'tis true... though lines like. 'we'll always have Paris' and 'make my day!' are used all over the place, it's more a case of what you can get away with, than what's legally allowed... if you're lucky enough to get it accepted, the magazine editor will have the final say...
Well, Harry Potter used titles of classical Disney books/movies and it seems no one seemed to be bothered with it. Dan Brown dragged in Darth Vader in his third Langdon book by having a statue of him. I think as long as you let people know where you got that quote from, then it's okay. "Come to the Dark Side!" Bob said. "Okay, cut the Star Wars crap, dude." Joe said. I think an example of what not to do would be: "Come to the Dark Side!" Bob said. "Never!" Joe yelled. "Okay, then not."
Not necessarily. In fact, trying that with lyrics can easily get you a lawsuit; one that will probably be settled out of court, but it will cost you.
IANAL, but I don't think the Fight Club people would have a legitimate case against you -- but even so, I suppose they could cause you a lot of hassle proving that.
True, true, it's a sticky buisness. To be on the safe side, I just make stuff up. Of course, if I'm setting it in the real world, then some things I'll have to keep, like the Wii or X-Box 360, because nowhere in the gaming world is there a system called The Saturn X.
. titles and characters can be mentioned... it's not the same as using actual lines from a copyrighted work... you need to study up on the laws: www.copyright.gov that's the us site, but the laws are the same, or similar, in all countries that are signatories to the berne convention...
Would it be plagerism if I had a character (drunk, let's say and they were college students studying Charles Dickens and the Industrial Revolution and another person happens to be reading a book about exploration in the North Pole) sing in the tune of a well-known song (at least the first two versus) and use a character from another story not my own? Like: Here comes David Copperfield, A-ridin' on a Beluga whale. What's he doin' in the Artic? I'll tell ye what he's up to. I'll tell ye here and now. He's ridin' on for adventure, and glory of Old England.
since dickens has been dead and gone for far longer than it takes for works to be in the public domain, how could there possibly be a copyright/plagiarism [note correct spelling] problem? learn all this on your own, at the source [ www.copyright.gov ] and it'll be a lot faster than waiting for answers here...
It can't be a copyright problem, but there could be a plagiarism problem if you tried to pass Dickens' work off as your own. Mind you, the chances of getting away with it for long, with such a well known author, are slim.
I wouldn't try to pass off Dickens' work as my own. If I have a reference from Dickens, I'll make sure to put him name in there some kind of way. But again, on the safe side, I just make stuff up. But thanks for the link. I'll check it out.
I think it would be better to try and move the medium forward by coming up with something original. Make it so good that years from now people will be trying to figure out how to legally plagiarize you.
But no writing exists in a vacuum. It all bounces off everything else we have read. The question isn't how to legally plagiarize -- I don't think anybody here wants to plagiarize. The question is how to legitimately engage with the existing culture without plagiarising. When Stieg Larsson has a character describe somebody else as a Gollum-like recluse, that draws effectively on cultural kowledge. It gets the point across simply and effectively, and tells us about the character speaking as well as the one being described. Is it plagiarism? No. It only makes sense if you recognise the reference to the original. Larsson is not passing Tolkien's work off as his own, he's drawing on the fact that it is now a part of the world that we and his characters live in. Did he have to get permission from Tolkein's estate? I don't know, but I certainly hope not.
Yeah, but that's totally different from what's being talked about here. That's actually a very cool and original way of describing someone, though like any other thing you could possibly write, including the letter 'A', it wasn't born in a vacuum. TS is talking about changing the actual words from another body of work just enough that it won't be looked at as plagiarism, rather than digging deep and writing from underneath the rocks in his gut.
Not totally. There's a continuum, and the problem is that it's not clear how far you can move along it, still being creative, without treading on legal toes. A lot of Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse was parodying the stuff that the schoolkids of the time was made to learn. Parody depends on being recognisable, and a lot of large media corporations use copyright to try to prevent parody. The issue isn't plagiarism, though. But what about Aphra Behn's "The Rover", a work which cribs a lot from Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso, or The Wanderer, including chunks of text -- but Behn's is generally regarded as the better play and is far more widely studied nowadays. That was clearly plagiarism, and by modern standards would be well out of line, but it wasn't a lack of creativity or skill that made her do it, rather it was her confidence that she could make a better job of it (as long as we're charitable enough to grant that the preference for The Rover is based on its merits, and not on Behn's status as a feminist and gay icon).
I don't agree with that. I think that, in this day and age, what with the Internet being as big as it is, theft in books and movies can't go unnoticed. In regard to original work, I think it's largely like video games. Companies make sequels because the previous one did well. The consumers may not like sequel after sequel, but if it's profitable for a company, they're going to keep making them. New IPs are a risk. Why try something new when the old formula works well? I think writers approach it the same way. Why not write for a genre and use the same old cliches that have proven time and time again to be successful? It takes a lot more work, and is a lot more of a risk, to produce a truly original work.
I'm sure many of you have read Gabriel Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I'm not so sure if many of you have read Isabell Allende's novel The House of The Spirits. Allende's novel is horrifically similar to Marquez's. Similar plot structure, characters, and descriptions. I think Allende's novel is a perfect example of what not to do with your inspiration. That being said, I do have to say that almost all stories are similar considering they mostly derive from early biblical tales. Archetypes and plot lines usually come from these tales. So in a way, we all plagiarize a little bit.
It is not possible to create a piece of work that is completely oringinal. With the amount of books already published it is impossible to write something and not to find similarities in another piece of work. Having said that, this is not plagerism. It is simply inevitable. To take someone elses work and simply change a few words here and there is despicable. It is one thing to get inspiration from someone elses writing and to make something of your own from this. But to take someones work and try to disguise it as your own? You are simply saying you have no oringinal thoughts and cannot write from your own heart.
