JeffKirvin.net

According to the Guardian, Shyamalan is being sued because the plot of “The Village” was too close to the children’s book Running Out of Time, published by Margaret Peterson Haddix in 1995.

I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but this is getting ridiculous. Recall that the writers of “Underworld” were also sued because there were “points of similarity” between the plot of that film and a relatively obscure midlist novel. We’re getting dangerously close to the end of art imagined by Spider Robinson in his short story “Melancholy Elephants“. In the story, copyright is about to become eternal, and any work of art, be it a song, a story, or a picture, is already compared against a massive central database of existing art to see if it will be a copyright violation.

There are 88 notes in the scale humans can hear. That means that there are a finite number of melodies, combinations of those notes. What happens after we’ve discovered and copyrighted them all?

As for writing, be it books or movies, I’ll let Spider handle that one.

“Now go back to the 1970s again. Remember the Roots plagiarism case? And the dozens like it that followed? Around the same time a writer named van Vogt sued the makers of a successful film called Alien, for plagiarism of a story forty years later. Two other writers named Bova and Ellison sued a television studio for stealing a series idea. All three collected.

“That ended the legal principle that one does not copyright ideas but arrangements of words. The number of word-arrangements is finite, but the number of ideas is much smaller. Certainly, they can be retold in endless ways�West Side Story is a brilliant reworking of Romeo and Juliet. But it was only possible because Romeo and Juliet was in the public domain. Remember too that of the finite number of stories that can be told, a certain number will be bad stories.

Copyright, as originally envisioned, was had nothing to do with ideas, only a particular expression of an idea. Jefferson was actually deadset against ownership of ideas, what has become known now as Intellectual Property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

If we’re really at the point of copyrighting plots, not books, but just the plot, then we all may as well stop writing right now. Storytelling has always been about the story, not the plot, about the journey, not the map. There really is nothing new under the sun, and if we run the risk of being sued on the basis that our idea is too similar to that of someone else, even if the execution of that idea is different, then storytelling is already dead.