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SMILE

was just the first of a whole new generation of magazines promoting the principle of positive plagiarism. Smile exists solely to encourage other people to take up this principle and to produce their own neo-plagiarist magazines.

Call the magazine that you start SMILE because plagiarizing this name will give you a good start on the road to copyright infringement, and I promise to take absolutely no legal action whatsoever against anyone who plagiarizes the title of the magazine.

So now you have the title of your magazine and you're well on the way to becoming a successful plagiarist. In fact, all you need to do is to put your magazine into production. and that is where the great advantages of plagiarism begin to show themselves. Plagiarism removes the need for talent, or even much application, in the production of magazines or anything else for that matter. All you have to do is select what to plagiarize, do the layout and then find somewhere to get it printed cheaply.

If you are not sure of what to plagiarize, a good place to start looking is in old copies of SMILE. You could even start by plagiarizing this article. A purist would plagiarize the whole piece verbatim, but you are free to change a word here or there, or place the paragraphs in a different order.

A fine example of plagiarism inspired directly by the pioneering example of SMILE is SLIME. SLIME is even less original than SMILE and hence infinitely better.


Monty Cantsin in SMILE 5, Oct. 1984