What follows is an effort to establish with as much precision as I can the extent to which Titan Books’ publication of The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film plagiarizes my book In Search of The Third Man. I have already given one detailed example in a recent blog post:
Here is a second example, and I shall provide other examples if it turns out to be necessary.
Below is the opening page of a chapter called “The Shoot” in The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film (p.101):
It closely follows the opening two pages of the chapter “On Location” in my book In Search of the Third Man (pp.55–6) in its structure, content and use of quotation: I reproduce these two pages below so that a comparison can be made.
The extract is plagiarism because John Walsh passes off my work as his own. To quote from the Society of Authors’ guidance (https://societyofauthors.org/download/plagiarism-and-copyright-infringement/and), plagiarism “is concerned with properly attributing ideas, theories and research to those who have discovered or created them”. There is no specific attribution that would enable a reader to know that Walsh is actually presenting my research and ideas here rather than his own. It is a copyright infringement too because, although he may be using his own words, he is still copying my work without my permission.
What adds to the egregiousness of this example is the ineptness of the copying. He gets dates wrong: I state that the first day of location shooting was 22 October; he wrongly sets it down as 2 October. I state that the last day of location shooting was 11 December; he puts 1 December. I state that the last day of the studio shooting was 31 March; he puts 13 March. He gets descriptions wrong. I state that the main sewer in Vienna was 30 feet wide; he states that it was 30 feet high. And he gets quotes wrong. When he reproduces my quote from Guy Hamilton, he omits the ellipsis that I had used to indicate missing words. And there are small rewordings: the original wording “You couldn’t shoot day after 4 o’clock” becomes “You couldn’t shoot in the day after four o’clock”, which changes the meaning: when Guy said “day” he was referring not to a particular time but to the “day unit”.
Walsh states that the quote from Guy Hamilton came from a 1987 interview. But this is wrong too. The quotation actually comes from an interview that I recorded with Guy in Puerto Andratx, Mallorca, on 15 October 1997. I can provide proof of this without the need to hunt for the original tape because I have the transcript of the interview that Guy corrected for me in his own handwriting and sent back to me. The relevant two pages from that transcript, containing the quotation, are reproduced below after the extract from my book.
Finally, I must repeat that this example is only one of many others that I will point out if necessary.
