No, Kingsbury’s story was entirely original. It was the underlying universe that was Asimov’s under a different name. In a sense, all three novels were about crises in psychohistory and this was an entirely different one. But in what I said about a magical school, I didn’t say a word about the story line. I was assuming it is was an entirely different plot, unrelated to Rowling’s. Imagine, for example, that magic mysteriously start to progressively weaken and it is up to Marty (say) to discover its cause and end it before it disappears. Suppose, say, that magic is actually due to the presence and health of the unicorns and some virus is killing them. Marty eventually discovers the cause and creates, somehow, a vaccine, to immunize them.
There. I have imagined a story utterly different from Rowling’s and I don’t see how it could be plagiarism. I hope someone goes ahead and writes it.
As bad or worse has been done with Tolkien; The Sword of Shanarra sold a bajillion copies and was sufficiently close to the Lord of the Rings that you could predict what would happen in sword at a scene-by-scene level based on what happened in Lord of the Rings. I’m told that the Iron Tower Trilogy is worse.
I’m in academia, so my experience with plagiarism and copyright issues is from that realm and not the realm of entertainment/fiction. But what you describe sounds like copyright violation to me. If this story were posted for free online (like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I’ll talk about more below) then there’s a good chance that no one would ever come after you. If they did, it would probably begin with a cease and desist letter and you could avoid a lawsuit by just taking the story down.
However, attempting to profit from a work that violates someone else’s copyright is the sort of thing that copyright holders tend to be less understanding about. Personally, I’d be particularly reluctant to screw around with something like the Alien franchise. An individual author might never learn about a minor commercial work that violates their copyright, or might decide it’s not worth going to court over. A major Hollywood film studio seems in a better position to both learn about the violation and sue over it.
As **Thudlow Boink **mentioned, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality isn’t a commercially published novel. It’s posted for free online on FanFiction.Net. I’ve never heard of J.K. Rowling going after fanfiction authors. Most copyright holders don’t bother trying to stop fanfic writers, although there are some notable exceptions (e.g. Anne Rice). In general though I think copyright holders tend to feel that fanfiction isn’t really hurting them and that playing Whack-A-Mole with fanfic sites isn’t worth the trouble. While the Methods of Rationality author could probably make a decent case for this particular story being a parody that is protected under fair use, it’s unlikely to ever come to that.
And I hope they’re prepared to deal with a copyright violation lawsuit. An entirely original plot does not change the fact that the hypothetical novel you described earlier made extensive use of specific ideas, characters, and settings from the Harry Potter novels.
You guys are neglecting a major difference between plagiarism and copyright: If something is a copyright violation, it is still a violation even if they name their sources. This is not true for plagiarism. If I announce my source, I am quoting you.
Plagiarizing is specifically claiming work to be your own when it is not. The concern is about people getting credit when they shouldn’t, not about who gets paid. That’s why plagiarism existed even before copyright.
That said, you really shouldn’t do either. But more and more authors are okay with technical copyright violations as long as you don’t try to make money off of it. And even some are okay if you make money off of it–see many companies and their Let’s Play policy, or some specific works that allow fanfic of them to be sold on Amazon. (or, to be more specific, Amazon bought the rights to allow it. They get a cut, too, so why not?)
Then why didn’t Kingsbury’s? That’s what he was trying to do: mimic Kingsbury’s method of filing off the serial numbers off a work in order to publish something in another author’s universe. What specifically would he have to change to make it work?
My guess is that Kingbury changed a lot more than the names to make it work–the names were just one of the things he changed. I could see making a story about a boarding school just with clubs, that you get to via portal in your dresser, and no real mention of a sport at all. And, yes, with a teacher everyone thinks may be evil. And perhaps the entire world is magical, and that raises the stakes even higher–the world is ending.
Just because you know you’re basing it on the Harry Potter universe doesn’t mean the final result will be based on the Harry Potter universe. See Shades of Gray, which was explicitly a Twilight fanfic. And, even knowing its origins, it’s perfectly legal.
I once pointed out to Terry Pratchett that one of his books (don’t remember the title) had many similarities with the book Comet in Moominland by Finnish author/artist Tove Jansson and he seemed a bit upset about it. However, I wouldn’t say that these similarities are plagiarism. Instead they are an homage to Jansson. He probably had read the book as a child and forgotten about it, but the plot had been lingering in the back of his mind all the time.
This thread has been interesting, but the answers contradict what I had always heard: that you cannot copyright ideas, only their expression. Rowling’s world of magic and Asimov’s universe are ideas. An original story based on them uses the idea, but not their expression.
There’s no clearcut answer. Nothing about what you describe is not necessarily a copyright violation, even if you use it all.
Ideas are not copyrightable, so you’re free to use the idea of the terrorizing alien. You just can’t set it up as part of the “Alien” universe.
The bigger question is why reuse an existing alien? Your job as a writer is to make things up and come up with something just as good or better (as Alfred Bester said, the only thing a writer has to offer is originality). Create your own terrifying threat and you’ll be a better writer for it.
I’ve been writing and selling SF for over 30 years and my goal was to never write anything I could find before. Other than a Star Trek proposal (the editor solicited it), I have never tried to work in another author’s universe and my advice is that you’re far better off writing something that’s nothing like the alien than just using what already exists.
It’s harder, but the results are going to be better.
That’s why the subject is so damn tricky. Asimov’s “psychohistory” in the Foundation series is an idea – but it is expressed in specific ways that make it recognizable. If someone else expresses an idea in similar ways, there may be trouble.
It can be subjective. Try to avoid doing anything that a jury might find derivative.
Regarding the Niven quote, I know that it’s in as a preface to one of the Man-Kzin Wars collections.
That, of course, is a way to use someone’s IP. Shared universes are fairly common in science fiction and fantasy and there have been some pretty good stories written over the years.
In school, if you are asked to write an essay on quadratic hypotenuses and you submit a paper that clearly identifies itself as a copy of Johnson’s (2003) landmark “Hypotenuses and the quadratic barrier”, you haven’t committed plagiarism per se because you have admitted that you didn’t write the paper. You’re very likely to flunk the assignment, though, because you didn’t actually write a paper, which was the point. Lack of attribution or insufficient attribution is normally an essential element of plagiarism.
On the other hand, if you upload copies of Star Wars to a website and clearly and unambiguously identify Lucasfilm as the creator and Disney as the copyright owner , you may still be guilty of a copyright violation because lack of attribution is not an element.
“A world of magic”, or even “a young boy attends a school for wizards”, is an idea that cannot be copyrighted. But US copyright law grants the copyright holder the exclusive right “to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work” (see section 106 of this very large PDF; it’s on pages 31-32 of the PDF, numbered as pages 16-17 of the original document). If J.K. Rowling and her lawyers could convince the judge that a particular story about a school for wizards was an unauthorized derivative work based on the Harry Potter series then she’d presumably win this hypothetical lawsuit.
In a copyright lawsuit the judge does have to consider the specifics of the original work and the work that’s allegedly an unauthorized derivative. A story that resembled Harry Potter wouldn’t necessarily be found to be in violation of Rowling’s copyright. There have of course been plenty of stories about schools for wizards, so borrowing that general idea isn’t enough to make a story a derivative work based on the HP series even if the author was inspired by the HP series. But if the story is about a young boy who attends a school for wizards that is reached by passing through a portal between platforms in a London rail station, etc., that’s not going to look good in court. It wouldn’t look as bad as if the boy was named Harry Potter and the school was called Hogwarts, but I don’t think just changing the names while keeping the details the same is likely to fool a judge.
Todd McFarlane tried to make a “but the names are different!” argument during his lengthy legal battle with Neil Gaiman over characters Gaiman had co-created while guest writing an issue of the Spawn comic. For more info see this short article from the AV Club, but basically the judge found that the characters Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany, and Domina were essentially the same characters as Gaiman’s Medieval Spawn and Angela even though they had different names.
The intent of my post was to understand how much, and what type, of a reuse constitutes plagiarism and/or copyright violation. I wanted to understand if there is any tolerance at all, socially and legally, for an author that wants to retell / refine / build upon a story already told by someone else, and whether that qualifies as a “creative effort” or is frowned upon as an imitation worthy of a lawsuit.