Its all been done!

A couple of years ago a young author, Kavya Vishwanathan, had her book pulled from the shelves because it turned out that certain passages of her book were almost identical to passages from some other author's books. Unfortunately, being charged with plagiarism can spell the end of an author's career.

This begs the question: How does one define "original" work? What characteristics does this work need to have to be considered truly original? Can anything be truly original? Take a look around and you will see many examples of new work being done that has more than a trace of some earlier work. The music industry is littered with examples of hit songs that have had parts of other songs. I have yet to hear of a singer or a band having their career destroyed because they wrote a hit song that sounded like another hit song!

Show me your favorite piece of software and I guarantee you that it has parts that have been re-used from other software. Just a small portion of any software is the secret sauce; the rest is just standard plumbing that is re-used again and again.

It is acceptable in certain professions to have your influences clearly visible in your work. Painters, fashion designers, architects and composers have all borrowed ideas from their influences to create new work and we never accuse them of plagiarism. Why is it so different with books? If I used a word-processor to cut and paste from 50 books to come up with my own original story, would that be stealing? Yes, you would find similar sentences and phrases but would that take away from the fact that I have created something new?

The fact of the matter is that very little around us is totally new. Its all been done before albeit in a slightly different form.

There is a famous story of an artist who took another artist's painting and created his own work by erasing parts of the original. Would this qualify as new art? Would creating a dish with leftovers from last night qualify as a new dish? Would it make a difference if the leftovers were made by me or were from a restaurant?

I am not condoning passing of somebody else's work as your own. All I am saying is that if you look real closely, almost all new work will have traces of something from the past.

The link below is a YouTube video created by taking clips from other existing videos on YouTube and creating a new piece of music. Take a look!

http://tinyurl.com/c9b4th