The Ethics of Adaptation
By: Flannery Wilson
Tags: Popular Culture, Copyright, Art, Film, Ethics

In the spring of 2015, I faced a challenging task.

I designed and taught two undergraduate courses in Comparative Literature — the first one, “Adaptation”, with 80 students — the other, “The Ethics of Storytelling”, an upper-level, more intimate course.

On the first day of thee larger class, I asked the students to define “adaptation” in the context of film and literature.

Many of the definitions that I received from the students were impressively insightful.

For example:

Adaption…means an interpretation of a work into a different medium to suit a personal point of view. The story’s plot is the backbone of its structure, therefore an adaptation has a similar backbone.

Some of the students defined adaptation relatively restrictively; that by definition, all adaptations must credit original source material.

But if this definition was too strict, the other extreme was far too loose: the idea that adapters should never be required to cite source material.

Though most artistic work is not “original” in some generic sense, it seems fair to expect artists not to steal directly from other artists.

To highlight the stealing conundrum, I tried to engender anger by offering the following thought experiment.

Imagine that you must write a paper for your English class. You work day and night, tirelessly, for ten to fifteen hours. A few months later, you find an exact copy of your paper on the Internet. Now imagine the following scenarios, one by one.

1. Your paper is listed for sale to other students for $99.99 on a ‘We’ll Help You Cheat!’ website. And no, you aren’t getting the royalties. 2. Your paper is posted for all to see — but there is no associated author. It’s ‘anonymous’. It does not appear that anyone is profiting from the public sharing of your paper. 3. Someone else on the Internet claims to have written it (their name appears as the author).

Which of these three scenarios is the most angering?

Most students in the class chose the first scenario as the worst, most angering case.

If this is on a scale of ignore it to World War III,

one student commented,

the scale goes from bottom to top.

When I asked the students what action they would take to resolve these issues, most replied that they would email the moderator of the website and ask that person to delete the paper.

This certainly sounds easy enough.

But, I asked,

What if you email the site and no one responds? What then? Would you ever want to take legal action?

Maybe they would, at least in theory.

But lawyers are expensive and life is short.

In real life, transgressions of this sort are not so easily definable. If they were, complaints would be indisputable, evidence would be solid, and the perpetrator would, eventually, take down the paper.

Since that day in class, I have struggled to put my own strong intuitions into words.

Though the first scenario is, without a doubt, rage inducing, I find myself much more fixated on the third.

As I see it, the first and second scenarios are maddening, but also slightly flattering.

In the first case, I would be flattered but want some of the royalties. In the second case, I would be flattered, but make an effort to re-attach my name to the text. The third scenario is my World War III.

The third scenario amounts to a theft in which no one is truly responsible.

In this scenario, the site owners have no interest in truth because for them it is irrelevant.

Or, more accurately: the site owners are exactly what they claim to be and nothing more: owners.

They might own the software, but they didn’t choose the name that substitutes yours. The computer program did.

Because no one is responsible, your complaint is irrelevant.

In reality, evidence of plagiarism comes only in tatters, in breadcrumbs.

We may find bits and pieces of our ideas scattered all over the place, and yet it is often an impossible case to prove.

The burden of proof falls on the original author rather than the one that steals. Usually, no evidence exists to back up the claim that our ideas have been copied.

The most angering part of the experience is the feeling that someone used your words and your ideas for profit when you were in your most vulnerable state, your moment of sincerity.

Over time, that anger turns into despair upon the realization that there is nothing that can be done.

So we justify it away: other people like us, working on similar projects, think of similar topics and ideas all the time. In many cases these justifications are warranted.

We cannot always know for certain, all of the time.

This does not mean that we should throw up our hands and discontinue our research, or that we should quit writing about films.

Why should we feel threatened by the work of others like ourselves?

Perhaps we are afraid that the ideas of others will make our own ideas appear less original or ignorant.

But why should we view admissions of ignorance in such a negative light — especially if we are willing to admit what we do know and what we don’t know from the outset?

Eventually, our frustrations must turn into something else; a new outlook, a new method.

If projects end continuously in feelings of despair, helplessness, and bitterness, the paper thieves win.

O ne property of the word “adaptation” is that it is adaptable. Its original definition, derived from French, is broad.

Adaptation requires an element of creative thinking, ingenuity, or luck, depending on the agents involved.

The word carries a positive connotation insofar as “creativity”, “ingenuity”, and “luck” are valued traits.

The biological definition, meanwhile, emphasizes the agency of the organism in affecting its own change over a period of time.

Something within the organism is changing to make itself function more efficiently in its environment.

In a literary context, the word has been modified to specify a transition from one medium to another:

An altered or amended version of a text…one adapted for filming, broadcasting, or production on the stage from a novel or similar literary source (the OED)

This definition is, again, too strict. The idea that movie adaptations are always derived from books may be pervasive, but that doesn’t make it true.