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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers,net.movies
Subject: Re: The Terminator vs. Harlan Ellison
Message-ID: <2848@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Jun-85 01:43:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.2848
Posted: Fri Jun 14 01:43:26 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Jun-85 07:38:19 EDT
References: <1027@peora.UUCP> <2818@nsc.UUCP> <981@trwatf.UUCP>
Reply-To: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Distribution: net
Organization: Plaidhenge
Lines: 51
Keywords: plagiarism, editorial
Xref: watmath net.sf-lovers:7999 net.movies:6635
Summary: Grey areas of law made murkier


> == Lord Frith

>How do you differentiate between rip-offs and coincidence?

How do you describe color to a blind man? That isn't as facetious an
answer as you might think, because plagiarism is one of the great grey
areas of literature law.

>The idea of a robot
>cop doesn't sound so obtuse to gaurentee another writer won't think of it
>again... and invent story lines around it.

The best way to look at this is through example.  If I were to write
a SF series set in a bar, I wouldn't have a lot of problem except
having publishers return it as being derivative. Spider Robinson has
done a bar series (Callahan's Bar) but doing another bar story doesn't
mean I'm plagiarizing him.

Now, if I decide to make one of the Bartenders Irish, and one of the
Bartenders an ex-minister, and maybe one night a week we have a
joke-a-thon and aliens keep wandering in after saving the world I'm
sure I'd hear from Spider's lawyers. Bar stories aren't illegal. Bar
stories that look like they have been borrowed from already published
bar stories are.

>Harlan's stories may have been inovative in their day, but that doesn't mean
>that they are inovative now.  Thus it seems presumptuous for him to conclude
>that he was ripped off.

It is also presumptuous for you to assume it otherwise. Whether or not his
story is still innovative is beside the point. Harlan owns the copyright to
Brillo, and the copyrights to the Twilight Zone scripts, and that gives him
the right to market them as he sees fit. If someone infringes upon the
marketability of his work by borrowing from them without paying him, then
Harlan is out money and is within his right to try to get it back.

If you decided to rewrite Unix, you could do so without any problem. If you
decided to rewrite Unix, however, with any of the materials the AT&T
considers proprietary, then AT&T would have your office 18 deep in lawyers.
The laws are different (copyright vs trade secret/contractual) but the
concept is the same. Harlan owns Brillo, AT&T owns Unix. Neither is unique,
but if you use the protected resources to create another resource without
paying for them they you are equally in the wrong whether that resource is
software, a SF story, or the patented formula for Valium.
-- 
:From the misfiring synapses of:                  Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

The offices were very nice, and the clients were only raping the land, and
then, of course, there was the money...