If you haven’t been on Twitter in the last few days, you might not have heard of the recent issue known as #CopyPasteCris. The short version is that a reader notified romance author (and former Supreme Court clerk and intellectual property law professor!) Courtney Milan that Cristiane Serruya had plagiarized one of her books.

Word spread throughout social media because Courtney is a popular author with over 30,000 followers on Twitter, and it was shocking that anyone would be so stupid as to plagiarize someone with her background and expertise. Soon, other readers and authors found more evidence of plagiarism from Cristiane.

Now writers, authors, and readers are all analyzing how it happened and what (if anything) can be done to prevent it from happening again. Let’s take a look…