Naomi Ragen To Pay $62,000 for Plagiarism
Image by Daniel Bar-On
Crossposted from Haaretz
A Jerusalem court yesterday ordered best-selling author Naomi Ragen to pay about $62,000 to writer Sarah Shapiro for plagiarizing parts of her work. This is the highest amount ever awarded by an Israeli court to an author for intellectual property infringement.
Image by Daniel Bar-On
Yesterday’s decision comes in the wake of the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling in December that in her novel “Sotah,” Ragen had knowingly copied from Shapiro. Ragen’s attorney said she would appeal the ruling in the Supreme Court and yesterday Judge Joseph Shapira ruled on compensation.
The plaintiff, who lives in Jerusalem, requested NIS 1 million in damages, or about $260,000 but the court granted only 40,000 NIS, or just over $10,000 in compensation, plus court costs and lawyers fees. In addition, the court ordered Ragen to remove the plagiarized passages from any future printings of the book.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
