Something that may be of interest to forensic linguists is the recent controversy regarding Dan Brown's bestseller
The Da Vinci Code. John Olsson, of the
Forensic Linguistics Institute has published
an expert comparison of several novels at the core of this case.
Something very interesting about this is that I think this result will result in an increase of cases where students copy and paste. Why should they get punished for something that a major author can do and get away with? I don't think there's anyone who after considering the evidence can seriously come to the conclusion that Dan Brown didn't take ideas and probably even passages from other books.
This reminds me of the 2001 case around the parody novel
The Wind Done Gone. Though the book is clearly a parody (which the US Supreme Court has ruled to be protected speech), a Federal district judge issued an injunction against publication. This was overturned by the appeals court, but the issue wasn't settled until there was an out of court settlement of an undisclosed sum. More information at
FindLaw and
Wikipedia.
Also, let's not forget that
RIAA is able to charge people who distribute content for free, whereas an author who takes a book and rewrites it for profit is exonerated by the courts. This doesn't seem very consistant to me, even though I recognize that creative powers are required in the case of the author and not the file sharer.
For the record, I tend to recognize the medieval concept that it isn't a bad thing to take something that already exists and give it a new meaning. In MHG, they called it "diuten". This creative process necessarily isn't a copy of someone else's work. (Due to the nature of context, it is impossible to reproduce the context of a quote, and therefore even an accurate quote is not the same as the same passage in the original work.) Of course, passing off someone else's work as your own is not acceptable.
