: Re: How do we draw the line between plagiarism and allusion? It’s no secret that in literature we see characters that remind us of other characters. Furthermore, it’s no secret we see plots

@Ravi5107385

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Legally, there have probably been millions of words written on the ramifications of this question for the law of every nation that has laws on the subject at all.

Historically, Shakespeare didn't just get away with it because he was brilliant but because the laws and customs of Elizabethan England did not have any more than an embryonic concept of intellectual property. Stories and songs belonged to everyone.

Morally, speaking for modern day people who do have, rightly or wrongly, a concept of intellectual property at least for recent works, the answer to your question about where the border between allusion and plagiarism falls is hard to specify in terms of rules that can be made to apply to all cases. Yet when it comes to writing that makes me say, "why, Author Y is just ripping off Author X", nine times out of ten I know it when I see it. The test is whether in going from X's character to Y's version of that character anything unique to Y's mind was added.

The same goes for plots and scenarios as for characters. David Weber's Honor Harrington science fiction novels concerning space warfare around the year 4000 are consciously and openly modeled on C.S.Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels set in the Napoleonic wars. The two main characters even have the same initials. Nobody gets upset because there is obviously a vast amount of Weber's own work and imagination put into the Honor Harrington books.

Weber clearly admires Forester's books, but there have also been very successful "inspired by" characters (and plots and scenarios) where the second author was reacting against the way the first author did it, saying, "no, that's not the way things would be." I haven't read it but from what I've heard Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would be a case of this. Yudkowsky gets away with having his book be about literally the same character because a positively obsessive amount of his own thought has gone into making his story different from J.K. Rowling's original. That difference is the whole point.

Many aspects of the story I am working on arose in my mind because I said, "no,that's not the way things would be" to some common tropes of the sub-genre, even when I generally liked the books in which I saw them. I hope that the eventual story will be more than just a reaction to other writers' works, but it will certainly allude to them, though not by name.

I won't get myself into trouble by specifying an author or book that I see as falling on the wrong side of the line between moral plagiarism and allusion. But when every memorable aspect of a character comes from the original author, then I'd mutter about plagiarism, even if it is cleverly arranged to be within the law.

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