The article published on 2010 11 February talks of a 17 year old Miss Helene Hegemann who has gained fame like no one else in the field of writing books. The book gives a story of a 16 years old girl who is discovering drugs as well as clubs in Berlin after the death of her mother (Kulish, para.1). The book was ranked fifth in best-seller list. The author is attributed to have written a play as well as a movie. This made her to be famous. However, the revelation in bloggers that associated her book with the novel Strobo has left people in a dilemma.
There are lines that were lifted from the later novel with minimal changes. The result of this revelation was recalling of a decline in outsized praise of Kaaya Viswanathan who plagiarized from her own work. Unlike this case, Helene one took a different twist as her book was nominated to be among finalist in a prize worth $20,000 despite the fact that it was known that there was a case of plagiarism. She apologized for keeping secrete her sources but maintained that at the current time there is no room for originality (Kulish, para.3). According to the blogger who noticed this, it was illegal for her to lift a whole page and present it as her own work.
From my own opinion, there is need to give credit to authors whom we get inspirations. There is no chance that lifting a whole page from another person’s work can be coincidental. Plagiarism thus denies the original authors credit they deserve at the expense of youngsters who come and copy past others ideas and presenting them as their own. It would be rational for her to acknowledge that indeed there are some paragraphs she lifted from Strobo.
Additionally, the jury selection of the book for the prize despite knowing that there was serious allegation with regards to plagiarism is nothing put praising the work that is not original (Kulish, para.10 ). One can only see this as a trend where in the recent past a German Minister was found guilty of plagiarizing a bout 100 pages of his entire 400 pages thesis. There is thus need to fight the menace from all quotas.