From Electric Lit:
In a lawsuit filed September 14, a former Swarthmore College baseball player named Charles Green accused Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding, of stealing significant plot points from Green’s unpublished autobiographical novel, Bucky’s 9th. “The two baseball novels bear a substantial similarity that could occur only as a result of Harbach’s access to a version (or versions) of Bucky’s and his large-scale misappropriation of Green’s creative efforts,” the suit claims. Among the “uncanny” parallels cited: Both are baseball stories. Both concern, specifically, the baseball teams of Division III liberal arts colleges. Both involve a baseball prodigy coming of age, and incorporate a “Recruiter-Mentor Plot” and an “Illicit-Romance Plot.” Both feature an estrangement between a father and his adult child. Also, both have a “climactic beaning scene.”
Does this amount to plagiarism? It’s hard to say. The two novels share a number of elements, but many of these elements are also present, in, say, the Futurama episode “A Leela of Her Own.” Unlike cases of stolen language, à la Jonah Lehrer or Melania Trump, claims about stolen ideas are challenging to prove. But that doesn’t stop people from trying.
. . . .
J.K. Rowling has been accused of idea theft, and vice versa, so many times that there’s a whole Wikipedia page for “legal disputes over the Harry Potter series.” The earliest was American writer Nancy Kathleen Stouffer, who sued Rowling for infringement in 1999, when only three of the books had been published (although it was already clear that the series was turning a handsome profit). Stouffer claimed that she’d invented the word “muggle” in her vanity-press book The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and that another of her works featured a character named Larry Potter. This is thin enough—but the court didn’t just rule that the similarities were too vague to amount to much. It actually found that even Stouffer’s weak evidence may have been fabricated. “In connection with this litigation, Stouffer has produced booklets entitled The Legend of Rah and the Muggles that were allegedly created by [publisher] Ande in the 1980s,” says the judgment. “However, plaintiffs have submitted expert testimony indicating that the words ‘The Legend of’ and the words ‘and the Muggles,’ which appear on the title pages of these booklets, could not have been printed prior to 1991.” Ditto for the tale of Larry Potter, which the judgment describes as the story of “a once happy boy named Larry who has become sad.” Stouffer said that the ’90s provenance of the words “muggle” and “Potter” wasn’t related to the case; she attributed it to “the fact that she continued to revise the story into the 1990s.” But the court found the whole thing unconvincing. Not only was the case dismissed, but the judge fined Stouffer $50,000 for “intentional bad faith conduct.”
Link to the rest at Electric Lit
From What Copyright Does Not Protect:
The Copyright Act says:
In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. 5
. . . .
Copyright law protects the expression of facts and ideas, not the ideas and facts themselves. Works that have not been fixed to a tangible medium are just ideas. Ideas are fair game for everyone to express in their own words. And ideas have been stolen since the dawn of art and literature. Here are some examples:7
- Canterbury Tales by Chaucer took ideas from the Italian author, Boccaccio.
- Shakespeare took plots for 90 percent of his greatest plays from other authors.
- Dimitri Yernetz wrote a series of books about a young magician under the titleTanya Grotter, written after J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.
- Cameron Crowe’s movie Vanilla Sky was a remake of a 1997 Spanish movie called Open Your Eyes. Penelope Cruz starred in both.
Link to the rest at Washington State University – University Communications
I am gobsmacked that Electric Lit did not mention Harlan Ellison. He got a settlement from Cameron with just the threat of lawsuit. If you cannot find a weird lawsuit in Ellison’s past, you ain’t lookin’.
If two (or more) writers decided to write a story loosely based on someone or something that has happened, you could easily have stories that appear to be plagiarism without any plagiarism actually occurring.
And then I’ve seen some really bad plagiarism where it looked like someone had used Word’s ‘replace’ feature to change the names/places of another work. (In another, the guy had rewritten the story line by line and it showed – because the new lines didn’t always fit/mesh as nicely as the original.)