he said "yoink" on an episode of The Simpsons.

21: Unlike Dorland, ogged has a clear understanding of that which he opposes: The enterprise of professional writing itself.

Didion, of course, was just cribbing from (plagiarizing?) Faulkner:

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

What if the writer's mother would have been able to write a better ode?

Then she should write it! As Larson explained:

Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn't just write about her donation her own way -- "I feel instead of running the race herself, she's standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities," Larson told me

A kidney isn't like pottery. People are only going to tolerate one poem about kidneys.

Then she should write it!

I think simultaneously:
* Copyright exists legally and morally regardless of whether the original author makes full, or any, commercial use of their creation
* In this specific case, it was too small potatoes for suing to make any sense legally, morally, or financially (her legal fees for the first lawsuit were probably ten times the most she could have made off the purloined text!)

From the OP, I think this elides an important point:

Dorland does a little digging, and finds parts of her own Facebook posts have been lifted in earlier edits of the story

Dorland found the prior version -- which contained the single plagiarized paragraph -- after her lawyer had already threatened the Boston Book Festival with a $150,000 lawsuit regarding the publication of an item that did not include that paragraph.

There is literally no evidence presented in the NYT story that any subsequent version plagiarized anything at all, nor is there any evidence that that the early version plagiarized anything beyond that paragraph.

When Dorland finally did sue, she acknowledged Larson's actual perceived infraction: "intentional infliction of emotional distress." That claim was dismissed, but it represents what the whole episode is about: Dorland's hurt feelings; not any impropriety by Larson.

The lawyers here might know better than I do, but I don't think the copyright claim looks much better from the limited information we have. Even in the narrow world of the law, Larson's claim for "defamation and tortious interference" seems a lot more plausible to me.

And contrary to the consensus here, I think the NYT writer persistently shades the facts in favor of Dorland. (But it's a great piece nonetheless.)

Can anyone give me a one sentence reason why I should give half a fuck, and why this requires N-thousand words?

Otherwise, knowing only what I've gotten through second hand twittering, I agree with lb's take in 7. ESH, but kidney lady did a good deed.

Oh. That's different.

To 38.

Well, the prior version was published, not a draft in a drawer. And when someone says "based on everything I know about the situation I believe this was based on my writing" and discovery proves that it was based on their writing, it's weird saying that they were wrong to sue because they couldn't have proven they were right before discovery. (Still wrong to sue because it's all petty nonsense, of course.)

Here's perhaps a more socially relevant question: should states ban "tortious interference" as a cause of action? From what I've read it's a dubious outgrowth of common law usually applied tendentiously, most often as an intimidation tactic by big companies when you did something they didn't like.

This seems like a low point in the lives of everyone involved, including the NYT writer, which seems fitting given that we're at a low point for human existence in general and fiction writing in particular. Writer does seem biased in favor of Dorland but boyyy not by much.

||
Sorry to do this, but is there a standard formula for figuring out what to charge as a contractor vs. your (former) salary as a full-time employee? 120% of hourly wage or similar?
|>

My gut feeling is 150%.

I don't know how to defend that, but 120% is too low.

"The biggest number you can ask for without cracking up" is a version of the advice I've heard. I'd think 2x your old hourly rate at a minimum. You're now the one dealing with all the overhead, health insurance (if this isn't just a total side gig), tax paperwork, etc. and you're the one bearing the risk of not having as much work, plus you have to spend uncompensated time actually setting up the contracts.

Plus no PTO or retirement contributions. That's 20% right there.

Back a million years ago when I was still a bad person, I did a lot of commercial tort litigation, and I saw a lot of claims for tortious interference with contract (usually in litigations between rough peers -- two companies rather than a company and an individual). And they usually got dismissed. But my instinct would be that there's nothing innately wrong with the cause of action, it's just the sort of thing you plead in situations where you're worried that the facts don't fit perfectly into something more specific.

This is a total side gig, although I suppose that could change. Glad to see that 150% seems more than reasonable to request, since that was the first number I thought of; I'll consider how far I want to inflate past that. Thank you!

29 is great. Really good comment, Walt.

(said sincerely)

When I was doing sidework for the same people I was working for at the university, I got 150% of my university salary.

I did math.

49: Do you have a sense of what kind of claim for tortious interference might have typically succeeded on its own merits?

A really good one?

42: There are two claims here by Dorland that I am perhaps inappropriately conflating: Plagiarism and copyright. Dorland accused Larson of plagiarism before possessing any evidence (at least, the NYT describes no such prior evidence).

Now here we're getting over my head, legally speaking, but Dorland issued a legal threat based on copyright, and I don't think her copyright claim is distinct from the plagiarism claim. That is to say, Dorland isn't claiming a violation of a right to privacy or a right to publicity or anything like that. She isn't saying that Larson stole her life story.

Copyright law is about stolen words or stolen factual knowledge, no? It's about information that goes beyond general principles like "people do generous things for complicated reasons" or "people donate kidneys."

Even with the unambiguous evidence of plagiarism, the copyright claim seems borderline frivolous. And without the plagiarism, what evidence does Dorland have of a copyright infraction? I'm guessing the NYT is vague on this because there is no real evidence. (This is what I mean by my guess that the narrative was shaded in Dorland's favor.)

Well, plagiarism isn't a tort, right? If someone plagiarizes you, copyright violation is what you sue for.

I maintain that:

1. Moby Dick isn't about whales.
2. Lawson's story isn't necessarily about Dorland.
3. The NYT story isn't about kidney donation.
4. The NYT writer showed remarkable restraint in eschewing the Dorland/Ahab comparison.

Also 5: The original post here is about kidney donation.

The whale symbolizes rich people with gambling addiction.

Moby Dick is definitely about whales. Whales and Jehovah.

I've never read it, but I thought Moby Dick was about whales the way Animal Farm was about a farm with animals.

How can you not have read it and have that pseud?

I carefully considered the possibility that 58.4 should have been posted on Standpipe's blog, but I really do think the author either missed or chose not to convey that connection.

63: It's stupid long.

No wizards.

56: Dorland wrote a letter about her donation. Larson wrote and published a story including barely altered parts of that letter, and later published a revised version with the letter more thoroughly altered. People have copyright in the letters they write. I'm not sure where the boundaries of fair use fall here, but Larson absolutely incorporated text subject to Dorland's copyright into the first version of her story. Suing over it is petty bullshit and I think ill of Dorland for doing it, but it's not what I'd call frivolous.

44: There's not a good formula that I've found, but double your pay is a reasonable rate. I know that the company bills me out at about 2.5x my salary, since they have admin staff to pay, etc.

I've been puzzled that none of you has said anything about how I donated my leg to the whale. Didn't you all think that magnificent act of generosity was worthy of commendation?

"From hell's heart I gift thee."

67: Yeah, I qualified "frivolous" with "borderline," but the claim (filed after the evidence of plagiarism came to light) didn't get dismissed yet, so that's a point in Dorland's favor.

I also don't know where "fair use" falls here, but if all they have is that paragraph and the general outline of the kidney donation story, my money is on Lawson on the copyright claim.

According to the case law, it's fair use if it involves Jerry Falwell having sex with his mother in an outhouse.

70: I've tried and failed to read Moby Dick several times, but I totally saw that Star Trek movie.

Hell, I have used people's real characters in semi-fictional -- and even factual -- ways they hated. It's not quite clear to me why it should be morally worse to use the words someone has written than the circumstances of their life.

This is a problem much more urgent in journalism than in fiction, though. The great phone hacking scandal that closed the News of the World in this country was triggered by the attempts of Murdoch hacks to access a murdered schoolgirl's voice mails. But I don't know that this was a much greater exploitation of her privacy than the routine monstering that the tabloid press gives to any sufficiently attractive victim of a sufficiently horrible crime, and to their families as well.

Surely the relevant question is whether the Larson story is any good as art or not.

73 who dis?

73 is me, of course.

The Star Trek movie about whales or the one about the guy who hated Kirk and put a worm in the Russian guy?

The Star Trek movie about whales wasn't about whales.

74.3: That's certainly my view. I'm normally all about facts and stuff, but the NYT article was itself a lovely bit of storytelling even if the presentation of the facts, in my opinion, left something to be desired.

I can't remember if that was the one where Spock and Kirk finally fucked. Like Moonlighting, it got worse from that episode on.

The NYT is getting pretty good at turning out culture stories that create intense debate even as everyone involved thinks less of themselves for engaging in it.

I missed the episode where Spock put a worm in Kirk.

Whenever I try to remember Star Trek movies, I always think of Galaxy Quest instead. In my defense, they had some good actors in that.

Dammit, can we change 82 to "politicalfootball"? I'd prefer not to use that alias in this context.

83: The presence of good actors in GQ is the main way you can tell them apart.

They couldn't use a good actor and have people think of Kirk, so they used Tim Allen.

My thanks to The Management.

84: Ha, I thought you were making a fluke joke, along the lines of Opinionated X.

Moby Dick is less like "Animal Farm", and more like "Wrath of Khan" from the point of view Khan's crew. It's not straightforwardly allegorical, in that it really is about whales. (There's whole chapters on the classification of whales into species.) It's just that the characters themselves read greater significance into what they are doing. Ishmael says in the first chapter that he goes whale-killing to stop himself from killing his fellow man (or himself). Ahab states outright that he wants revenge on the whale because he can't get revenge on God.

It's good to set achievable goals.

In a symbolic sense, Moby Dick is not about whales, but in another, larger sense, it is.

Whales are indeed large, but are they larger than symbolism?

92: See chapter 32.

To my mind the most interesting questions about this story have to do with why it was published in the first place. Here are two women, of whom nobody has ever heard. Both are writers, though neither has published a book. One of them believes them to be friends; the other does not. One has a borderline copyright claim relating to a short story the other published in a lit mag (in my view, clear fair use, and no conceivable damages anyway). Outside of the prurient interest in other people's interpersonal drama, who the fuck cares?

I honestly can't help wondering what kompromat Dorland must have on Bob Kolker or his editors at the NYT to have gotten this story to press.

Disclosure: my wife is close with Larson so I have known her slightly for some time; I have therefore seen how Dorland's years-long campaign of harassment -- of which this article is a piece! -- has affected her even as I can see how she (Larson) should've handled the matter differently in the first place.

It's purely about the prurient interest in other people's interpersonal drama. One of the functions of journalism is entertainment, and I think the reaction this story has gotten establishes pretty unambiguously that it's good entertainment.

Is the piece a novel argument against the unity of the virtues?

It's like Jerry Springer, but classy because it's two authors.

Eh, okay, I guess. I think the NYT usually considers itself more highbrow than Jerry Springer, but maybe nowadays it really is all about the clicks.

Also, from the OP, this is surely true:
"Sometimes people kind of suck, and it hurts to find out the ways in which people think you kind of suck. That's my take."

And if you don't want to know the ways in which people think you suck, don't subpoena their group chats!

Reminder to keep your catty group chats on Signal.

It is so much easier to post now that Trump's out of office, because it doesn't feel quite as naive to post something frivolous. I think other outlets are also kind of rebounding like that. This is exactly the dumb kind of piece that lets us all relish in being judgmental that we've been missing for five years.

I can see that. And I don't fault you for posting about it, as it is clearly in the Discourse. I do sort of feel like the Times should use its real estate more responsibly, though. I very much doubt that the story came out the way Dorland wanted or expected but it has nonetheless had the effect of drawing Larson out into the public eye as a spectacle for no good reason.

Eh. She made a public mockery (disguised, but communicated to their mutual friends, and transparent to the target) of a woman who she had allowed to believe she was friendly with. And the woman turned out to be a nutcase who blew it up into a lawsuit and a story in the New York Times.

This seems like the sort of thing that could be avoided by (1) not being cruel, and (2) particularly not to people who are nutty enough to go over the top about it. Or more succinctly, she fucked around and she found out.

94 et seq:

Outside of the prurient interest in other people's interpersonal drama, who the fuck cares?

A whole lot of art could be accurately characterized as prurient interest in other people's interpersonal drama. And what is the use of art?

I do share Osgood's view that this piece is pretty egregiously tilted toward Dorland. Had I written it, I would have framed it around the Moby Dick* quote and Dorland's obsession with Larson. But "bad art friend" is a superior choice, I think, and addresses a much more interesting issue: What do we owe to art and to each other?

*I believe one reviewer in the 1850s asserted that Melville wrote that book only to appeal to people's prurient interest in interspecies drama.

No question that was Dorland's experience of it, and as I said I'm not nominating Larson for sainthood. I think the conclusion that she "fucked around" depends on a certain reading of the facts that is being widely presumed. I don't mean to dive too deeply into the details, but it seems to me that much of the Larson-sucks reaction is rooted in the idea of a relationship between the two women that exited entirely in Dorland's head. I don't think you can blame Larson for that.

1 to 104.last.

A FB post isn't a story. Larson is catty and mean (but who the hell invites a bunch of people to follow a page and then emails them if they don't like their post? WTF Dorland. ) but if she'd lightly edited a letter from an archive that a self-praising kidney donor wrote it would count as 'research' and 'realism.' ("Oh yes, that line is taken from George Washington's actual farewell letter, but we had to change a few things to set it to music.") It's not nice and I'd expect Dorland to be hurt and mad but it really doesn't seem like theft -- she'd be hurt and mad even with (more than) a footnote that said 'this was taken from a real life kidney donor's page of self-congratulation.'

To put it another way: if Dorland were just an acquaintance and not an aspiring writer, it really doesn't look like theft at all.

105: they did not go to school together. They were, per 106.last, exactly mere acquaintances. But your larger point certainly stands!

Seems to me that the punishment Larson is experiencing -- and this NYT story has got to be the pinnacle, since it'll be mentioned in her obituary -- is just ridiculously over the top for the sins she might have committed.

Be nice to people in line at the store, even if they step on your foot, lest they pull out a handgun and shoot you, is what I would say the takeaway is here, if analogies weren't banned.

Only write stories where all your characters are glorious heavenly saints.

There is a limit to how vindicated anyone could possibly feel if it's printed in the goddamn New York Times that "she'd had some bouts of slapping herself." I cannot stop laughing at this terrible thing. It's no laughing matter, obviously-- but my Lord, in the paper of record? Before you've even published a story? I don't think they make antidepressants powerful enough for this scenario.

I have now developed a grave fear that I was the Dorland of my graduate program. I definitely didn't sue anyone, but I also didn't donate a kidney, so it's a wash.

There's no rule that you have to donate your own kidney, if you happen to find one.

You obviously know the people involved at all, and I certainly don't. But the idea that the relationship between them was entirely in Dorland's head seems wrong to me. If someone invites you to join their private FB group for celebrating their good deeds, you don't have to join. If you do join, as Larson did, you seem to me to be affirmatively accepting that you're in a relationship with them where they're going to tell you private stuff, and it's not weird at all that they'd be angry if you used that stuff to put their faults on public display.

Now, it is totally weird and over-the-top for someone to sue you and get an article written about you in the NYT just because you made them angry like that, even if you committed some light lawbreaking in the course of affairs -- Dorland seems to be a nutcase. But you know, if you make people angry, you're running the risk that they'll do something about it.

I also didn't coo over Marilynne Robinson. (What sexist crap, incidentally: imagine anyone writing "she noticed classmates cooing over Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick...") Housekeeping is a refreshingly strange book, though, its virtues mostly inimitable (much like Melville's). It's so slow that I nearly gave up on it multiple times, though.

I like literature with a formula, so I'm mostly reading the Herman Cain Awards.

I know you shouldn't diagnose strangers on the internet, but it seems highly likely that Dorland has some sort of personality disorder. Having a big internet group to make fun the person with a serious mental illness seems kinda gross, and it seems like the NYTimes should at least think about what's going on here.

If this keeps them from writing about Clinton emails, it's worth it.

I feel like we are near comity. Without presuming to speak for Larson I think there is a way to read her denials that the story was about Dorland as an act of kindness: the character in the story is not portrayed in a flattering light, and even if Dorland's behavior inspired that character it seems more generous to say that the actual person is more, and better, than that one act--i.e. that the character isn't the person, and the story isn't about her.

Obviously this is undermined by the use of her exact phrasing in the early version of the story, and I agree that doing more to separate Dorland from the character at the outset would've been better.

I also think there are more minced questions of artistic ethics in the background, but the finer points of how a character can be inspired by an identifiable real person without *being* that person, and how that character's appearance in the story doesn't make the story about that person, have long since gotten clouded over by the sense of personal betrayal and the hardening battle lines once Dorland claimed ownership over the entire topic.

I feel like we are near comity. Without presuming to speak for Larson I think there is a way to read her denials that the story was about Dorland as an act of kindness: the character in the story is not portrayed in a flattering light, and even if Dorland's behavior inspired that character it seems more generous to say that the actual person is more, and better, than that one act--i.e. that the character isn't the person, and the story isn't about her.

Obviously this is undermined by the use of her exact phrasing in the early version of the story, and I agree that doing more to separate Dorland from the character at the outset would've been better.

I also think there are more minced questions of artistic ethics in the background, but the finer points of how a character can be inspired by an identifiable real person without *being* that person, and how that character's appearance in the story doesn't make the story about that person, have long since gotten clouded over by the sense of personal betrayal and the hardening battle lines once Dorland claimed ownership over the entire topic.

This whole thing boils down to two women fighting over a $425 short story and a man getting paid $20K to write about them. I stole the previous sentence from Twitter.

And I keep on double posting. Sorry!

Has anyone noticed that while it's true the patriarchy hurts men too, it sometimes is a pretty sweet deal for men?

121 is perfect.

Thanks. I've been working on various phrasings of that for a while.

i've never been on fb, so that may be an entirely different social space with completely different norms than everywhere else, but ... that kidney donor lady has not-well streaming right off her. she reached out to author lady bc the latter ... didn't affirmatively praise her, unprompted, re the donation???? people that is straight up not the act of someone who's moving through the world healthily. that's like chasing down people here for not commenting on your humblebrag comment, right? unless in fbland everything is completely utterly different. doubt it, but if you say so okay!

& she gets steadily more obsessive from there on out. yikes. author lady - maybe unwise, maybe mean. donor lady - waaaaay out there. 115 last is right.

Facebook people are often really aggressive about how you should affirm them. Some will try to sell you candles or essential oils. It's horrible.

Honestly, better than the NYT editorial page by a bunch and not just because you can see my nieces and nephew.

Fully agree with 115 and 124 as well.

(Also, so as not to ignore LB's point about the relationship between them -- I have never been on FB either so can't claim mastery of the etiquette; I can only say that even if "entirely in Dorland's head" overstated the case I am certain that they have never been close, at all. I suppose you can put some responsibility for the misunderstanding on Larson if you think she should be blamed for being warm and kind even to people she isn't close to, but I wouldn't.)

I'm baffled by the people who think the article tilts towards Dorland. Maybe legally, but she's portrayed horribly.

130: It seems to indicate (knowing nothing of the world of writers) Dorland was wronged, however unpleasant or difficult she may be.

The entire story reminds me of the quote about academia - so vicious and intense because the stakes are so low.

Also the title, "Bad Art Friend" kind of drives me crazy for being both unclear and dumb.

Maybe I missed that it's a phrase one of them used themselves.

Bad-Art Friend or Bad Art-Friend.

Bad, Art Friend. Not on the rug.

129: This comment is central to the perception of journalistic bias, and reflects a misunderstanding that is common among journalists themselves. Dorland is portrayed insufficiently horribly as compared to her actual behavior, and Larson's incontestably correct views are often treated as matters of opinion and perspective. Try this:

I'm baffled by the people who think the media tilts toward Trump. He is routinely portrayed horribly.

This is impossible to deny. Did the media even once -- one single time -- claim that Obama bragged about grabbing pussy? Did the media ever even hint that Obama looked at fascists and anti-fascists and found good people on both sides? To this day, the media has refused to report that Obama fathered five children by three women. Sure, yeah, the media sometimes amplified claims that Obama was a tyrant, but did the media ever assert that Obama publicly declared his love for people who violently invaded the Capitol?

Yeah, yeah, I know the media suggested Obama might have been born in Kenya, but you know, there's nothing actually wrong with being born in Kenya. When you look at Trump vs. Obama (or Biden or Clinton) how can anyone claim that the media tilted toward Trump?

And yet, I claim the media tilted toward Trump.

Dorland has stalked and abused someone over a period of years with no sensible justification. The bill of indictment against Larson has two parts: She imprudently stole the exact language of a paragraph of a Facebook post; and she spoke cruelly in emails about a nut. These two narratives are treated as roughly equivalent. The article is written deliberately to leave open the question, "Who is the bad art friend?"

Oh, weird. I just went back to the article because I was wondering who used the phrase "bad art friend". I hadn't realized that Larson is the one who initially sued Dorland. Dorland's copyright claims are counterclaims in Larson's defamation suit against Dorland.

It is true that Larson filed first but the lawyering began on Dorland's side--she'd been sending demand letters and threatening to sue for some time. When it was clear the suit was coming (I think the article says Dorland's lawyer was asking whom to serve) it was just a matter of who would get to pick the forum, as I understand it.

135 is obviously my view as well!

Which means that while Dorland still seems like a weirdo, I shouldn't have called her a frivolous litigant -- she's not the one who filed a lawsuit.

Is it defamation to have called her a frivolous litigant?

It occurs to me that Larson's use of Dorlands post is fair use (transformative) under the (reasonable) assumption that Dorland was posting about her experience.

Dorlands claim makes sense only if she was thinking of herself as an author doing creative work when she posted -- as if Larson had lifted her published fiction (not likely transformative.) That's... interesting.

oh lb 138 is just silly - i will assume you posted it without benefit of reading 137 or whole stretches of the article re the relentless increasing drumbeat of donor lady's clearly unhinged obsession with author lady. donor lady's litigation intent didn't spring into immaculate being in her xcomplaint. whether or not donor lady meets the tech def of a friv litigant my god author lady has a juggernaut of mental ill health barrelling down at her, whatever her faults-poor prior choices, at that point i find it hard to fault her for attempting to litigate in her preferred forum.

donor lady sat down one fine day to asess who had not sufficiently electro-genuflected re her look at meeeeee donor!!!! posts on fb, & then basically asked those who came up short to justify themselves. & then saddled up & embarked on a multi-year campaign against author lady. who was perhaps unwise, &, in private, mean. all reading this who are supremely confident they are free from both faults - bravo. also, maybe a bit of self reflection is in order. just a thought.

& journalist, editors, etc. really should *not* have succumbed to this temptation.

141 (DQ, right?): Yeah, it's not so much being first to the courthouse that seems like the big issue, it's that I don't see what actual claims Larson has against Dorland at all. On the defamation front, as far as I can tell, Dorland was saying factually at least fairly accurate things about Larson's story having been based on her, and incorporating a reworked version (to various degrees, depending on the version) of Dorland's writing. Calling that defamatory seems borderline frivolous to me.

Dorland's copyright infringement claim, on the other hand, has something solid to it. Dorland still seems like a nutcase for lawyering up about it rather than letting it go, but I think Larson should probably have settled rather than ginning up some nonsense counterclaims.

yes, me. phone not paying the attention needed whilst i'm distracted. if you were advising author lady how exactly do you gain leverage in settlement negotiations? favorable forum, (hopefully) rational judge in the wings to enforce a settlement agreement. would you really have advised holding off?

anyways meta filter, article may strike others differently, have been focus of stalker-esque energy twice, experienced amazingly vast blind institutional indifference both times, look to almeida for your locally credible testimony (whistling into dark - yooooo hoooo!), managed to wiggle out via pluck & toughness, let me tell you being feminine target of yuck is a seious fucking drag. gender & ethnic perceived id of author lady a GIGANTIC FUCKING CLUE here folks - donor lady trolled for a soft target.

Donor lady isn't read, right?

I don't see what actual claims Larson has against Dorland at all

Dorland went after six different organizations for their past connections with Larson, however fleeting, demanding to know if they would disavow an alleged plagiarist; then she went to the Boston Globe to continue the campaign in public, and finally she sent a cease-and-desist letter to the book festival. I'm not sure if there's a particular legal term for "massive overreaction to dubious offense," but I don't think there's no case at all for defamation and harassment. I imagine Larson was looking for some kind of timely intervention before things got even scarier.

I don't mean this next thing to sound sympathetic to Dorland per se, or apologetic; it's just meant as speculative description. But something significant is clearly tied up with the kidney donation in Dorland's mind that is not quite revealed, or pursued, in the article. I'm not sure it's all just garden-variety narcissism. It seems like it might have gotten over-weighted with her sense of raw value to humanity, in a way that's bound up with her mission-driven ideas of her writing (previous source of raw value to humanity?), and so the insult she felt from her supposed "friend" seemed incalculably devastating and led to her awful behavior. In her head, this isn't really about a possibly plagiarized Facebook post; there are a whole bunch of transactions that snarl it up with deeper things. It's all depressing as hell, really.

135: yes, the media was incredibly biased towards Obama and against Trump, because by reporting horrible things about Trump it made them real. Central to this whole universe is the deeply held belief that high-status men and women do not just deserve to hold and exercise power, but also have the right to define reality. If one side says it's raining and the other side says it's sunny, your job is not to report both sides; your job is to work out which side is higher-status and report the weather accordingly.

On the story itself, I can't imagine any sane or decent individual deciding to lift chunks of someone's diary about donating a kidney to a stranger in order to write a story mocking a woman who donates a kidney to a stranger. What an awful thing to do.

It would be entirely different if the story had been neutral. If I wrote on FB about running a marathon and a mate of mine lifted bits of it for a short story I wouldn't mind unless the story was called "Shmajay, the Racist Asshole Marathon Runner". Then I'd mind quite a lot and I'd try my best to make them hurt.

A normal person (which Larson is not, she's an NYT Discourse Person) would have spoken to Dorland first before writing the story! To avoid causing massive offence! But as the tweet quoted said, "writers don't owe anyone immunity from inspiring unpleasant characters". Sure. And writers by the same token don't get immunity from being decked by the people they deliberately insult.

I'm not sure if there's a particular legal term for "massive overreaction to dubious offense," but I don't think there's no case at all for defamation and harassment.

Generally, saying true things about someone isn't defamation, and while I completely see the argument that Dorland overreacted, I don't see anything saying she was lying about Larson. "Tortious interference with contract" is the other thing Larson sued Dorland for, is the kind of thing that, while I think it should continue to exist as a cause of action, is very hard to plead, and I don't think disseminating truthful information would count.

Harassment depends on the details of Dorland's conduct, but I don't believe that's what Larson sued for and I'm not seeing what's described as rising to the level of being actionable.

146: I think pf is saying the media biased towards Trump, because they didn't document his full awfulness.

gender & ethnic perceived id of author lady a GIGANTIC FUCKING CLUE here folks - donor lady trolled for a soft target.

This seems like an odd reading of the situation. While Dorland certainly got obsessive about it, she didn't pick Larson to go after out of the blue. Larson is the only person who published a story using Dorland's writing and at least originally conceived as a take-down of Dorland. I don't understand calling that Dorland selecting Larson as a "soft target".

I don't see anything saying she was lying about Larson.

The NYT did not print any false and defamatory statements about Larson, nor did it specifically say that Dorland made such statements. From this you infer that she -- someone you agree is a nutjob -- limited her campaign of harassment to scrupulously true accounts of the facts? Yeesh.

This is how people come to the conclusion that the story as written, even as it does not make Dorland look good at all, is nonetheless extremely sympathetic to her side.

Also, I agree that tortious interference is hard to plead and I don't know how strong the claim is on the specific MA version of the law. But the basic fact pattern, I think is this: 1) the Boston Book Festival plans to use Larson's story as its One City, One Story selection, giving Larson some small amount of money and a large boost in profile; 2) Dorland finds out, and says "If you do that I'll sue you, a tiny non-profit, into oblivion"; 3) BBF says "we can't afford to get sued, so we're canceling our commitment to Larson."

If the copyright claim were legit, that would be one thing. Supposing it's not (it's not), I can't see what the tortious-interference tort is for if not for this. I also think the BBF behaved shamefully (they were indemnified anyway!), but that's a separate question.

If you know what Dorland was saying about Larson that was untrue and otherwise defamatory but didn't make it into the article, then you know more than I do. Obviously, if there was actual defamation, then Larson had a claim for defamation.

And the copyright violation claim doesn't look to me to be self-evidently nonsense. This isn't my area and I don't know much about it, but reworking someone else's copyrighted language in your own work is at least going to be a close call. The thing about tortious interference is that the conduct complained of has to be wrongful, and telling an organization that if they do something you have a plausible cause of action against them for it isn't wrongful.

I'll keep on saying that Dorland doesn't look good in this story -- expecting people to effusively admire you for your good deeds and setting up a venue for it is super weird and kind of pathetic. And her reaction to Larson's actions is obsessive and over the top. But Dorland being a giant weirdo doesn't make Larson in the right about everything.

I don't think there's any reason to suppose that Dorland was ever going to sue Larson. Dorland's goal was to stalk, threaten, bully and sabotage. An inevitable court judgment against Dorland was never going to help her with that -- and in fact, such a judgment would foreclose a lot of Dorland's options. Here's how the NYT writer finesses that point:

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference -- that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

"As it happened." It was just one of those things. The NYT writer attempts no explanation -- it's just a random fact, out of nowhere and in no way foreshadowed in the story because Larson didn't spend years issuing threats.

Dorland backed Larson into a corner here where she had to file suit. Dorland -- not Dorland's lawyer, but Dorland -- contacted Larson's lawyer with yet another legal threat, and yet again didn't follow through. Given Dorland's goals, it's the right tactical choice: She can run up Larson's legal bills without incurring any herself. She can do this forever.

At some point, Larson has to call this bluff: She has to go to court, or she's going to spend the rest of her life being stalked and harassed, and having her professional associates stalked and harassed. So Larson waits. When no suit is actually forthcoming, Larson acts. I can't see that she had a choice.

150: That's right, but I don't object to ajay's amendment, which is about Obama and Trump; not Dorland and Larson.

I do want to see both the Larson story and the court filings. I've only googled it a bit, but a better New York Times would have provided at least the court filings.

154: Larson did have the option of settling -- withdrawing the story and paying a sum of money that looks very reasonable as against the costs of litigation. Calling bringing suit her only option leaves that off the table.

The settlement on offer was a sum of money that may look reasonable next to litigation cost but was in fact a *lot* of money for someone with no meaningful assets (she's in her 30's and has spent her entire career at a non-profit writing center), along with a commitment to pull the story and promise not to write anything like it, or discuss it, ever again.

Do you think that's a reasonable thing to ask a fiction writer to accept? This is not a story about Dawn Dorland; it is a story about a woman of color in which a character inspired by one thing Dorland did plays a role. The story had already been revised to take Dorland's actual language out, and to add a credit to her as an inspiration for it, which I think *was* a reasonable concession even though the initial version should've qualified as fair use under any reading of the doctrine. Should Larson have let Dorland assume ownership of the entire thing, which she did not create and which is not about her, along with a fat cash payment, in the hopes that it would make the harassment stop?

Come on.

157: There's more at stake here than the money -- but $5,000 is a lot of money to some folks, too.

That story was a big professional success for Larson, and it seems obvious to me why she would think it was not an option to withdraw it in the face of a ridiculous legal threat.

I do wonder if, in retrospect, Larson wishes she had dropped the whole thing. People often regret standing up to bullies, but I don't think Dorland conveyed at the outset just how crazy she was, and how far she was willing to go.

She went to the metaphorical mattresses.

If the legal threat were ridiculous, then settling would have been absurd. But the copyright claim has already survived a motion to dismiss, which I think qualifies it as not ridiculous. Here's (what I believe is after a quick Google) the opinion denying Larson's motion to dismiss, which holds that a jury could find even the latest version of the story "substantially similar" to Dorland's letter: https://casetext.com/case/larson-v-perry-1

That doesn't mean Dorland ultimately wins, "fair use" can't be determined at the motion to dismiss stage, but at the very least Larson was skating close to the line on copyright infringement. It would have been difficult for her to give up the story given that it's a major professional accomplishment for her, but those are sort of the breaks when you act in way that gives rise to legal liability, while simultaneously making the person with a claim against you very angry in a way that may not be reasonable, but is perfectly predictable.

158: The story was, in Larson's words, initially drafted as a "takedown" of Dorland. Saying that it's not about her seems like a stretch.

"You're so vain, you probably think this story with a paragraph copied from your Facebook page is about you."

Also, why shouldn't Beatty think a song about him was a song about him?

162: No, those weren't Larson's words:

"The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn't it?" Calvin Hennick wrote. "But Sonya didn't publish that draft. ...

But even if we set that aside and say Hennick's characterization was fair, the thing that began as a takedown of Dorland was not the thing that was published. By the time it saw the light of day she had made it into something else, and Dorland's insistence that it is *still* all about her is at the heart of the problem. I honestly don't want to focus on the racial dynamic but the fact that you (and many others, and the article) continue to center everything about this episode -- the story itself, which is not about her, and the "feud" which amounts to harassment perpetrated by her -- around the white lady seems .. not like a coincidence.

I agree with 163 though. I don't get how that song isn't about whomever it's addressed to.

when you act in way that gives rise to legal liability

A court will ultimately decide, but it seems unlikely that Larson did something here that gives rise to legal liability.

But the copyright claim has already survived a motion to dismiss, which I think qualifies it as not ridiculous.

We're at the stage of arguing definitions. What is "ridiculous?" I'd propose that a legal action can have zero chance of success -- rendering it ridiculous by my definition -- and still survive a motion to dismiss.

That's pretty cool that you can fetch the judge's order. Thanks. I wanted to see that, and I might have enough info now to look at the rest of the case at some point.

164.1 is absolutely right -- that wasn't Larson, that was a friend of Larson's in the discussions of the situation that came out in discovery. Sorry about getting that wrong, but it still seems like a relevant evaluation of the history of the story.

I think they should get the Nobel Prize. Both of them: it has to be shared. They'll like that!

166: In most cases, I'd call the motion to dismiss stage exactly where you determine if a case is ridiculous. The exceptions would be where there's strong disagreement about the facts, and the ones alleged by the plaintiff seem very unlikely, but this isn't that kind of case.

167: All I did was Google for it, which is why I hedged. I could find it on PACER and check that what I found is accurate, but I don't want to charge NYS the dollar or so it would cost and I don't have a personal frivolous PACER account.

164: You've hit on the question that's really interesting to me. What ought the NYT story have been about? I like the writer's choice, and I like his choice to treat Dorland sympathetically.

But he needed to treat Dorland with the sympathy that one affords to someone with significant mental problems, not as someone who is acting arguably acceptably. As I said previously, I really like the "Who is the bad art friend" framing. The problem is, that's a question with an answer, and the writer deliberately obscures that.

I think they should get the Nobel Prize. Both of them: it has to be shared. They'll like that!

Cut the baby Nobel prize in half!

171: I think the "bad art friend" framing is appropriate in that it makes clear the extremely low, middle-school stakes of the story. But if you really look at it, I'm not sure either of them can be a "bad friend" given that they were not and are not friends.

Possibly one of the lessons of the story is that it's risky being "warm and kind" toward people you don't view yourself as having interpersonal obligations toward, because they may misunderstand that position.

Indeed, Moby kind of said what needed to be said way back in comment 1.

"You've hit on the question that's really interesting to me. What ought the NYT story have been about?"

LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE

But to return to 171.1: what ought the story to have been about? Nothing! All the story does is take two people's pain and make it worse, for the amusement of the rest of us. Obviously it found an audience so in that sense it had entertainment value, but it is gross.

It's a warning for the rest of us.

Bad art, friend.

All the story does is take two people's pain and make it worse, for the amusement of the rest of us.

It may help Larson overcome any undeserved harm to her reputation that Dorland has caused, by getting the facts out. That's about as much good as many newspaper articles do - they let the audience decide how they should feel about some person. Larson isn't otherwise famous, but she's someone who's pursuing a writing career and could become well-known if she succeeds at it. She's not just a random nobody.

If someone was going around and defaming me, I think I'd want a newspaper to publish an accurate story about the situation, including the ways in which I'd behaved less than ideally.

180 Never ever consent to be the Twitter Main Character. You think the story is going to be accurate, but when you read it, you'll see it isn't.

I have the standard lawyer's objection to the use of the word 'frivolous' to describe a law suit that has (or may have) legal merit. Surely the most frequent misuse of the term hereabouts is describing environmental litigation. Just yesterday, our federal district judge upheld a magistrate's ruling blocking a several thousand acre timber sale. The biological opinions underlying the agency decision to go ahead with it were based on materially wrong calculations of the existing road density, which is an issue for bears, and also the plan didn't spell out in adequate detail how some of the deviations from applicable minimum standards (for elk and other wildlife protection) were going to be mitigated. I can promise you that proponents of logging, and of gut-shooting liberals in general, will spend the rest of time decrying this successful suit, as they do all successful environmental suits, as frivolous.

What they mean is bullshit. And what they are doing is making a value judgment about the proper balance between habitat preservation and the particular work that the sale represents. A traditional value judgment, truth be told.

I would never say that the kidney lawsuits are frivolous, but they are, to me, clearly bullshit.

Kid climbs over my fence to fetch an errant frisbee, tosses it, then climbs back over. My trespass suit isn't frivolous. It's just bullshit.

That's a respectable distinction to make.

I find myself thinking that there's an interesting symmetry here -- in a sense both parties made the mistake of making themselves vulnerable in the absence of a relationship of goodwill. Dorland made herself vulnerable by setting up that FB group where she exposed herself as an absurd, needy person who was desperate for affirmation about her kidney donation. And she thought she was safe because she thought the people she'd invited to the group were her friends, but she was wrong about that, and wrong in way that could have been seen as insultingly presumptuous. And so someone she'd exposed herself in front of, Larson, used her exposure in a story in a way she found painful and which made her angry. And the lesson is if you're making yourself vulnerable to people, make sure they're actually your friends first.

For Larson, on the other hand, she knew that there wasn't a real friendship there, and so she felt free to write her story despite it being very likely that Dorland would find out (given that even if not friends, they were acquaintances in the same professional community) and would be hurt and angry when she did (this is a judgment call, but it seems to me to be perfectly expectable that Dorland would be upset to recognize aspects of herself in a character intended to be contemptible, and Larson's behavior seems to me to indicate that she wasn't surprised that Dorland's feelings were badly hurt). And that would have been fine -- there was no reason for Dorland's hurt feelings to be important to Larson given that they weren't friends -- except Larson made herself vulnerable to Dorland by (plausibly) violating Dorland's copyright in a way that gave Dorland quite a lot of leverage to make Larson's life unhappy. And the lesson there is that if you're willing, for personal advantage, to make your relationship with someone openly hostile in a way that's likely to make them want to do you harm, you should watch your conduct so that you generally appear to solidly be in the right in the eyes of third parties you care about. If you abandon the relationship of goodwill, don't make yourself vulnerable.

BTW, the Forest Service loss in that case is unsurprising: they are constantly losing cases here. Conservative folk wisdom is that our two judges -- one senior, one regular -- are some kind of hard core environmentalists, looking for excuses to oppress working people. I've known and appeared before both of them for years, and can say, unequivocally, that what they both are is sticklers. They apply the law, and if the Forest Service is obligated by law to do something and doesn't, these guys will call them on it. What I can't get is why the Forest Service doesn't just do it right, instead of continually getting knocked down for half-assing everything.

As you guys know, I'm involved with the non-profit partner of a national scenic trail. By statute, the Forest Service was supposed to provide Congress with a comprehensive management plan for the trail in 2011. Did they? No. Have they even now? No. They finally got sued over it, in 2019, and the hearing was a couple weeks ago, in front of the senior judge. 'You have a problem here, right counsel?' he says to the DOJ guy.

Meanwhile, in other Montana news, law students have forced the dean and associate dean of the law school to resign. https://missoulacurrent.com/government/2021/10/um-law-school-2/

What's wild is the part the journalists try like hell to avoid. It appears that the subject of some or all of the complaints is the law student currently running for mayor. Who is, himself, worthy of novelization. He says the whole thing is cooked up by partisans of the incumbent mayor.

All of you who are expounding on Dorland's mental illness -- you appear to have ignored the fact that she is the rare case of someone who has received an authoritative clean bill of mental health.

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She'd become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life -- the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn't been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. "I didn't do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed -- I thought."

As someone who represents the state equivalent of the Forest Service and has bitter experience with the sort of errors you're talking about, overworked and understaffed/funded explains a whole lot.

I need to buy a small acreage adjacent to a nice state forest

strongly endorse 164 last.

except Larson made herself vulnerable to Dorland by (plausibly) violating Dorland's copyright in a way that gave Dorland quite a lot of leverage to make Larson's life unhappy.

This is the thing I wonder about. I've been noodling around google on this, and a Boston newspaper story said that the contested bit was 100 words in a 5,000 word story. It's hard to see this as plagiarism, and really hard to see it as copyright infringement. (Certainly the court, by failing to dismiss, doesn't seem to have evaluated the question of fair use at all.)

Of course, with the fellowship application, the alleged plagiarism was, without question, completely invented by Dorland. The NYT writer certainly didn't waste any worry on the legal credibility of her complaint, but instead focused on her hurt feelings.

you should watch your conduct so that you generally appear to solidly be in the right in the eyes of third parties you care about

The third parties that Larson cares about are backing her -- except the ones subject to threats from Dorland.

I found the amended complaint from Larson.

The blow-by-blow account of Dorland's behavior reads quite credibly, and it's nuts. Larson seems to have done a lot to accommodate Dorland's legal complaints, and it was all ignored because the issue was never about plagiarism or copyright in the first place.

The real subject of the piece is the creative writing biz complex that stretches all around the country and sucks money out of aspiring writers and people deluded into thinking they are aspiring writers.

https://twitter.com/xlorentzen/status/1446016061254606849

A twitter thread with an interesting different perspective.

"And the lesson there is that if you're willing, for personal advantage, to make your relationship with someone openly hostile in a way that's likely to make them want to do you harm, you... "

...are probably evil. That's a pretty good definition of it.

The thread in 191 is really interesting and fits well with my impressions on reading the article. There's a whole context of "writing" as a (mostly fake) "profession" in the background of the interpersonal conflict. I find the context more interesting than the conflict, but obviously the NYT has its own editorial judgment perspective.

People really should just sell out and write things up for pharmaceutical companies.

192: I wouldn't say that. What if the person you're entering into a hostile relationship with is a bad person? You just ratted them out for being a KKK member or something?

Or, more relevantly, what if the thing that you wanted to do, that was going to make the relationship hostile, was something that would make them angry but that you had a right to do and a strong interest in doing? Something like that has to be Larson's position -- not that she was unaware that Dorland would be hurt, but that she was entitled to use anything she encountered, including Dorland's kidney donation, as material for her art, so that while it might make Dorland angry, that anger did not mean that Larson had done wrong. That's at least an arguable position.

192: Agreeing with 195 and adding that elements of this thread, including 192, smack of the "bitch had it coming" defense. The interesting thing about this story might have been the legitimacy of Dorland's hurt feelings -- if Dorland hadn't gone berserk on Larson. Larson, in no reasonable sense, had it coming.

191/193 remind me of the classic remark about academia, that the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

195: hence why I said "probably". Yes, there are hypothetical cases where harming another person for your own personal advantage is the morally right thing to do. Not many, though. (Ratting someone out for KKK membership is unlikely to be to your personal advantage though I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical where it is.)

And, no, if you have a legal right to knowingly harm someone, and a strong personal interest in doing so, that doesn't make it not an evil thing to do! Harming people solely for your personal benefit - with no higher motive such as the benefit of others - is actually a good working definition of evil. Especially when it also involves an act of knowing betrayal.

193: I think this is actually the heart of it. Dorland seems to be thinking her FB post is an artistic work. Dorland has copyright, but Larson IMO has an excellent case for fair use. (Most of my creative friends seem to think "Larson was mean but this isn't anywhere near plagiarism.") She took a letter and transformed it into a very small part of a story. If Dorland had published a story featuring that letter, and Larson copied the episode into her book, then probably it's not fair use. Larson has to be thinking of Dorland's post as something like personal communication or an archived letter. If the NYT had done a fawning profile of Dorland's donation that quoted her letter that had been posted publicly on FB, and Larson had read it and been inspired to write a story where she borrowed language from the letter, I can't see anyone thinking that's not fair use.

But Dorland seems to be thinking of her FB posts as part of her writer's portfolio or something because she invited 'friends' from a writer's workshop to her page. Stealing work from a colleague at an aspiring writers' workshop would be much closer to plagiarism, but this is to me a lot more like basing a character on the annoying woman you met at the workshop and snarking about her privately to other friends. Maybe not prudent if annoying person is crazypants but also not really an issue of artistic theft, which seems to be the NYT frame. I think it's that frame that's sympathetic to Dorland.

"elements of this thread, including 192, smack of the "bitch had it coming" defense."

Well, all of the thread, really, given that both the characters in the story are women. But, you know, thanks for singling me out for the cheap accusation of sexism. Thanks for being lazy enough to go for the absolute minimal effort way of undermining an argument.

197 reminds me of 130, which reminds me that hardly anyone would make the claim "the lower the stakes, the more bitter the fights" if the word "academia" weren't in the quote. What is the actual claim?

Dorland seems to be thinking her FB post is an artistic work.

I honestly don't think that's it. Dorland wanted to damage Larson as much as she could, and found copyright to be the tool that suited her. That's all. A different person might have used fists or a hammer or a gun to fight this evil.

200: I think you are correct that I can't possibly be accusing you of sexism, and incorrect that I am accusing you of sexism.

199: I don't know much about copyright, but you seem to be drawing a distinction between the copyright applicable to a
work of fiction and that applicable to a letter, and I don't think there is a sharp distinction there. The writer of a letter has a copyright in the contents of the letter, just as the writer of an artistic work would. That distinction comes into play when you figure out how fair use plays out, but it's not simple, I don't think.

Also, you've brought up how a writer might rework archival materials a couple of times -- wouldn't those generally be old enough to be in the public domain?

I learned from this thread that you can't get something declared fair use on summary judgment. That seems like a good copyright law reform; stop a lot of bad lawsuits before they ruin people.

This is way too long, but having sorted out my thoughts on this, I will now inflict it on y'all:

It seems to be generally taken for granted in this thread that Larson and the author of the NYT piece, Robert Kolker, are involved in a fundamentally disreputable enterprise. Kolker, we are told, is engaged in "entertainment" (95, 177) that is on a level with Jerry Springer (97, 98).

Why would Kolker or the NYT involve themselves with this trash? Osgood has thoughts in 94:

I honestly can't help wondering what kompromat Dorland must have on Bob Kolker or his editors at the NYT to have gotten this story to press.

LB (in 183) proposes that Larson is "willing, for personal advantage, to make [her] relationship with someone openly hostile." Another person echoes this and elaborates, describing Larson's behavior as: "Harming people solely for ... personal benefit- with no higher motive such as the benefit of others."

I took ogged to be at least partially kidding in 21 when he said: "I recall that line not to excuse any writer, but to condemn them all." But maybe ogged wasn't kidding! And many others seem sympathetic to this, so I'll repeat my response, this time in earnest: "Unlike Dorland [and many people here] ogged has a clear understanding of that which he opposes: The enterprise of professional writing itself."

The act of creation by a journalist or a fiction writer is understood here as being a fundamentally self-centered activity, of no benefit to others. Kolker must be being blackmailed. Larson had no discernible motive beyond personal advantage.

Once you assume Larson's lack of larger motives, LB's 157 makes perfect sense: "Larson did have the option of settling -- withdrawing the story and paying a sum of money that looks very reasonable as against the costs of litigation."

Celeste Ng had the obvious (to me) response in the NYT story:

Ng told me that Larson's entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks -- to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer's work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer's reputation in the process.

It makes a lot of sense to engage in (what I call) victim-blaming if the "victim" is not engaged in an honorable task to begin with. If Larson and Kolker are deliberately damaging the lives of others for no reason beyond personal gain, then it makes sense to think of them as evil.

But I just can't work that out. I think the act of telling stories is incredibly useful. Larson and Kolker made ordinary storytelling choices. It's peculiar for a philistine like me to be nearly alone in defending art among all you smart, cultured folks. But here we are.

Peep's link in 191 really captures the value of storytelling by being so ridiculous in denying it. Kolcker, we are told, shouldn't be interested in reporting what Larson and Dorland think about their actions. Kolcker shouldn't even care what Kolcker thinks. Kolcker was "irresponsible" because he failed to report what Christian Lorentzen thinks about the situation.

Stories take us out of ourselves and into the minds of other people. Lorentzen doesn't want to go there.

But NW does! In 74, he is exactly right when he says: "Surely the relevant question is whether the Larson story is any good as art or not."

204: so my understanding is that if the use is "transformative" it's fair use. That's why the venue matters: if you steal someone's story word for word you haven't transformed the material if you present it as your story. If you read a letter and incorporate it into a story that is substantially original arguably you have. If she'd taken it word for word as a backdrop for a lyrical dance piece -- fine. Amount matters too of course but this isn't plagiarism and it's killing me that that's the takeaway when it's not the most interesting ethical angle.

Public domain helps but: Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem quoted from Hamilton. Noticeably - I picked up on it as she was performing it. That's copyrighted, and she's using it in a work she's representing as her own - and there's no citations in a poem. But clearly it's an allusion and that's OK. This question comes up in sampling music tracks and so forth, too - when have you done enough to transform it?

204: so my understanding is that if the use is "transformative" it's fair use. That's why the venue matters: if you steal someone's story word for word you haven't transformed the material if you present it as your story. If you read a letter and incorporate it into a story that is substantially original arguably you have. If she'd taken it word for word as a backdrop for a lyrical dance piece -- fine. Amount matters too of course but this isn't plagiarism and it's killing me that that's the takeaway when it's not the most interesting ethical angle.

Public domain helps but: Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem quoted from Hamilton. Noticeably - I picked up on it as she was performing it. That's copyrighted, and she's using it in a work she's representing as her own - and there's no citations in a poem. But clearly it's an allusion and that's OK. This question comes up in sampling music tracks and so forth, too - when have you done enough to transform it?

Stories take us out of ourselves and into the minds of other people.

That's why you need a wizard.

This is pretty great.

I think 206 goes a bit far - no one's condemning the act of writing wholesale, but Larson by her own admission started writing this story deliberately to take Dorland down a peg or two, and the NYT seems to have published its own story without any sort of public interest motive.

184: Conservative folk wisdom is that our two judges -- one senior, one regular -- are some kind of hard core environmentalists, looking for excuses to oppress working people. I've known and appeared before both of them for years, and can say, unequivocally, that what they both are is sticklers. They apply the law, and if the Forest Service is obligated by law to do something and doesn't, these guys will call them on it. What I can't get is why the Forest Service doesn't just do it right, instead of continually getting knocked down for half-assing everything.

A perfect example of Wilhoit's Thesis: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The local conservatives cannot believe that they are not allowed to do whatever they want, and that the law will not be shaped to meet their desires.

210: It is. Plus it's short enough that I can read the whole thing.

People should either include a wizard, a Swedish detective, or make their point in like 800 words or less. Except for me. Journals that give me only 3,000 words are the worst.

https://twitter.com/simonxix/status/1445697152567574534?s=21

I really can't see George doing that.

Damn, you're right

He could plan on doing it and still want praise and then flake.

Swap "kidney" for "blood" and it works. He would totally donate blood to impress his latest girlfriend.

He plans to donate a kidney, finds out what it entails, donates blood instead, & tells everyone it was a kidney.

207/204: I am also no copyright expert, but I'm pretty sure this is basically right. LB is correct that the writer has a copyright in the work regardless of its fiction/nonfiction status, but Cala is also right that that's not the question: the question is whether the Larson story qualifies as fair use, and therefore doesn't violate the copyright. There are four factors (see here for more than you ever wanted to know):

1) character of the use -- transformative use is more likely to be fair than derivative
2) nature of copyrighted work -- use of nonfiction is more likely to be fair than use of creative
3) amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used -- using more is less likely to be fair than using less, and
4) effect of the use on the potential market value of the original work -- if your use does no commercial harm, it is more likely to be fair.

Of these factors, numbers 1 and 4 are usually the most important but every case is unique and fact driven, so nothing is dispositive on its own. In this case, factor 3 weighs in Dorland's favor as to the early version of the story but the other three all point strongly toward fair use, so even if I weren't personally biased I really don't think this would be a close call.

As for pf's point that Larson and Kolker are analogous in this situation, that's interesting and I'll want to think about it a little more. I think there's a difference between creating fiction that might hurt someone's feelings if they see themselves in it* and doing journalism that amounts to exposing the dirty laundry of non-public figures. Maybe writing is writing and stories are stories, I guess? I'm not sold.

*and I'll say, again, that it would've been easy enough for Larson to do more to distinguish the character from the person, and her failure to do so was at best careless, probably rooted in the assumption that nobody reads short stories so who would ever know? I think this was true in Cat Person too, fwiw. It goes to the peep/teo/Lorenzen point that most of the people who write stories have no expectation that they'll ever find an audience. That doesn't excuse bad creative choices, but I think it does mitigate the "she must be an asshole" element of knowingly causing someone pain. (Kolker obviously doesn't have that defense at all.)

probably rooted in the assumption that nobody reads short stories so who would ever know

Isn't it a little different when they're presumably both trying to get published in the same genre of periodicals?

and her failure to do so was at best careless, probably rooted in the assumption that nobody reads short stories so who would ever know? I think this was true in Cat Person too, fwiw.

Huh, I hadn't known this coda to that story.

That doesn't excuse bad creative choices, but I think it does mitigate the "she must be an asshole" element of knowingly causing someone pain.

You think? I've been arguing with you despite not being committed to Larson being a terrible person: I'm certainly not sure that the use of the letter isn't fair use, there's a very good chance it is. And like Faulkner said: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." The hurt feelings might be worth it in the service of art (which feels like a pretentious way to talk about it, but you know what I mean).

But the idea that it's surprising that Dorland found out about the story because nobody reads short stories seems wrong to me. Sure, if you write something that would hurt the feelings of a coworker at your day job as a bank teller, they almost certainly won't read it. But Dorland was a teacher in the same creative writing thing where Larson worked; not only is she the most likely person on earth to read any given short story, they had plenty of acquaintances in common who both knew about the kidney donation and were likely to read the story. You can believe that any hurt feelings on Dorland's part weren't a reason not to write the story, but I can't see how Larson could have believed Dorland wouldn't know about it.

Again, Larson seems to have written the story specifically to attack Dorland, so I'm not sure that really applies.

225 to 221.

221: I suspect it was more about the absolute ridiculousness of the self-congratulatory letter which does sound like something a Writer would put in the mouth of a self-absorbed character. You know who rejoices in you? I. I do. With my shabby chic live laugh love in medium gray script.

I read it as more "Easter egg for my snark group" than anything else.

225: what doesn't apply? Fair use analysis? Copyright is the only claim Dorland has left in court and copyright law doesn't care about any of the personal nonsense.

If you mean my suggestion that she assumed nobody would read it, it seems to me *much* more likely that a writer would make fun of somebody she barely knows on the assumption that the target would never find out, than that she would essentially do it to her face.

also, again again, the relevant quote from Larson is

"Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?" she said. "Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don't care about Dawn."

so I dispute that she was "seems to have written the story specifically to attack Dorland," but I doubt I'm going to convince you on that point.

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to keep arguing about this endlessly. Say that Dorland's hurt feelings are unimportant and her reaction to them was unjustifiably over the top, sure, I'd be happy to leave it there.

But whatever the Olympian level of Larson's total disregard for Dorland's existence, they both worked (in some capacity) at GrubStreet and had plenty of writing acquaintances in common (like, all the people Larson was chatting with about Dorland). The idea that it was anything but inevitable that she'd see the story, which transparently referred to her even if she wasn't what it was primarily about, seems completely implausible.

I guess I've been avoiding GrubStreet because I've heard it's a bad deal for restaurants. Now I have another reason.

It goes to the peep/teo/Lorenzen point that most of the people who write stories have no expectation that they'll ever find an audience.

FWIW, this wasn't exactly the point I was making (though it's related). I was more struck by the fact that they're both thoroughly ensconced in this weird ecosystem of "professional writers" who aren't necessarily "professional" in the way that term is usually used. Dorland, for example, clearly considers herself a professional writer despite never having published anything. Given that context, I do think LB is right that there's no way Larson could have reasonably assumed Dorland wouldn't eventually find out about the story. It's not clear to what extent she intended for Dorland to see it, but she must have known she would have.

and her failure to do so was at best careless, probably rooted in the assumption that nobody reads short stories so who would ever know? I think this was true in Cat Person too, fwiw.

Huh, I hadn't known this coda to that story.

I hadn't seen that either, and it's fascinating (and sad).

230:
On the real-world question of whether Larson is a terrible person, I know the answer to be no, based on facts not in the record. That colors my reading of the facts that are in the record, which is probably why it looks like I'm reaching so hard for the interpretation of them that is most congenial to her side. Maybe I am!

I do, however, think that there is a reading of the story where Larson's transgressions are, to any reasonable person, minor: writing the story was arguably mean but I think fair game as art. Making the character look too much like Dorland, definitely a mistake, remedied in subsequent revisions. Telling Dorland it wasn't about her: to me that was partly (a) trying to avoid a confrontation and/or hurt feelings, and (b) **TRUE** as the Dorland-inspired character was not the protagonist, not the focus of the story, cannot emphasize this enough.

To some extent this point may turn on exactly what Larson said to Dorland, which I don't have at the front of my mind, but suffice to say that (b) is what both of them are actually exercised about. Dorland's copyright claim is bullshit and she doesn't care about it; what she cares about is that "her" story was "stolen" from her. (scare quotes, not actual quotes) (one might think it would be the public ridicule, but if she understood how ridiculous she looks she would not have pitched this story to the NYT, and the Globe, and others).

These two points have gotten blurred, and I submit that that blurring is Dorland's fault. The character was based on her, a fact about which Larson may have lied for good reasons or bad. The story was *not* Dorland's story, which is what Dorland has asserted, in one form or another, all along. This is the part where the white lady assumes ownership of somebody else's creative work which is, per the Celeste Ng quote in pf's 206 above, the thing that made Larson and her friends dig in their heels and get increasingly angry at Dorland in the group chat. They're right.

Can you point to anything particular from Dorland where she asserts ownership of the story Larson wrote (rather than of the small portion of it that is repurposed from Dorland's writing)? That's a framing that is very unsympathetic to Dorland, but I'm not really sure what it means.

Here's a Twitter thread with links to some of the original documents. There does seem to have been some animus toward Dorland well before she knew about the story: https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1446292353237626892?s=21

I bet both of them can sell a book now. The system works.

235: What I mean by that framing is that Dorland's demands have, from the start, included that Larson pull the story from publication and never publish anything like it again. Also where she did not stand down when her actual language was removed from the story and she was credited as an inspiration for it (I think).

And yes, the animus toward Dorland seems to have begun when she started bugging Larson about not liking her FB posts, and then wouldn't let it go, all of which predated the writing of the story. My guess is that it started off with some cattiness in the group chat, and that in hindsight Larson could've been more direct with Dorland about what she was doing and why and then who knows what might've happened differently.

But the parsing of how to people who are now enemies came to be enemies is simultaneously the most fun to pick at, as a sport, and the least fair to the actual people on both sides. Nobody comes out of it looking good. I think the behavior of the person I know and like was defensible, unsurprisingly; I am sure the same is true for people who know and like Dorland.

"From the start" seems off there. As far as I can tell, Dorland became aware of the existence of Larson's kidney donation story in 2016, had some email exchanges with Larson where she expressed hurt feelings, and then didn't do anything more, including reading the story, until she finally read it it 2018 around a year after it was published. That doesn't seem to as if she was obsessively insisting that anything Larson wrote about kidney donation was hers, more that she was reacting to the actual content of the story.

Does "from the start of their legal beef" make you feel better? Is there something that happened between 2016 and 2018 that made these demands reasonable? Whether or not she obsessed over the story in the interim doesn't seem pertinent to me.

It does seem relevant to me that Dorland wasn't coming after Larson for years after she initially became aware of the kidney story and expressed her hurt feelings about it -- that it, it seems like strong evidence that what she wasn't acting out of generalized animus toward Larson, but out of a specific belief that that the story, even in the intermediately rewritten magazine version, was plagiarizing her words.

As to the specific demands Dorland was making, I'd really want to see someone with knowledge quoting them, rather than your general characterizations.

That's fair. I don't have the correspondence and probably should've kept my mouth shut about facts not in the record anyway.

A reflection from Zeynep Tufekci:

I got interested in the meta part: why was everyone talking about it? My conclusion is it was actually written, narratively, to be a lot more ambiguous than the straightforward writing of a timeline would have been. It's a deliberate "what color is this dress" construction.

I feel that 15, 29, and 96 are the key comments here.

Rotten In Denmark, who used to comment here a million years ago and has that terrific "You're Wrong About" podcast, wrote up his reaction and I mostly agree with him: https://rottenindenmark.org/2021/10/10/identifying-the-bad-art-friend-is-easy/

That was good. I don't know how you prove or disprove one-sided friendship in a legal sense, but he makes a good case in a moral sense. And plagiarizing someone you don't like is stupid. You're handing them a a weapon pointed at you.

245: me too!

I do think it's interesting that the kidney donation itself has just disappeared into the background, even though it's probably by far the most morally significant thing either protagonist will ever do in their lives. But it's just one thing, and it's done, and there's not much to say about it (and because, I think, it's kind of uncomfortable in its moral purity -- which is part of why Larson and her friends found Dorland's dwelling on it so cringey). Whereas the whole drama about the story is, well, dramatic.

Yeah, I wonder if this whole brouhaha will be a good thing because it raises the profile of kidney donation, or a bad thing because it makes people associate it with interpersonal unpleasantness.

Or because it makes people associate it with being a white savior!

I am also hearing reports that "The Kindest" is not a masterpiece. That's okay -- I haven't written a masterpiece either -- but, if true, it does make the "fable about writing in our times" reading of the affair a little too hamfisted.

Mmm, ham.

245 is indeed good.

Yes, it is. The point about the timeline is particularly important. It makes a certain amount of sense for Kolker to have presented the timeline as he did; he was telling the story primarily from Dorland's side, so we learn things in the order she learned them. It definitely obfuscates the actual timeline, though.

That's a problem for the TVA.

They're remaking Willie Wonka again? That was like three years ago they did it last time?

Writers are fighting over $450 instead of trying to convince Hollywood to make something new.

254: I'm sure you already felt old before I said this, but... 16 years ago.

Still, the first one wasn't great and the second was worse (people said, I haven't seen it).

I don't actually know that I've seen the first one, but it has Gene Wilder and murdering children, so I'm assuming it's at least passable.

Oompa-loompa doopity doo
I've got a passable movie for you

The first one was a classic. The second was a mess, but the Oompa Loompas in that one were great.

And the book itself is obnoxiously racist. I can definitely sympathize with my fellow white men who are sad about giving up their culture. Leaving aside the racisms (and the loathing of fat people and whatnot) it was a terrific book.

I am reviving the kidney thread because of Larson's lawyer.

Larson and/or her lawyer also chose to sue Dorland's lawyer for representing Dorland, and that is a massively effed up choice that guarantees Larson's time in court will be lengthy and very, very costly. There are very few cases where you can legitimately sue opposing counsel for being opposing counsel. (I can literally think of cases where a lawyer advocated for racialized violence against the opposing client in the press and there was no cause of action.)

Suing the opposing lawyer sounds like a terrible idea.

But not as bad as suborning perjury.

+ "SPOILER ALERT"

That MeFi thread also contains many good Frowner comments for the Frowner fans among us.

I'm always faintly baffled that I don't have an account there.

Frowner's comments in that thread are indeed very good.

I got somewhat overly interested in this over the weekend, and I have now gotten to the point where I have strong opinions but also some nagging questions that will probably never be answered. From what I've read, unless there's some really horrifying bad behavior from Dorland in the pre-2018 period that doesn't show up in the documents at all, Larson behaved very badly without provocation. Dorland's FB group was perfectly normal, everything she posted in it was perfectly normal, contacting Larson to say that she wasn't participating in the FB group, would she prefer to be removed was perfectly normal. All the obsessive behind the scenes animus toward Dorland from Larson and her friends seems completely one-sided and unprovoked.

What I'd love to know is the precise history of the communications between Dorland, Larson, and the various organizations in 2018 after Dorland read the story. There's certainly room for Dorland to have behaved very badly there, but there's also room for her to have been quite reasonable, and I haven't seen anything more reliable than Larson's lawyer's characterizations. But I'd love to know if Larson could have saved the story and kept this all from happening by apologizing and working out a rewrite of the letter that Dorland accepted as non-infringing, as opposed to trolling Dorland by adding her characteristic sign-off into the latest version of the letter and then hiring a lawyer (before Dorland did) and filing suit.

I have only briefly browsed that MeFi thread and have promised myself I won't get sucked back into this, but I can't help this one observation based on LB's very sensible questions: the number of things that are "very clear" to people based on the documents, and while also being definitely false in the sense of what happened in the real world, is dispiriting.

I am honestly not here to argue about any of these facts, only to remind anybody who is still focusing their attention on this that what you can see on the internet about this years-long dispute that was private until last week is extremely, extremely incomplete.

Yes, anything complicated like this is going to have all sorts of stuff going on that doesn't make it into the public narrative.

And my sympathies to you and your wife. Being friends with someone in a position like this is a hard place to be.

Yeah, it's true that I probably should have thought twice before dredging it up again. I watched a close friend get dragged over misrepresentations a few years ago, and without oversharing, I have had past circumstances of encountering hostile media attention as kind of a structural fact of life. So I should definitely know better than to do this, but [personal shit & bad judgment]. Sorry.

My closest brush with bad media was when a guy disagreed with my dad and called the radio station to point out (correctly) that his yard had shitty grass.

Thanks, both (and Moby too, what the hell). I appreciate the sympathy and understanding.

I know how hard it is to have to water and mow the lawn more often just because of who you are close to.

The radio caller suborned grass.