Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
Don't go there... 
(Who was first?) |
I have no idea.
When I was in high school, I wrote a short story about some people with psychic powers who were being persecuted as witches in medieval times. My high school teacher, who was completely unfamiliar with science fiction or fantasy, stumbled across a copy of Katherine Kurtz's
High Deryni in a book store, thought the story looked similar to mine (based on the synopsis on the back cover), and suggested to me, rather strongly, that I needed to put an acknowledgment to Kurtz in my story... or even submit a different story for the assignment, as she though mine was too much like Kurtz'.
My story wasn't especially great, but it wasn't anything like what Kurtz had written, as I had reason to know, having read all of Kurtz' Deryni stories as well as numerous other works of science fiction and fantasy with similar themes. I told her I thought I owed more to Gillian Bradshaw for stylistic reasons, or perhaps Lloyd Alexander, and eventually included an acknowledgment listing about a dozen authors. But the idea of people with unusual abilities being persecuted was so common that it didn't seem reasonable to me to even draw a comparison between my story and Kurtz'.
The teacher didn't really get the point, and I think it's the same point we're discussing here. After some period of time, ideas pass into the common culture, whether we want them to or not, and after that point the "original" author really has no "right" to try to control those ideas. They aren't original anymore. Acknowledging a limit on copyright term seems to me to recognize this.