Questions about plagiarism and copyright

@Goldenclover179, why do you want to do this? I read lots of sentences in the works of other writers that I love, but it's never occurred to me to steal them and stick them into my own work. I kind of recoil at the thought. Good writing by others just inspires me to try to write better myself. A good sentence by someone else makes me want to write a better one.

Why do you want to steal someone else's sentence? Aren't you proud of your own work?

 

Okay, thanks for all the advice.

 

@minstrel, it isn't that I'm not proud of my own work, I haven't actually stolen any sentences, I was only wondering if this was something that's okay to do or not, for future reference if I ever saw something that really popped out. I'm new to writing, so I don't really know what you can and can't do.

 

deadrats reply might seem a bit harsh, but it is the truth. Plagiarism is just that, no matter what the intention is behind it. Besides, it's pretty obvious that it is not okay. You are taking someone elses work and passing it off as your own. That is stealing something another writer came up with, and I think that the very essence of any writer is originality and creativity. Copying is quite the opposite of that, and unworthy of a writer. The question "would it get noticed" is the same question a thief asks himselfs before sneaking into your house at night and snatching your jewelry.

If that sentence really popped out to you, that means it is probably well-written and memorable, otherwise it wouldn't have popped out. That means it is not just a generic sentence that one might find in many books, but one of the things that made that book a good read. The only possible way to use it would be some kind of tribute, but that would require one of your characters to quote the work in your own book. Ask yourself instead; What is it that made this sentence pop up to me? What is it about this style, this use of words that makes it great? Figure that out, and play with it. If you blatantly copy/paste the work of others into your own, not only do you run the risk of some serious notoriety, but it certaintly would not make you a better writer, and I certainly would feel a bit of shame to get praise for something that isn't mine. Try to see through it, see what it is that is good, and use it to improve yourself.

 

Some of this is going a little overboard. You guys would have Shakespeare hanging by his thumbs. The comments here are way too proprietary in terms of ownership of language.

 

I think that writing sounds forced and artificial. If you're using something so well known as "so long and thanks for all the fish," and you're writing in that genre or to an audience likely to know it, you don't need to mention the source.

Look at movies and TV shows that use pop culture references, often lines, from well-known works. They don't necessarily bother to explain where they come from. That detracts entirely from the value of the reference to the audience.

 

Depends on how long the sentence is and how much detail it has. I've been known to lift concepts and sentence structures from other people - whether that's song lyrics or a technique I see in a book that's a clever way of approaching something (that's called "learning how to write better"). But if I do that, and I'm not doing it as a purposeful reference, I'll workshop the sentence until I have a different sentence that has that same effect that I want.

 

Context and authorial intent are important, and that sort of thing gets lost when people talk in absolute terms. There are many instances of lines being taken from sources where the intent is that at least a small percentage of readers will recognize the source. Not everyone will; not even most of them. But there's nothing wrong with that. It's an inside reference between the author and the reader, and explaining it destroys the connection it creates between the authors and the readers who do recognize it. I've seen probably half a dozen movies with lines from Evil Dead 2, which the majority of viewers aren't going to get at all. They're going to think the screenwriter from the newer film came up with the line. There's no character popping up saying "Nice Evil Dead 2 reference," or something like that. There isn't a line in the credits that says "That line from scene 24 was written by Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel" (nor am I going to explain the reference in the prior sentence). Sometimes it's a word or two, sometimes it's an entire sentence from the source material. Sometimes it is done as a parody, sometimes not.

Context and intent. The absolute admonition that you can never use a sentence from another work is bollocks (in the context of fiction; academic writing is another issue). And you don't have to look far to find books, movies, and TV shows that quote entire lines (or more) from other works without anyone explaining where they came from. You're either among the readership/viewership who understands it, or you're not.

 

A short sentence or phrase isn't going to give rise to copyright liability.

And, as I said, TV shows, books, and the like use phrases or short sentences from other works all the time without going out of their way to specifically identify the source. That's part of the point of making those references.

 

But I didn't see this as a question about using pop culture references, but about grabbing a sentence merely because it's admirable--rather than because it's unknown--and inserting it in one's work.

I couldn't wrap my mind around why anyone would think that's OK, but then I compared it to some other creative hobbies. It's pretty much just fine for a cook to copy elements of someone else's cooking or a seamstress/clothing designer to copy elements of someone else's garment. And it's just fine to join in the craze for zombies, or vampires, or young wizards. And it's fine to say, "Hey, I never thought of combining Beethoven with steel drums! Let's try that with Chopin!"

But it's not OK to copy a specific sequence of notes, or a specific sentence.

So I guess the line is less clear than I would have thought.

 

A single sentence, short phrase, title, etc. typically doesn't have copyright protection because they're too short. That's just a simple principle of copyright law. It's why you can have two book with the same time (setting aside trademark issues, which could arise).

 

Sure, it's a length issue, in part, and a creativity/originality issue in part. Phrases, slogans, etc. don't usually qualify because they're considered too short to exhibit the degree of creativity or originality necessarily for copyright protection. Doesn't mean no short phrases could ever qualify, but it is generally considered that the shorter the phrase the stronger the creative argument has to be to turn it into something that qualifies for copyright protection.

If you had a book title that was 500 words long, it would likely qualify even though titles, as a general rule, do not qualify.

 

It depends on the sentence. I would stay away from things that are iconic like "It was the best of time, it was the worst of time" ya know. But Im sure millions of authors have copied simple sentences unintentionally just because you can't help it. Like "She walked up to the door" im sure has been used a lot.

 

But that's not copying. It's just coincidentally the same.

 

I should have put copy in quotations..."copy"

 

I wouldn't mind quoting a very famous sentence because nobody in their right mind would think I was trying to pass it off as original. I'd quote almost anything from Shakespeare, for instance, or Dickens' "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

What I wouldn't do is something like this:

The boatmen pulled the drowned body into their dingy. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

The second sentence in that example is verbatim from James Joyce's Ulysses. It's a sentence I love, and it's unique and distinctive, but it's obscure enough that most people wouldn't be familiar with it. If I used it, it would look like I was trying to pass a gem from someone else off as my own work - that's what I'd recoil from.

 

I sometimes here lines in films and tv shows that I'm very tempted to shoehorn into my narrative somehow or other. Two recent ones from a tv show I'm watching are:

"He's surrounded by so many arse-lickers they'd be pushed for an answer if he said hello."

"All he's got to do is fart and you'd crawl up and have a crap!"

 

I don't see why you would want to do this verbatim. I think you're better off writing your own words with your own voice rather than worrying about how to put someone else's into your work.

I did wonder about something similar to this once when reading Gardens of Water by Alan Drew. At one point Yrem looks down at Istanbul at night and Drew describes the city lights she sees very beautifully and prosaically. Something like describing the lights as like "a constellation of stars".

Its such a good way of describing a night time city I have always struggled to stay away from it. In the end I decided that the english language is generous enough to let me get away with ripping off a few things!

 

I think the OP has got hung up on a particular sentence he or she has read somewhere and maybe thinks it's the only sentence they want to/can use for a given part of their project.
How many times have we all written something, come back to it the following day and thought, no, that's not right,so we correct it instinctively and suddenly it looks beautiful?
Whichever way you look at it, writing a book isn't writing a YouTube comment or scribbling something on Facebook; it's original, it comes from you and only you.
On the face of it and not knowing exactly to which sentence the OP is referring, I couldn't live with myself knowing that I'd nicked a unique sentence from someone else.

 

So I was doing some research just into general info for my WIP. It seems that Buddha had a lot of pertinent teachings that would apply to many of the events in my book. Could I use direct lines from his teachings? Or from others, Socrates. (HAHA So-Crates, I need to watch that movie again), Confucius, even Martin Luther King Jr? (not ancient I know). Or would I need to reword it and try to make it my own?

 

Do you mean from a legal standpoint? I believe quotes like that would be considered public domain, but definitely something to research further (someone on here is quite knowledgeable about that kind of thing but I forget who. @Steerpike maybe?).

Or do you mean is using them essentially ripping them off, and would be not great morally? I would think of it this way: do these figures exist in your world? Can they be quoted directly and attributed to? Then do that. It's also perfectly fine IMO to repackage the general ideas and philosophies into a fictional setting - there's a lot of cultural overlap when it comes to things like that (like the concept of an afterlife, or karma) and it makes sense that some fictional culture would have them too. But they wouldn't have the exact words. If you're going to use exact words, they should be credited to the real life people who said them.

(Maybe something of a sidebar, but I used an excerpt from an ancient Nordic text in a short story of mine, and I also tried very hard to track down the most accurate and literal translation possible. If you're using something that's been translated to English, it's worth getting as close to the source material as you can.)