All Quiet on the Spiderbaby Front...

It's been two weeks now since the shitstorm of "Spidergate" swept through the Internets. Twitter, blogs, forums and facebook were abuzz for a few days and even a few mainstream periodicals picked up on the story: Gawker, The L.A. Times, The Toronto Star, The Guardian.

Intrepid investigators have scoured Lianne MacDougall's past works, going all the way back to her college papers, discovering a history of plagiarism that reaches far into her past.

Meanwhile, there's been no word from the MacDougall/Tarantino camp, from St. Martin's Press (where her book Grindhouse Girls is said to be coming out "late 2013"), or from any other media outlet.

I could be deluded (and usually am) but I feel that the Spiderbaby "scandal" extends past the boundaries of "genre journalism" and speaks to a larger problem of the value (or lack thereof) placed on the pixels that so many people have been pushing around the internet. By writing something for online consumption, is it's value inherently less than that of something on paper? And why should one writer get paid for using the exact same words that another writer has used rather than paying the original author? Is there more value in the "image" of the author than the actual output?

This ordeal has opened up a lot of great conversations that I would encourage people to check out including (but not limited to):

• Lianne Spiderbaby plagiarized my review of Turn Me On, Dammit!
• Lianne Spiderbaby Didn’t Plagiarise Me, But I'm Angry Anyway
• Lianne Spiderbaby & Journalistic Integrity (or lack thereof)
• On Plagiarism, “Lianne Spiderbaby,” Tarantino, and when “borrowing” is theft
• Spiderbaby and why plagiarism is as pointless as it is depressing
• What Defines the Value of a Word
• Plagiarism is Not a Style of Writing

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

And, in the meantime, don't hold your breath for anyone else to pick up this story and run with it. It seems that things have run out of steam.