[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dadioflex

Anyone know the specifics about the two novels that had to be withdrawn from sale? I do have one incident in the back of my mind, but it's all Dead Grannies until I see a link to somewhere recognizable.

Is he talking about stealing a scene and re-writing it, or cutting and pasting?

I see nothing wrong with re-writing a scene. I don't really see anything wrong with wholesale lifting of plots and characters, so long as you use your own words.

There are, what, seven archetypal plots. There are far more archetypal characters, but they all started out as being new and unique to someone.

Culture does not thrive where lawyers abound.

But yeah, cutting and pasting would be bad. Also, stupid.

There was one well-publicised case recently where a spy novel had entire scenes taken from James Bond books, I recall.

EDIT: Here we are, "Assassin of Secrets", by one "Q.R. Markham". A report about it in the UK's Guardian newspaper here.

"He seemed to have taken most of his action scenes and dialogue from post-Fleming Bond novels (at least six of Gardner's), and added long poetic descriptions from several of McCarry's books, as well as the back-story for his protagonist. A bizarre personal playlist of his favourite moments in the genre, I guess, all sewn together with the magic of Controls C and V," said Duns. "I immediately emailed the publisher, explaining the situation and giving the example from the Bond message board and all the others I had found, and asking them to remove the Q&A I had done with him from their websites – he had of course also plagiarised many of his comments in it, from Dream Time by Geoffrey O'Brien, which was also the source for much of his book's prologue – and to withdraw the book."

There was another case a year or so ago where some teenage girl published a book that turned out to have been "lifted" from other sources.

EDIT: This case was one "Kaavya Viswanathan" back in 2006. Wiki article on the subject here.