Eternal Recurrence: An Iterative History of Plagiarism

Posted April 11th, 2007 by editor

</strong><br /> The copyright battle over the dire and fictional 'Da Vinci Code', between it's author, Dan Brown, and Enzo Fardone, author of the equally dire and fictional 1982 book 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail', is just one of the more recent highlights in the long history of claims of plagiarism. </p> <p>Microsoft has made the equally dramatic claim that software piracy costs it Â£250 million per year, whilst the Business Software Alliance claims that global software piracy now costs $34 billion per year. British and American universities are reporting an epidemic of plagiarism and copyright abuse, resulting from the growth of the internet, which they believe is becoming a serious obstacle to intellectual progress.</p> <p>The UK Patent Office states that intellectual property law, such as the copyright protection of literature and computer software, is an 'enabling tool' that promotes innovation, progress and competitiveness. The US Constitution states that copyright protection is necessary to <em>'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts'</em>. The view of the software giants is that without a monopoly over the use of their ideas they would not have an adequate financial incentive to write good software. The music and publishing industries likewise claim that the unauthorised use of ideas, plots, melodies and lyrics stifles creativity by driving real writers and musicians out of their jobs. The message of western governments and businesses is clear: <em>Plagiarism has been going on long enough; it's time to stamp it out</em>. </p> <p>In the course of investigating this matter I found quite a few definitions of plagiarism using online dictionaries, several intriguingly bearing a notable resemblance to others. Unfortunately quoting them would itself constitute an act of plagiarism because their copyright terms said that <em>'no content from the website may be copied, reproduced, framed, hyperlinked, republished, downloaded, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way'</em>. (Even quoting that was probably a crime!) Definitions of plagiarism I have found elsewhere include: <em>'to appropriate ideas, passages, etc. from another work or author'</em> or <em>'taking the writings or literary concepts (a plot, characters, words) of another and selling and/or publishing them as one's own product.'</em> With such definitions in mind let's have a look at some of the most significant cases of plagiarism in the history of literature in order to grasp the scale and severity of this problem.</p> <p><strong> A LONG AND SORRY TROJAN TALE </strong><br /> Homer's <em>Odyssey</em> is the tale of how Odysseus escaped the fall of Troy, of how after an adventurous sea voyage he landed in Ithaca and then of how after a great battle regained control of his palace. For over 2700 years Homer managed to pull this off as an original work, but now the truth is coming out. Homer's depiction of the Underworld closely resembles scenes from the Mesopotamian <em>Epic of Gilgamesh</em>, the Sumerian king who ruled in 2800 BC, and the <em>Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld</em>. Linguistic analysis by Milman Parry has revealed that the poems are the final product of centuries of synthesis and reworking by generations of earlier oral poets. Homer might have got away with this had not archaeologists reconstructed the original stories from the cuneiform text on fragments of clay tablets dating from as far back as 2000 BC. Great Zeus, strike him down with your thunderbolt!</p> <p>Virgil's <em>Aeneid</em>, written in 19 BC, is the tale of Aeneas of Troy, of how he escaped the fall of Troy, of how, after an adventurous sea voyage closely modelled on both Homer's Odyssey and Apollonius of Rhodes' <em>Argonautica</em>, he landed in Italy and then of how, after great battles closely modelled on Homer's Iliad, he founded Rome. The story then recounts the great deeds of subsequent Kings of Rome. Apollonius himself derived his story of Jason and much of his plot for the <em>Argonautica</em> (written in the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC and now widely known as <em>'Jason and the Golden Fleece'</em>) from Homer's <em>Odyssey</em> and the <em>Medea</em> of Euripides (431 BC). Virgil's characters, sections of plot and formulaic phrases are all freely and liberally borrowed from these earlier sources. Why did the great hand of Jupiter not descend from heaven and write on Virgil's parchment 'Publius Vergilius see me - this is not your own work!'? Fortunately nowadays we have a wide range of anti-plagiarism programs, such as Turnitin and MyDropBox.com, that can instantly spot this kind of thing.</p> <p>It was not just the ancients who seemed incapable of writing a good story without stealing the plot. In Dante Alighieri's <em>Divina Commedia</em> of 1307 we are guided by the poet Virgil through an underworld derived directly from that of the <em>Aeneid</em> - itself derived from the underworld of the <em>Odyssey</em> and (though Dante did not know it) from the even earlier <em>Descent of Ishtar</em>. He thought he could get away with it, but maybe he has since been sent to his own inferno.</p> <p>Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Latin <em>Historia Regum Britanniae</em> (History of the Kings of Britain, c1136), steals the entire plot of the <em>Aeneid</em> when he tells the tale of Brutus of Troy, of how he escaped the fall of Troy, of how after an adventurous sea voyage he landed in Totnes in south west Britain and then of how after great battles he founded his capital, Troia Nova ('New Troy', now known as London) and gave his name to the island - Brutain. It then recounts the great deeds of subsequent Kings of Britain, principally King Arthur - who is derived from the Welsh celtic <em>Mabinogion</em>. Chretien de Troyes' four Arthurian romances (1160-80) and Robert Wace's <em>Roman de Brut</em> (The Romance of Brutus, 1155) were both written in French but derived their plots from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Breton/Welsh celtic myths. </p> <p>The whole unfolding epic of Brutus of Troy and King Arthur, the so-called 'Matter of Britain', was rewritten in English by Layamon around 1200 in his <em>Brut</em> - and then Sir Thomas Malory plundered all the earlier Arthurian sources to produce his <em>Le Morte Darthur</em> of 1469. As if this were not quite enough, Malory's text was then used both by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his <em>Idylls of the King</em> (1859) and T.H.White in <em>The Sword in the Stone</em> (1939).</p> <p>William Shakespeare wrote his <em>Troilus and Cressida</em> in 1602. He stole the entire story from Geoffrey Chaucer and hardly even bothered to disguise Chaucer's title - <em>Troilus and Criseyde</em> (c1385). It wasn't Chaucer's story though; he went off on holiday to Florence in 1372, long before that was the done thing, and translated <em>Il Filostrato</em> of Giovanni Boccaccio from Italian into English. I suppose he thought nobody would notice. Boccaccio wrote his story around 1335, but from where did his Troilus come? The name again is a give-away - he appears in Virgil's <em>Aeneid</em> as a character from Homer's Troy. Here again, from Homer to Shakespeare, we have twenty three centuries of unbroken plagiarism.</p> <p>Sadly, for Shakespeare this is far from being an isolated case. Not only did he use stories from Boccaccio's <em>Decameron</em> (1358) as the basis for <em>Cymbeline</em>, <em>Two Gentlemen of Verona</em> and <em>All's Well That Ends Well</em>, he also used Plutarch's <em>Lives</em> (c100 AD) as the basis for <em>Julius Caesar</em>, <em>Antony and Cleopatra</em>, <em>Coriolanus</em>, <em>Timon of Athens</em> and <em>A Midsummer Night's Dream</em> as well as making widespread use of Ovid's <em>Metamorphoses</em> (8 AD) and the plays of Seneca (c50 AD) - who himself heavily relied upon the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides (both c400 BC).</p> <p>Chaucer derived many of the stories in the <em>Canterbury Tales</em> (c1390) from Boccaccio's <em>Decameron</em>, as well as from Ovid, Dante and Virgil. Boccaccio likewise derived his stories from... well I think you have got the idea by now.</p> <p>Warner Bros Pictures, in an attempt finally to put an end to this shameful process, have carefully copyrighted their 2004 epic 'Troy'. Sadly it was not as memorable as its predecessors. All rights are, of course, reserved and neither the plot nor the characters may be used without permission. They are fortunate that none of the long series of aforementioned authors, from Homer onwards, had thought of copyrighting their work!</p> <p><strong> PLAGIARISM AND PROGRESS </strong><br /> So there we have it - a sordid and unbroken chain of plagiarism stretching from the ancient Sumerians to the present day and ended only by Warner Bros legal intervention. Each and every one of our so-called great writers and artists is exposed as a con-man and cheat, each one stealing from his ancestors only to have his stolen work stolen again and used without permission by his descendants. Not a single one of these works of literature can claim to be a unique and original creation of it's author, nor has there been any attempt to hide the fact that most of them are derived from well-known predecessors. Surely all this plagiarism must have had a devastating impact on the evolution of literature. Or am I being unjust to the most famous writers in history?</p> <p>What is obvious from all these examples is that current concepts of plagiarism and intellectual property were unknown for virtually the entire duration of our literary history. Not only were writers freely using the works of earlier writers, they were making a point of doing so and were actively avoiding inventing their own original stories. The fact is that our literature has not evolved through each generation of writers starting from scratch and developing their own unique plots and characters. Writers that just 'made up' their own stories rather than telling 'real' stories would actually have been criticised for doing so. Traditionally the art of story telling was to tell traditional stories in imaginative and creative new ways. In that way it was possible for each generation to use and build upon the works of earlier generations. The same was true in painting and architecture and many other fields. The idea was that artists unselfconsciously used the tools and the vocabulary developed for them by their predecessors and then provided their work as a gift for their descendants. Innovation was an iterative process in which each generation re-evaluated and refined the work of the past. Not only were such works not copyrighted, we often don't even know who designed or built our greatest cathedrals or illustrated the greatest medieval manuscripts.</p> <p>A dictionary from 1911 had an interesting comment on plagiarism: <em>'The idea of plagiarism as a wrong is comparatively modern, and has grown up with the increasing sense of property in works of the intellect'</em>. A few generations later, at least in the english-speaking world, we have all but forgotten how historically abnormal is our proprietary attitude to ideas.</p> <p>The idea of patents on inventions and manufacturing techniques only emerged with the rise of the individualistic merchant classes in renaissance Italy and Britain. They were first awarded to Venetian glass-blowers, initially in Britain in 1449. The concept was used most consistently in Britain and its colonies and only really took off with the industrial revolution. The principle was given pride of place in Article 1 of the original American Constitution of 1788: <em>'The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries'</em>. The legal copyrighting of books can again be traced back to Britain in 1710. Initially copyright law prevented the unauthorised printing of entire new texts but later it was also applied to the borrowing of concepts, characters and plots.</p> <p>In the classical, medieval and early modern eras works of literature and art, ideas and designs were treated as public property - part of the 'intellectual commons' that could be used by all. Whilst an artist or craftsman, a writer or philosopher might be provided with an income to support their livelihood, their ideas were not viewed as private property or tradeable commodities. They would not be outraged if other people used their ideas in their own work, they would treat it as an honour. And they would find the idea that ideas can be owned as incomprehensible as native Americans found the concept of the private ownership of land.</p> <p>The modern western view that the privatisation of knowledge and the ownership of ideas are necessary for creativity and intellectual progress is disproven by the progress of the forty centuries in which this view was unknown. Far from encouraging creativity, intellectual property laws force each writer, creator or inventor to start from scratch, avoiding all the best ideas of the past out of the fear of litigation. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the giants of the past we are forced to stand at their feet in fear of being trodden down.</p> <p><strong> TAG ALL THOUGHT </strong><br /> We are lucky that only the most recent ideas and literary creations have been privatised and not the older ideas that underlie them. Writers may be hampered by not being allowed to use plots and characters from recent stories, but imagine if they could not use the older ones either, if they required legal authorisation to use phrases from any past author such as <em>'winter of discontent'</em> (Richard III) or <em>'a plague on both your houses'</em> (Romeo and Juliet), if they had to pay the Anglo-Saxon and Roman inventors of the very words of our language or even the Greeks and Phoenicians who invented the letters of the alphabet. The ultimate outcome of such a process would be the intellectual tagging of every word, phrase and idea. An article like this one, if legal permission could be obtained to write it at all, would need to be accompanied by ten pages of acknowledgements to all the previous thinkers whose ideas had directly or indirectly influenced the text.</p> <p>This is exactly the situation that has rapidly developed in the world of writing software. From a situation in the 1970s when most key ideas were in the public arena we have, in a few short decades, moved to a situation where most of the ideas (including once-public ones) are now the intellectual property of a few global monopolies and most of the software is encrypted to prevent the public and independent programmers from reading it. Microsoft might still nominally be losing Â£250 million per year through software piracy but it would never have appeared as a business in the first place, nor grown to its current massive size, had not Bill Gates made copious use of preceding software that was at that time part of the intellectual commons. When the software industry, through privacy and copyright law, fail to repay their own debt to the intellectual commons they deplete the resource pool available to future generations of independent programmers. Contrary to the claims of the intellectual property advocates, it is difficult to imagine a situation more likely to paralyse the evolution of software.</p> <p><strong><br /> Robert Vint</strong></p> </div> <div class="links"> <ul class="links inline"><li class="first last comment_add"><a href="/comment/reply/134#comment-form" title="Share your thoughts and opinions related to this posting." class="comment_add">Add new comment</a></li> </ul> </div> <br> <br> </div> <div id="comments"></div> <span class="clear"></span> <p><a href="#top" class="to-top">Back to top</a></p> </div> <div id="sidebar-right" class="sidebar"> <div id="block-menu-120" class="block block-menu"> <div class="blockinner"> <h6 class="title"> Featured Articles </h6> <div class="content"> <ul class="menu"> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/109">The Art of Noise</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/263">Jeremy Allison gets a name check from Fidel Castro</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/244">That Which Survives</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/129">The twenty-four hour loaf</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/108">Orbiting Debian: Bdale Garbie</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/119">Diving for Perls: The poetry of programming</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/116">Hacking after midnight</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/67">Why should we not tag our politicians?</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/231">Always Crashing</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/246">The Viral Clause</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/56">Tivo, phone home...</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/225">Machine smashing ain't what it used to be</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/113">Requiem for Bell Labs, Unit 1127</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/120">Shakespeare, think tanks, Linux, Atlantis & the AdTI</a></li> <li class="leaf"><a href="http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/177">Vista - 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