Because we’re not blessed with perfect memory it’s quite easy for a writer to believe that an idea he thought was original is, in fact, not. It could be based on something he read, saw, or heard of many years ago and subsequently forgot. Our writer verges here on plagiarism and possible copyright theft, and all unconsciously. What can he do?
He is a decent and honourable person and would not normally dream of stealing another writer’s work, but he had no idea. He woke up with the concept one morning and thought it was his. His brain has betrayed him and could lead him to the courts, fines and humiliation, for plagiarism carries with it a stigma comparable only to interfering with farmyard animals.
I am no legal expert and yet it seems to me that ideas in and of themselves can not be copyrighted. Otherwise there would be no genre fiction, no derivatives of James Bond, Mike Hammer or Sherlock Holmes. Admittedly it would be illegal to call your spy James Bond or to lift passages from Fleming’s work, but the concept of a debonair, globe trotting spy could easily be duplicated though perhaps not with as much success as 007.
So where does one draw the line between adopting a genre and stealing an idea? I don’t have a clue, and that’s why we’re protected in some way by agents, managers and production companies and their attendant legal departments whose responsibility it is to pick these things up. The problem is that I’ve just spent six months writing this masterwork and I’m not going to be happy to discover that it’s been wasted because some guy in Outer Mongolia wrote something similar ten years ago. Guess I forgot to do some research before I started writing. Should have checked the net before I started writing about my acrobat, detective, nun. Google would have picked it up.
But, though this isn’t directly about plagiarism or copyright theft, let me tell you about my brief brush with writing legality. A co-writer and I put together a stage play which spoofed a well-known cartoon family which features in a Scottish Sunday newspaper. (If you’re Scottish you’ll know who I mean!) The company which publishes this newspaper are known to be fiercely protective towards their brood and we were naturally nervous about their response. My co-writer was an academic and consulted one of the senior law lecturers at Glasgow University to check upon what we could get away with. The written reply was incomprehensible to mere laymen, but we decided to proceed anyway.
We varied names and situations, but because this cartoon strip is so iconic in Scotland we were sure people would make the connection, especially when we managed to get a two page spread, complete with photographs, in an evening newspaper by way of pre-publicity. But there was much we kept the same, the characters themselves, the extended Scottish family and their relationships, their archaic Scottish dialect, even their costume. But the spurious background we added to this cartoon family was that they were the descendants of the illicit union between Queen Victoria and her Scottish manservant, John Brown. In their eyes, therefore, they were the rightful rulers of Scotland.
Anyway, the show opened, was well attended and was well received. In the bar afterwards I got talking to one of the audience. How had he heard about the play? He’d read about it in the newspaper. Had he enjoyed the play? Yes, thought it was hilarious. Wasn’t offended that we’d spoofed Scottish icons?
What? Was that what it was about, that family? I thought it was just a typical Scottish family.
Gurmeet Mattu is a comedy writer with an award winning 25 year writing career. He currently offers free factsheets, critiques and online writing training at www.scriptschool.co.uk
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