Roger Kreuz

And so you can see how the perspective of the creator runs the gamut of this is fine to this is terrible and I'm going to sue you.

So that adds more complications to the story of what's going on here in terms of intent and in terms of whether people would want to litigate against that story.

I originally believed that it was relatively uncommon, but the more research that I conducted, the more I found that cases have been litigated, or more commonly, it's resolved through out-of-court process where a lawyer representing one artist might send a letter saying, gee, you know, you ripped us off, and there might be an out-of-court settlement.

In fact, that's often what happens because people want to keep out of the news.

And so you have these allegations of plagiarism

And then you never hear anything more about it because the party is held privately out of court.

That seems to be very common, especially in the music world, where charges of appropriation and plagiarism can affect reputations in a fairly major sort of way.

So a lot of it's handled in a private way.

And that makes it even harder to know exactly how much of it's going on.

I naively assumed it was fairly infrequent, and then the more research I did, the more I was just astonished at how much there is.

There's a mention of plagiarism about once a week in the New York Times, for example, and that has increased dramatically over the last couple of decades.

There are periods of time when it's not been talked about very much at all, and therefore it probably was not as big of a problem, but today it seems to be a major issue.

And that may be a reflection of our more litigious society that people are more likely to sue other people or that the ideas about ownership have changed over time.

When Shakespeare was writing his plays, there was no real idea of ownership.

Shakespeare ripped off lots of people.

Almost all of the great writers from the early modern period were borrowing each other's plots, in some cases, each other's characters, and that was considered to be fine.

Yeah, intellectual property, or just IP as people call it, that's a relatively recent phenomenon as well.

It really goes hand in hand with the discussion of copyright.

And for our purposes today, they're pretty much identical.

The idea being that when you create some work, maybe it's a song, maybe it's a short story, that there is implicit copyright and that that work is your intellectual property.