: Re: When does satire (parody) become plagiarism? Stephen Fry wrote a novel called The Stars’ Tennis Balls, and claimed that only afterwards did he realize he’d rewritten The Count of Monte Cristo.

@Megan928

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I am now going to try to answer this question based on what I've learned since our December exchange.

I have "taste-tested" both books without reading through either. The styles are different enough that I'm going to assume that Stephen Fry didn't plagiarize any of Dumas book in the usual sense of "copying" one or more passages.

There is a doctrine called "striking similarity," whereby copyright infringement can occur even in the absence of plagiarism. The two works have "parallel" sequences regarding abduction, incarceration, a treasure hunt, and ultimately revenge. So Fry might have some vulnerability on those grounds.

I am not a lawyer, but I have learned some things from my "day job" about how "copying" is viewed. From what I understand from my reading of case law, it is not a "literary" test as a writer would understand it, but rather a marketing test: Does Work B go after the same market as Work A with essentially the same type of bait? Here, Fry is probably on safer ground.

The reason I'd cite is that both are "period" pieces. Dumas' in "pre-Republican" (before 1871), Fry's in the modern era. One would not expect Fry to follow up with another "pre-Republican" thriller like the Three Musketeers (deterrence is an element of the law). Nor could Dumas imagine the modern world that Fry's character lives in, so we can't accuse Fry of taking away Dumas' follow-up opportunity.

The best chance of convicting Fry is to convince the jury that there is a specialized and limited audience of "kidnap-revenge" story afficionados that Fry was cutting into. Fry's counterargument would be that "modernizing" the setting would draw large a "crossover" audience that would now buy "The Count of Montecristo" but would never read it otherwise. Maybe even yours truly.

An example of "probable" fair use was "Pretty Woman" by Two Live Crew that was a takeoff of Roy Orbison's original. Crew actually copied the first line of the song, and then veered off in the opposite direction; Crew's "woman" was a "streetwalker," Orbison's was an "innocent." The Supreme Court threw out the judgment in favor of Acuff Records and ordered a new trial because it could reasonably be seen as parody. And the "oppositeness" of Crew's version basically brought in a new audience with minimal damage to Orbison's. So Acuff Records did the smart thing and cut a deal with Crew instead of risking a new trial.

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