work? It's a fine line and the number of recent court cases involving books, films and music have yet to throw up a definitive answer.
SHAKESPEARE had plenty to say about plagiarism.
"So all my best is dressing old words new," he wrote honestly, "spending again what is already spent." So did the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, who observed in the first century of our era that "some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works". In fact, Shakespeare is supposed to have pinched bits of Pliny to write Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida and Othello.
Bits only, however; he was more of a Plutarch man.
day, perhaps, is its litigious potential. The dust has scarcely Code, Dan Brown's 40-million-selling success story that, according to authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, was based They failed, in the end, to win a cut of the action.
As did Nancy Stouffer, a hitherto unremarked children's writer who unsuccessfully sued J. K. Rowling for pinching the word Muggles from her own book, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, to put it to far more profitable use in her Harry Potter series.
court. Neither the guilty nor the aggrieved have that sort of money so authors are simply named and, if the mud sticks, shamed. After Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Like Faulkner, he revealed, Swift process of writing and was, in his eyes, so obvious that he had on. In every other respect, Last Orders was clearly a very different book. The furore was soon over, in fact, but it made Swift's life fairly hellish for a week or two.
"It is in the nature others," he said at the time. "Equally, there are certain things for which there is no literary patent or monopoly."
And so we come to this week's little literary scandal, in which another writer's autobiography.
McEwan's Atonement is not a war novel, but a domestic drama about jealousy, betrayal and guilt between two sisters. The elder sister is, however, an army nurse during the Second World War and, in his acknowledgments, McEwan cites No Time for Romance, by Lucilla Andrews, as an invaluable source of contemporary medical information. Andrews had been a nurse during the war.
She had then turned, with great success, to writing hospital romances; No Time for Romance was her one venture into autobiography.
Last weekend, a London tabloid reported that Andrews, who died in August at the age of 86, had been planning to deliver a speech using her words as his own. In one example quoted, Andrews wrote of "dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains".
Accordingly, ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut and painted lead potion on were called Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase and George; so were Bryony's. And so on.
In a sense, the trap of quotation awaits any novelist who wants to use the past.
"It is an eerie, intrusive matter, inserting historical record, one feels a weighty obligation to strict can be novelistically realised, but they cannot be re-invented." There was, in fact, very little information available at all about "For certain long-outdated medical practices, (Lucilla Andrews) was my sole source," he continued. "I have always been grateful to her.
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This is not a dispute that will make it to court. Legally, copyright is infringed only by material that is "important, distinctive or essential" to the original work, according to the senior legal officer at the Australian Copyright Council, Ian McDonald. "It's not just a question of amount.
In most cases where there is a question of infringement, the author has taken a little matter rather than a legal one." McEwan's Atonement, he ideas, let alone whole phrases. I tend now to go back not to what the author took it from, but what they made of the whole by bower-birding and re-threading things.
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The novel stands or falls, after all, as a work of imagination. "Despite the fact people like to work out what is behind fiction, I actually creates a novel," says Roger McDonald, whose story of an of white settlement, The Ballad of Desmond Kale, won this year's Miles Franklin award.
with, you've got no way of selecting what you might use to flesh that out.
I can imagine that from what I've read about Ian McEwan his novel. It's not that he used that to create the novel. It's the other way around.
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readers can spot places, visual details and atmospheres subsequently woven into the novel. An elderly waterman in London stood in a formal hall, waiting to be "bound over" for his apprenticeship and not daring to move, even though he was in front of a very hot fire. She has then given this experience to the Is this, too, a sort of plagiarism, a small theft of identity?
At the big end of literary success, the use of other people's lives can be a minefield; African-American author Terry McMillan, who as a character in one of her books, Disappearing Act. Names were changed, but that didn't stop him suing (unsuccessfully) for defamation.
Whether a character is recognisable once fictionalised is, however, a murky business.
Helen Garner has said that after she Carlton theatrical scene of which she was clearly a member, several wrongly, as it turned out. They didn't realise, she told a Melbourne Writers' Festival, how much of it she had made up.
But real details, including personal ones, can provide writer and reader.
Grenville's use of the fire vignette, for example, works beautifully you feel the heat yourself in giving her own story a particular verisimilitude. And in informant not only knew she was taking notes, but was spurred on by that knowledge to tell her more.
But all authors, historical or not, are constantly absorbing details that are grist to the mill.
"When I read an article on Ian McEwan I thought yes, that's exactly how it happens when you're writing," says Roger MacDonald. "Most of the time authors don't should."
Novels, after all, do not set out to convey information.
The duty of the novelist, he says, is to convey what he describes as a the reader on its own terms. Of late, he says, he has given up calling his background reading "research" at all.
"So many historians tell me that what I do is not research.
So I evocatively you picture something, the more chance you have that it will be convincing historically. But that doesn't mean it's literally, truly a transcription of what must have happened."
There are many more battles over ideas, words and phrases in the film and pop music industries.
Musical copyright, says Ian McDonald, can stand or fall on one recognisable bar. And in Hollywood, where the stakes are immeasurably higher than in the world of literary fiction, spotting and suing is an industry in its own right.
George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, had to fight off claims by a French screenwriter, Stephanie Vergniault, that the thriller was argued, fruitlessly as it turned out, that writing Syriana equal experience.
Pop musicians who have been taken to court in the past few months include Beyonce and Green Day; a few years ago, Frozen and its mother-ship album, Ray of Light happens to be married to the head of EMI Music Publishing. And these are just the cases we hear about. In Mumbai, home of the vast Bollywood film industry, Hindi composers are almost routinely crackles with their fury.
Back in the '60s, the songwriter Tom Lehrer celebrated the spirit of intellectual theft. "Plagiarise!" he enjoined his listeners.
"Let no one else's work evade your eyes! Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!" Not that anybody could have taken him up on it, since nobody else could convincingly have claimed that inventive but simply appalling rhyme.
As a piece of period detail about the golden age of satire, however, it could prove indispensable.
Stephanie Bunbury is a senior Age writer.
Keywords: Time For Romance, Ian Mcewan, Lucilla Andrews, For Romance, Ian Mcdonald, No Time, Time For, No Time For
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