Plagiarism

The chapter in this book on the inspiration of the prophets showed that, like some of the biblical authors, Ellen White used passages from the writings of others to put on paper what God had shown her in vision or what the Holy Spirit led her to write. In 1980, Walter Rea, at that time a minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Long Beach, California, gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times ^{7The interview was published in the Los Angeles Times dated October 23, 1980} in which he made three allegations: (1) Mrs. White was a thief—she stole the literary productions of others. (2) She was a liar—she denied that she did it. And (3) she and her husband exploited the church members and made a fortune from her books. Then in 1982, Rea published the book The White Lie in which he has about one hundred pages of two-column comparisons of statements from Ellen White’s books that resemble what other authors had written previously.GP 84.2

Plagiarism is the taking of ideas and/or wording from another person’s publications and passing them off as one’s own. The officers of the General Conference considered Rea’s allegations to be so serious that they asked the General Conference’s legal office to have them investigated. The legal officers asked attorney Vincent L. Ramik, a Roman Catholic lawyer specializing in patent, trademark, and copyright law, to do the investigation.GP 84.3

Ramik read the book The Great Controversy all the way through and spent about three hundred hours reading in many of Ellen White’s other books and researching about one thousand relevant cases in American legal history. He concluded that Ellen White was not a plagiarist and that her works do not constitute copyright infringements. In his report he stated,GP 84.4

I believe that the critics have missed the boat badly by focusing upon Mrs. White’s writings , instead of focusing upon the messages in Mrs. White’s writings. . . .GP 84.5

Ellen White used the writings of others; but in the way she used them, she made them uniquely her own, ethically, as well as legally. And, interestingly, she invariably improved that which she “selected”! . . .GP 85.1

. . . Ellen White [used] . . . words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, yes, and even pages, from the writings of those who went before her. She stayed well within the legal boundaries of “fair use,” and all the time created something that was substantially greater (and even more beautiful) than the mere sum of the component parts. And I think the ultimate tragedy is that the critics fail to see this. ^{8“There Simply Is No Case,” Review and Herald, Sept. 17, 1981, 3, 5.}GP 85.2