The Gaming Den

Okay, so we know that if we write a story about a princess of a kingdom rebelling against an evil empire who sends two bumbling guys to a faraway place who meets up with a farmboy who takes these two bumblers to a wise old mentor with a hidden warrior past whereupon the wise old mentor finds out that the empire has plans for a magic spell that destroys kingdoms so trains the farmboy in a magic swordart so that when they meet up with a salty rogue mercenary in a bar they can go on an epic castle raid to rescue the princess...

It's pretty easy to tell that the plot is ripped wholesale from Star Wars and that story is plagiarism. However:

1) How much of that story would have to be changed for it to not be plagiarism and

2) Is it possible to expand on a story so that it's a wholly original work?

For example, say that the farmboy was actually a deserter from the empire and pretended to have amnesia so he could live his life in peace but hated the empire to the point of psychosis. However, when he recovers the spell from the empire's clutches he decides to get revenge against the Empire by using it over the protests of the princess and the wise old mentor--and he's forced to kill them to stop them from interfering.

It obviously uses the same plot points and structure as Star Wars, but by changing a few key details the meaning o the story is changed to the point where they are entirely different works. Is THAT still plagiarism?[/i]

I think you're conflating the folk process with plagiarism. See, plagiarism is the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." It is not using story elements from another story in your own story. The Magnificent Seven is not plagiarized from Seven Samurai. A New Hope is not plagiarized from The Hidden Fortress.

-Username17

So how did Kurosawa ended up successfully winning his lawsuit accusing the MS of plagiarism?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So how did Kurosawa ended up successfully winning his lawsuit accusing the MS of plagiarism?

Because that was never a battle over plagiarism, really, it was a battle over selling the rights to the movie between different studios. And let me tell you, author's rights and property is much more complex than any amount of plagiarism. Note, also, that while Kurosawa won his suit, he was also successfully counter-sued, so it's not like he exactly got off with a clear victory.

Here are the specific details:

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1124650 wrote:BBC[/url]]Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is often referred to as 'the Original Magnificent Seven'. This is quite true: when the film was first screened in New York in 1956, the English-language title was The Magnificent Seven, since apparently Toho Studios did not believe that American audiences would know what samurai were. Although the version shown was substantially cut - from 207 minutes to under 160 - its power still made film studio executives consider doing a remake, and Kurosawa's use of film-Western techniques, particularly those of John Ford, had them re-imagining the movie in that particular genre.

Producer Lou Morheim purchased the remake rights from Toho for $US250. This sum was ridiculously low, even by 1950s standards; perhaps Toho did not believe a successful film re-make was possible, especially one by a gaijin1 studio. Several years later, though, a Tokyo court ruled the sale illegal (see below for details).

---

As mentioned earlier, a Tokyo court ruled in 1978 that the original sale of Seven Samurai's remake rights was illegal. This was the answer to a lawsuit by Kurosawa and his screenwriters Hideo Oguni and Shinobu Hashimoto, who had never been paid royalties for Toho's subsequent re-releases of the film. One of the ramifications of this decision was the statement that United Artists (which by now had merged with MGM) never had the right to make the three Magnificent Seven sequels, and thus owed Kurosawa more money.

MGM counter-sued Toho Studios and Kurosawa Production in 1991. Two years later, in an out-of-court settlement, Toho paid MGM $50,000 to settle the original error, and MGM gained from Kurosawa Production the remake rights to Seven Samurai - but only if the re-make took place in the Western genre.

So this truly wasn't a suit about plagiarism. In fact, it wasn't even about copyright infringement in the case of the original film. It was only about whether or not the sequels infringed on Kurosawa's IP.

But while we're here, let's explain the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is a legal concept, and it's all about how many words you duplicate, not about story elements. Plagiarism is concerned with ripoffs of ideas as well as words, but it's an ethical, rather than legal, concept. Thus plagiarism is only a big deal if you belong to a profession or organization with a code of ethics that prohibits it. You can't go to jail for plagiarism, but you can be kicked out of school or fired from certain jobs for it.

Plagiarism is not illegal in the fiction-writing business. If it was, no books would ever be written, since there are few entirely new ideas under the sun. For example, Shakespeare would never have written any of his plays if he wasn't allowed to rip off elements from other people's stories. (In fact, Shakespeare couldn't have written most of his plays under modern copyright rules, but that's another story.)

Plagiarism is seen as a bad thing today and this is fine as we truly do live in a world where everyone can see everyone and that lack of privacy has made that one author's written word has to be only that author's written word.

But there are those who think that Chaucer took his characters and changed their names and some of their professions from the Decameron and another French Text.

Shakespeare did the same.

THere have been many who done so.

I can't date when Plagiarism became such a twattish thing.

I'm neither playing devil's advocate nor saying plagiarism is the antichrist.

I'll try to hit up the library tonight to see if I can hit up a library on a quick book on the history of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is bad.

But plagiarism isn't building upon your predecessors, or using similar themes or settings or even characters.

Plagiarism is where you take someone's work as your own. It's not sourcing where the information came from, or taking an entire story.

We are also in a world in which we are bombarded with far more sourceable and unsourceable information than ever before. In the past, no one expected a penny if you sang a song you'd heard at a campfire, now we do. As expectation rises... Blurring the line between what is an isn't someone's work...

Well, you're not selling me that plagiarism is a good thing, because you're describing it as it isn't.

-Crissa

http://www.8easybits.net/comic/latest.php

This isn't really relevant to the discussion of plagiarism, since it concerns itself more with derivative works, but I thought it would be relevant to the thread since I (did) love this guy's webcomic before he went on a several months-long hiatus punctuated by douchebaggery.

Wow. That 8 Easy Bits guy is a tool. Does he have a problem with Muppet Treasure Island too? What about Ulysses? Are Kermit the Frog or James Joyce somehow stealing from Robert L. Stevenson or Homer? Those guys are fucking dead. You can't steal from them.

-Username17

I attend felting classes where people make flowers from unspun wool. Most of the attendees are semi-professionals (that is, they sell the stuff they make). The community is really obsessed with plagiarism. "Oh no she made a rose! I made a rose a year ago! Plagiarizing bitch! I'll wipe you from the face of the Internet!"

They stop short of posting shock images, which is a wonder given the idiotic general disposition that sort of defeats the purpose of taking classes. "I'll show you how to make this flower (but not just any flower you like) and you'll pay me money and heavens forbid you from ever making a second one without my express written permission, not to mention posting pics."

Yeah, I read that and my thoughts on the whole thing were "wow, this guy is a total ass."

I don't think it's right to use someone's works too closely without stating that you are doing so. I don't really know where to draw the line of "too closely", and that doesn't concern me so much. But the guy who wrote that, he's a total douchebag, and he should just stop doing that.

Every single thing you write will always be influenced by people in your world. That's not debatable-that's literally how reality works and if you have a problem with that you're probably kind of crazy.

Plagiarism is wrong because you are using someone else's work and claiming it as your own. It is wrong because it is dishonest, and the trouble that it causes stems from that dishonesty.


Let's look at Frank, because he's right here in this thread. He and K wrote stuff, and told everyone it's totally okay for them to use their work however they like. But I still think it would be wrong for someone to take their work and then claim that they wrote it, not because it would offend Frank and K (because I'm pretty sure they've said they wouldn't be), but because it would be devaluing what they have done and telling other people that they were not the ones who did it.

But when someone-like, for instance, me-makes something using material that Frank and K created, and then goes and says "hey guys, I made this based on these things by these people", well, I'm of the opinion that doing that is okay. And I think a lot of you would back me up on that.


I'm also of the opinion that you can create things using the inspiration you get from other people's creations and not say so, and it can still be okay as long as you don't lie and say you didn't have that inspiration if you really did have it. If George Lucas drew inspiration from The Hidden Fortress to write A New Hope, that's okay. It's still okay even if he doesn't say he did. It stops being okay when and if he claims that he didn't.

Cielingcat wrote:But I still think it would be wrong for someone to take their work and then claim that they wrote it, not because it would offend Frank and K (because I'm pretty sure they've said they wouldn't be), but because it would be devaluing what they have done and telling other people that they were not the ones who did it.

To quote Races of War, "Honorable people take credit for their kills." Signing your stuff means people know where more awesome stuff is available, otherwise actual geek-hours are going to be spent looking for the source.