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Pacwriter
Unity Member
Post Number:
2354
Registered: 04-2002
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 12:00 pm: |   |
Ok the girl in college got busted. Da vi code Brown read the other guy's work.
At least once a year somebody is accused of lifting words, thoughts or plots. Not counting the New York Times reporters who always seem to get caught.
So if you read 100 novels of one genre and wrote a book in that genre, would your work be 100% original?
http://www.perrycomer.com
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Claudia Turner VanLydegraf
Mindsight Moderator
Post Number:
2665
Registered: 06-2002
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 01:39 pm: | |
PAC,
that is a really good question given today's propensity for writers to sort of go by what other things have been written on any type of subject or thought.
I personally don't know the answer to it, because if a person watches movies, reads books, listens to newscasters or studies anything, where does one draw the lines? We all gravitate towards those topics we feel comfortable with and want to look more closely at in any form that we look, listen to, read, enjoy, and because the mind soaks up information like a sponge, who is to say what is original or what is prompted by other associations and study. Tis a sticky wicket that copyright laws have gotten themselves into, huh? I personally don't think that here are any original thoughts anymore, what with over 4,000 years of mankind thinking on this planet, so if that is a premise, how is there anything original after that amount of time? We all have the same types of mechanisms in our brains and the brain always works in much the same ways and responses, so how can we be totally original? We can be different by putting things together differently in the ways we present them or act upon them, but that is not original, just different. The thought processes are still the same with the same types of outcomes.
That being stated, then how can there be anything but a balance of plagiarism coming forth in many areas of our lives. We pick a phrase and several more people pick the same one, like "yo' dude," or any number of others, did the person who picked it up last plagiarize the first? A person who has a tendency to write may put a phrase together differently, like "hey dude, yo'," but he still used the same words. Tis a sticky wicket, I say......
Claudia
MINDSIGHT MODERATOR
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Dennis Collins
Mindsight Moderator
Post Number:
1852
Registered: 06-2002
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 04:24 pm: | |
Most editors and publishers tell us that in murder mysteries there are only a handful of plots. I don't remember the exact number but I know it's a single digit and the number five kinda sticks in my mind.
With thousands of mystery novels published anually, how many variations can there be on so few themes?
Does the publisher bear any responsibility? If the right lawyer brings the right case in front of the right judge it could change everything. Authors would have do do the equivalent of a "patent search" at a cost of at least $1500 before they could even submit their work.
Dennis Collins
Moderator
www.theunrealmccoy.com |
Fred Dungan
Unity Member
Post Number:
1624
Registered: 10-2002
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 04:35 pm: | |
You've hit on what is wrong with restricting yourself to a single genre. Sooner or later you are going to exhaust your subject matter. Experiment. Innovate. Don't be afraid to cross boundaries into other genres. Writers need to take a lesson from musicians - the only boundaries restricting your talent are the ones that exist in your mind.
Other than copying page upon page (as opposed to excerpts) verbatim, it's not really stealing. In fact, it's quite flattering to have someone else copy your style and settle for sloppy seconds from your table. In art, there is no such thing as plagiarism. Plagiarism is a legal term in which one party claims to have been injured by another party violating his/her proprietary rights to intellectual property. Actually, in the real world, the minute you say or write something in public, it becomes public property. The Mickey Mouse 80 year provision of the Millennium Copyright law is an international joke. Comedians steal each others material on a regular basis - so would writers if the big publishing companies were not so adept at lobbying Congress. Don't get me wrong, I do believe in intellectual property and copyrights, it's just that we have gone far beyond the original intention that the Founding Fathers had in mind. Patents and copyrights were originally intended to boost commerce by protecting innovators. Nowadays they all too often stifle commerce by eliminating competition for 80 years.
Want to steal Bushwhacked? Be my guest. It's certainly not going to make you any money and it might even put you in a wheelchair. What I'm getting at is that at our level there is very little need for protection. Copyrights, like ISBN's and all the rest of the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with writing, are vastly overrated. We spend far too much of our precious time worrying about them.
http://www.dunganbooks.com |
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