Property, Plagairism, and Poppycock

Sailor Boy has been studying Intellectual Property. One of the cases used as an example in his class deals with a man who sued Cole Porter, saying that Porter had stolen four notes from the middle of one of his songs and made it the first four notes in a Porter hit. This case is apparently very important not only because it dealt with what can be considered as intellectual property but also because it dealt with what level of expertise the judiciary ought to have in a particular field to decide such a case. (The laymen said it sounded like Porter had stolen the notes. The music experts said that was beyond ridiculous, that there are only eight notes to start with.)

I don’t know what the final decision was.

But when I heard about it, I thought of how that translates to the writing world. Writers talk a lot about how certain elements of your story are not original to you. I was reading an RWR article from 2004 about it. You aren’t the first person to write about vampires, and you won’t be the last. Nobody has the patent on sexy, brainy librarians. On some level, your plot has always been done before. Your cool twist is not really your own. M. Night Shaymalan didn’t invent the “dead protagonist.” And as for the latest lawsuit against Dan Brown, that he lifted information from a nonfiction work of religious history, I thought that was what we like to call research. (I don’t know the facts of the case, but holy crap are all novelists in trouble if they can be sued because of accuracy of research!)

And of course, the arguments about the difference between a ripoff and a retelling are endless. (Don’t believe me? Check out the comments thread here and here.)

And aside from the “it’s not really yours to start with” argument, there’s also the “I’m not really doing what you’re doing” argument. I resisted reading the Harry Potter books for a while because I thought the concept leaned too closely to one of my favorite films from childhood, The Worst Witch (starring a tiny Fairuzia Balk and Tim Curry), about a girl at a British boarding school for witches. When I actually read Harry Potter, I realized how differently each work approached a very similar topic, to the point that I don’t even think of them being similar at all. They aren’t a similar concept, they’re a similar subgenre. My own book may be set at an Ivy League secret society, but it’s not an outlandish thriller like The Skulls. As I said to a few college friends, this book is the anti-Skulls.

So, the the writerly argument goes, the only thing you really own in your story are your words.

(This is why when you feel you have invented a word (like, say, Muggle), you sue someone else who has been using that word. And if it turns out that not only did you not invent that word, but that you might not even have been using it before the other person did and even if you were, which can’t be proved, you’re definitely not using it in a manner which could in any way be confused with the way another person was using it, you lose your lawsuit and become an industry laughingstock.)

Now the next question is, the one that brings us back to the Cole Porter case, how many words or notes count? Every author in the world has put “the” in her work… somewhere.

There’s a post on Romancing the Blog today that drew my attention to a plagairism case going on in the U.K. According to the news article about the case, the author of a memoir has had her book pulled from production because it was discovered she lifted several passages from other authors, ranging from Graham Greene to Charlotte Bronte. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. According to Tara Gelsomino on Romancing the Blog, “The explanation her publisher (Bloomsbury, for the curious) gave was that the author’s incredible photographic memory was to blame.”

As a chick with a somewhat freaky memory, I have to admit this scares the crap out of me. I have been known to write a sentence, look at it, then realize that I cribbed it from another source. I’m sure all writers have had this experience. Good sentences live in your heart. Isn’t the point of deathless prose that it becomes, well, deathless?

So I read the comparative quotes between Judith Kelly’s Rock Me Gently and Jane Eyre et al. Some of them are downright xeroxes, others are a bit harder to recognize (I had to read the Bronte bit a few times to see the similarities.) All are very, very short, some only a sentence or two in length:

King Billy is a Gentleman, Mantel: “My childhood seemed to belong to some much earlier, greyer world. It was my inner country, visited sometimes in dreams…”

Rock Me Gently: “My childhood had been consigned to some much earlier, greyer world. It was my inner country, rarely visited.”

So yeah, that’s obviously a quote. It’s also obviously itty bitty. So I’m wondering, if those sentences hadn’t been conjoined, if she’d only used the second one, would it be plagairism? I know I have heard psychologists describe inner countries before, internal landscapes of the soul, etc. etc. At how many words do you draw the line?

Is the problem one of genre? This chick is supposedly writing a memoir, but quoting having said and done things that happened in novels. It calls into question not only her originality, but the nonfiction nature of her memoir. Did she really get typhoid in her orphanage, or did that happen to poor Jane Eyre? If she’d been writing out and out fiction, would she be applauded for her “nods” to the classics?

Or is the problem one of intent? (or lack thereof.) When chick lit writers from Elizabeth Buchanan to Helen Fielding write “it is a truth universally acknowledged” in their books, we all laugh at their wink to Austen. (And if Austen is public domain, then Bronte probably is too). But those ladies are writing comedy and giving clearly unspoken tribute to a genre matriarch. Where does one draw the line? When I saw the Rock Me Gently excerpts, I was disturbed. But if I saw Jane Austen’s famous first sentence from Pride and Prejudice followed up immediately by the similar line from Bridget Jones’s Diary, without understanding the context, or the fact that the author had intended it to be a tribute, I’d probably feel similarly. And then, who is to call into question the author’s intent? New Critics would lambast me for that one! And perhaps Fielding and Buchanan are off the hook because it is a famous opening sentence, not some obscure pasage from the middle of the novel.

If I started the next book in the Secret Society Girl Series with “George Harrison Prescott, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul: George Harrison Prescott,” is Amy a dirty plagairist, or just being pretentious and funny?

I’m not defending Kelly. But I am curious. What counts? Where does one draw the line? Discuss.