Another week, another high-rolling writer accused of plagiarism by a nobody. Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series and the reason that most bookshops now have a shelf mark for "Paranormal -Romance", stands accused of stealing plot elements for her fourth vampire novel from a book published on the internet by a teenage writer called Jordan Scott. Among them: vampires, a wedding, an emergency caesarean section and a main character who calls his wife "love". Coincidental, certainly, but likely no more than that: it's hard to imagine Meyer stumped for plot elements in a series she'd already written three volumes for. She says the claims are "completely without merit".
But Meyer isn't alone. Literary plagiarism is hard to prove but it can mean serious money. And even the loser is set to gain publicity. High-profile cases are few but significant. In 1978 Alex Haley, - the author of the multi-generational saga Roots - was accused by Harold Kourlander of plagiarising Kourlander's novel The African. Haley settled out of court for nearly $750,000 (Dh2.7 million), claiming that he'd never read Kourlander's book. A literature professor later attested to having given him a copy but by then the case was settled.
Other cases are less clear-cut. Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, came to London in 2006 to answer charges of plagiarism from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, whose 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail set forth the conspiracy hokum that lay at the root of Brown's novel. Brown was acquitted, but the case raised several questions. Where does inspiration become plagiarism? Must writers acknowledge the debts they owe to other citizens of the republic of letters? And most importantly, can the plagiarism of intellectual property ever be proved?
The answers are important because they bear on the entire structure of literary thought: the cross-pollination, inspiration and plain theft that are responsible for the evolution of thought and style. As TS Eliot put it: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." Most modern plagiarism cases (the word comes from a Latin word for "kidnapping") stand or fall by the most discernible evidence: the comparison of texts. Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life - greeted with rapturous advances from its publishers in 2006 and swiftly signed for a film deal - turned out to contain passages with strong phrasal similarities to five separate writers, including chick-litters and Salman Rushdie. Viswanathan's claims that she had a photographic memory and had unconsciously internalised the passages (actually not without merit, given the irrelevance of the cited extracts to the plot) were brushed aside in the fuss that surrounded the James Frey fake-memoir scandal. Her book was pulped, her film deal shredded, and she retreated into obscurity.
And spare a thought for JK Rowling, who's embroiled (though one suspects with not much concern) in a lawsuit over the fourth volume of her Harry Potter series. Having emerged unscathed from another plagiarism suit in 2002 after her accuser (the author of a book called Rah and the Muggles, featuring a character called Larry Potter) was found to have falsified documents in the case, Rowling now faces accusations from the estate of the little-known children's author Adrian Jacobs, who died in 1997. His lawyers are suing for £500m (Dh3 billion) under the claim that Rowling ripped off a 36-page book called The Adventures of Willy the Wizard.
According to the suit, which must set a new record for use of the broad brush in plagiarism litigation: "Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest, which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures." Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury, has held firm, pointing out that Jacobs's book was "a very insubstantial booklet which had a very limited distribution".
And, honestly, it sounds as though they can afford to be sanguine about the enterprise. Apparently "the central character of Willy the Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school".