There is not much to be said in defense of 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan, the Indian-born Harvard student whose first novel was pulled from bookstores worldwide last month after she failed to disprove charges of plagiarism. But there is something.

Salman Rushdie summed up the critics' case shortly before Ms. Viswanathan's publisher announced Tuesday that it was scrapping plans for a revised version of her embattled "chick-lit" tale. "I know when I write a book, it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign," the Indian-born British novelist said. "And so must she."

In a way, that should be the last word on what the young writer did. It doesn't really matter whether you call it theft, as the victims do, or "unintentional" reproduction, as Ms. Viswanathan did when confronted with dozens of similarities between her book and another writer's work. (Now that people are poring over "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" with magnifying glasses, traces of at least three other books have been detected in it, including Mr. Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories.") You pass off someone else's work as your own, and you pay the price -- usually fame of a kind you never wanted, followed by professional oblivion.