--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "bucktowntiger <jdh22_at_c...>" <jdh22_at_c...> wrote: > Here's my thing. Sometimes (and I'm not saying that Chip Beall did > this) the apparent plagiarism of a question is not known by an author > when writing a question. OK. It's certainly not unimaginable that such a thing might happen from time to time. There are a finite number of ways to structure a question on the "Battle of Waterloo" or "Diels-Alder Reactions" or "England Dan & John Ford Coley." >From a lawyer's standpoint, copyright law, unlike patent or trademark law, does not protect the original author from "independent creation." Which means that if a defendant can prove that he/she created the work without any knowledge or awareness of the existence of the prior work, there is no infringement. (A court is of course going to cast a skeptical eye at a defendant who claims to have independently written the exact same 96,542 word novel as the planitiff .) The big battlefields in this area of law are software "reverse engineering" cases and artistic design cases. (Contrast with patents, where, if your invention is already patented by someone else, it doesn't matter if you knew about their invention or not.) If it would objectively make sense to write a question the same way it's already been written, someone might conclude that, well, great minds sometimes think alike. There's no prohibition against using the same clues again, nor should there be. But...IIRC, we've seen plagiarists copy factual errors, missepellings, and poor grammar as well as clue content. And when that happens, it's strong evidence against independent creation. So, no, I wouldn't expect writers to conduct a question search to make sure their question hasn't been written before. In fact that requirement, if it were to exist, might do more harm than good by encouraging the increased use of esoterica and minutia in QB questions. -Tim Young
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