Interesting Links for 8-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Radiohead: are they any good? (A sceptic listens to the first five albums - funny and well written)
  (tags: music radiohead reviews)
• The S stands for Simple (Thankfully I don't have to work with SOAP, but if you ever have, this is hilarious)
  (tags: humor xml programming software web soa soap)
• The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders (This being the bit that worries me about today's speech)
  (tags: law uk rights freedom government)
• Nick Clegg's speech on civil liberties. More of this please - reminds me why I couldn't vote for Labour last time around.
  I'm nervous, of course, of what the actual laws will be. But this is generally pointing in the right direction.
  (tags: uk government law rights freespeech libel terrorism)
• Glasgow pantomime dress broke Geneva Convention
  (tags: law uk)
• Facebook made profits of $350m in 9 months. Valued at $50Bn. Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me...
  (tags: facebook business web2.0)
• Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed. (They claimed that she copied the idea of wizards travelling on trains. WTF?)
  (tags: harrypotter law books)

Comments

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

It's this particular bit of blatant plagiarism that bothers me, particularly considering many (really bloody stupid) people seem to think it's the other way round

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that that's plagiarism. As the remainder of that long list makes clear "Small boy discovers that he's an important magician and goes to school to learn magic" has a very long tradition. But I can understand the frustration for the author when people get it the wrong way around.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's definitely not blatant plagiarism (unless you can show me the exact copied passages of text -- that's your textbook definition). And I don't think it's even likely to be influenced by the other book.

HP taps into a long-running traditional genre, the English boarding school novel: a lot of the tropes (scheming rival student, sporting contests between houses, kindly headteacher and irascible/antagonistic master or mistress) are stock items.

HP also taps into a separate traditional sub-genre, the lonely kid who discovers they've got magical powers and grows up in the process of developing them (self-realization).

Banging two sub-genres together until you get something new out of the fusion is SOP for a whole bunch of authors (including me). I'm about 99% certain that Jill Murphy and Joanne Rowling entirely independently banged the same two extremely-popular ideas together to develop their own stories; the bizarre thing is that Harry Potter became a worldwide marketing phenomenon.

I will concede about a 1% probability that J. K. Rowling read "The Worst Witch" when she was a kid -- she'd have been 9 when it came out -- and bits of it stuck in her subconscious. None of us write in a perfect vacuum. However, TWW didn't go bestseller and would consequently have been extremely easy to miss.

An author writing a kid-goes-to-magic-school novel today has no scope for claims of ignorance about Harry Potter. But as Lev Grossman shows (in "The Magicians") being able to rely on your audience's prior familiarity with HP can actually be a good thing, if you're working to defeat their expectations.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. My comment was pretty much hyperbole in response to the "wizards on trains" bit. The sentiment though (that Jill Murphy was fairly unlucky, and that it's bad that she's the one that sometimes gets accused of being derivative of HP) remains.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It seems like a very natural mashup to me, and looking at the list in Wikipedia, to a lot of other authors too...

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Plagiarism really doesn't imply exact copied passages of text. Wiktionary has 'The act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person's ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.' OED gives 'The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft.'

And I'd put the chances of Rowling having read The Worst Witch *much* higher than that. It was certainly a pretty popular series when I was growing up (the first book came out four years before I was born) - Wikipedia informs us 'They have become some of the most outstandingly successful titles on the Young Puffin paperback list and have sold more than 4 million copies.[1] In 1986, the first book in the series was made into a Halloween telefilm.' Given she would have been pretty much exactly its target audience, I'd go so far as to say it would be distinctly surprising if she'd missed it entirely.

You're quite right apart from that, though.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wow. As I'd never heard of "The Worst Witch" (and am 18 months older than JKR) colour me surprised.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

things that made me smile: Neil Gaiman on whether Rowling nicked from The Books Of Magic...
[paraphrasing].. 'No, she didn't. She's a very intelligent woman. She'd have made changes that would erase the question. It's sheer coincidence. I can, however, give you a list of stuff she *did* steal, but I only know that because I stole them too'

and on whether Sandman will ever be a movie: 'Hollywood is a big meat grinder. I have no interest in feeding Sandman into that grinder' [followed by MASSIVE audience applause]