Plagiarism really isn't the same thing as copyright infringement, although a partricular case might be both things at once. If I publish a pirate edition of a book by William Bronk, that is infringement, but not plagiarism. If I publish as poem as my own, that Bronk really wrote, that is plagiarism and infringement as well. If I plagiarize something whose copyright has expired, that is still plagiarism even if nobody has standing to sue me for it. If I plagiarize a few lines, but not anything lengthy or significant enough to be sued over, that is still plagiarism. If I read an article in the PMLA and write my own article, with the same ideas but completely different words, that is plagiarism, but have I infringed copyright?
If I cite something in a footnote, with proper attribution, that is not plagiarism; but if it is a complete, self-contained poem then I might need permission not to infringe on a copyright, according to some interpretations of the law.
Infringement is reproducing a text without permission, in a way that damages the interests of someone who owns that text.
Plagiarism is misrepresenting the authorship of ideas, phrases, sentences. It's easy to see why these two concepts are confused.
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The bottom line: the idea of the integrity of the work as piece of writing is devalued. It's easier for a ghost-writer to plagiarize, because that person has less invested in the integrity of his or her word/work.
Well, if the book says "as told to..." then that makes it a little different. Even celebrity memoirs that don't say "as told to" are assumed to be written by ghost writers. At what point does that become simply a convention that doesn't even need to be acknowledged? We just assume that someone else wrote the book unless there's some reason to believe otherwise.
Did the books say "as told to Bob Basil"?
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