So, I was reading the cover copy of a fantasy romance involving a relocated book shop, the owner, and a good looking male neighbor. I have not read the book. However, the idea intrigued me, and I decided to start sketching out a story about a relocated book shop, the owner, and the power of stories. More than that I didn’t have.
Is this theft?
Filing off the serial numbers is common enough and well enough known that there are academic books published about it. You start with ideas from a book or film or other thing that you really like, or that you find a few bits fascinating and want to explore. Then you expand those ideas, rework them in different directions, and (when done well), the result is completely different from the original source. This is done with mythology, plays, and all sorts of things. I did it with “The Wolves and the Ice Lion,” drawing on a music video and a second song from the same group. I moved everything to a new location and time, and turned the romance into something rather different, involving an aging mercenary and a widowed noble woman, neither of whom were interested in romantic love.
Legitimate switch is taking an idea and moving it from one medium to another, completely reworking it, and telling a very similar story in a different way. The surface may look similar (see a lot of paranormal romance or mythology retellings) but the new piece is unrelated to the idea despite surface similarities.
Neither is intellectual theft, when done well, and correctly. Fanfic is sort of gray, because it is based on fans using known and copyrighted characters and going in other directions with them. Some authors strictly forbade this, and had their lawyers come down hard on people who circulated fanfic. Others had few problems with it, so long as certain guidelines were and are respected. One of those is “don’t try to sell your work.” Only after a lot of filing, rewriting, adjusting, and changing can what starts as direct fanfic be legally published sale. My Cat Among Dragons series started as flat-out fanfic of two very different stories in different media. It turned into something different from either one, something that does not infringe on either series’ copyrights.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with pulling bits from a story that you love or hate, and doing it better, or differently. Fanfic for your own pleasure is great, and a wonderful way to develop story telling skills. Trying to mimic another writer in order to see what makes their stories tick, to sort out for yourself how she works with language so you can build on that can be a valuable learning tool.
So, if a bookstore is relocated and the power of the stories is unleashed on the world, and perhaps a mild romantic relationship develops, is it infringement? No. But read Patricia C. Wrede’s essay at the link below for more.
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Legitimate Switch and Filing Serial Numbers”
I am conflicted between the “proper practices of a publisher of (my own) stories” and the way that traditional story telling actually works, in the hands of the (anonymous) “people”.
Yes, one should do all the proper serial number filing (with its concomitant problems) in one’s own, current, for profit publications. That’s how the modern commercial world works.
But that’s not how the world of STORY works, the world of campfires and traditional tales and sleepy children. That world is porous and teeming with crossbreeding stories and characters, always at hand to help with understanding current life and its dilemmas, to frame one’s fears and dreams, to ruminate about behaviors and causes, to explore the endless “what-ifs” of existence, real or imaginary.
The writer (or tale teller) who creates a world of characters and story that are fresh enough to stand out may deserve to have his name attached, (and certainly deserves his commercial rights under law), but names are forgotten, and commerce dies away into “public domain”. And a good thing, too. The hoard of “Story” is better for it. The “Matter of Britain” or the “Matter of France” is bigger than any one of its contributors whose names we can attach, and it teems with Story.
My family makes stuff.
Frequently, we come up with interesting and useful ways to make stuff.
Some of those, we’ve set up a legal framework to try to strike a balance between “develop awesome stuff (which requires access to other awesome stuff)” and “get more awesome stuff because folks who make it can actually get some money from it.”
That definitely is a cost, and I just miiiiight have a bit of a gripe at the folks who confuse the compromise for moral framework, or worse a moral absolute.
Homer deserves honor; but goodness, we should never even consider locking away the stories he told!
(and yes, sometimes framing it that way does help folks understand the idea of stories being rooted in older stories– just like technology)
OTOH, both Matters are — messy. The continuity snarls of Marvel and DC combined into one.
Breaking off our own little worlds does help with artistic unity.
I can’t remember if I’ve ever “repurposed” the plot of a story, but my story Touch of Genius is a tribute to a certain writer named Ray whose style I shamelessly imitated in it. I believe Heinlein, among many others, contended there are only 3 plots. Some say 7, but the idea’s the same. I remember how Terry Brooks’ Shannara series of books was accused by many of being a shameless rip-off of Lord of the Rings.
I know Sarah has famously said that No Man’s Land was based on her frustration with how Ursula Le Guin handled the basic idea of Left Hand of Darkness. As everyone should know, ideas are not copyrightable. That’s one of the bane of writers when someone finds out they’re a writer and corners them with, “I’ve got a great idea for a story…” An idea is nothing. What you do with the idea is everything.
I did a talk one year for a middle school English class and I told them it was perfectly fine to do fan-fic, as a sort of training-wheels book. Taking characters and a setting already limned out for you and creating new adventures … well, neccessary and mostly painless learning process for a starting-out writer.
As for filing off the identifiable serial numbers – hooo, boy! Did that with the Lone Star Sons series. Took the concept of the Lone Ranger, took away the mask, the silver bullets, the magnificent white horse, racked it back 40 years and based some of the incidents on real history, and made the hero and sidekick a kind of Secret Service for the Republic of Texas – and Hi-Yo Unidentified Pinto Pony, Away!
I also lifted a the plot of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and set it in the American Southwest … any good plot ought to be given a good romp in any setting where it would work, but one of the reviewers for the anthology that it was in was a bit miffed and called it a rip-off! (No, it’s a homage, you uncouth clod!)
I’m amused because I think I know what anime triggered that book….
If you are thinking about pirates, you are on the right track.
I actually meant the book that you read the cover for and went “hm, that idea is shiny-”
OK, yes, looking at it sideways, it’s probably that anime, or the anime movie made from a British novel. Or “yes!”
David Drake made a career of repurposing plots – from both fiction and nonfiction. Cross the Stars was his retelling of the Odyssey set in the far future. His RCN series borrowed heavily from history,
Pournelle did the same thing. One section in his novel The Mercenary lifted the Nika Riots whole cloth. Ditto Poul Anderson. His award-winning No Truce With Kings borrowed from Kipling’s poem “The Old Issue.”
The question is not whether you borrow. It’s whether the result is an original story.
I also appreciated how he would explain that in the fore words and afterwords.
Especially the times he had to explain how what really happened was so outlandish that no-one would believe it if he’d put it in the novel.
My comments on the Wrede piece cover my positions nicely. . . .
I still haven’t had anyone recognize the original source of anything except the fairy tales, where I will even tell you that I ripped it off. 0:)
I also rambled on here:
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/stealing-ideas
It’s interesting to read this post right now, because I’m currently writing a story that’s an homage to Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” — except my story is set in Indianapolis, deals with a modern ride-share driver who’s a plane-spotter, and has a supernatural element.
And my magic school stories are as much an homage to Louis Sacher’s Wayside School books as they are a riff on Harry Potter.