When does plagiarism begin?
- Thread starter AG31
- Start date
ElectricBlue
Joined 11 Years Ago
- Joined
- May 10, 2014
- Posts
- 19,378
Sometimes this sort of thing can happen by pure accident.
For example in one of my stories that I wrote back in 2016, an abusive husband/father is unhappy with the meatloaf he is served for his dinner so feeds it to the dog, then heats up a can of dog food and eats that for his dinner instead. At the time I had never read the book 'The Prince of Tides' nor seen the 1991 movie based on this novel, but there is also a scene in this where an abusive husband/father doesn't like his dinner and ends up eating dog food instead.
There are some fairly significant differences between my scene and the one in Prince of Tides. In Prince of Tides, the long-suffering wife/mother secretly cooks the dog food for her ungrateful husband disguising it as beef hash and rice, and he really enjoys it, not knowing he is eating dog food. In my scene the father prepares the dog food himself and eats it willingly to make a point about how much he dislikes his wife's cooking. Also the way the two scenes play out are different and take place in different locations and eras, Prince of Tides in the South in the 1950s and mine in New York in the 1980s, but still many people reading the story might think I was inspired by the novel or movie, which I most definitely was not, it's just an amazing coincidence.
For example in one of my stories that I wrote back in 2016, an abusive husband/father is unhappy with the meatloaf he is served for his dinner so feeds it to the dog, then heats up a can of dog food and eats that for his dinner instead. At the time I had never read the book 'The Prince of Tides' nor seen the 1991 movie based on this novel, but there is also a scene in this where an abusive husband/father doesn't like his dinner and ends up eating dog food instead.
There are some fairly significant differences between my scene and the one in Prince of Tides. In Prince of Tides, the long-suffering wife/mother secretly cooks the dog food for her ungrateful husband disguising it as beef hash and rice, and he really enjoys it, not knowing he is eating dog food. In my scene the father prepares the dog food himself and eats it willingly to make a point about how much he dislikes his wife's cooking. Also the way the two scenes play out are different and take place in different locations and eras, Prince of Tides in the South in the 1950s and mine in New York in the 1980s, but still many people reading the story might think I was inspired by the novel or movie, which I most definitely was not, it's just an amazing coincidence.
ElectricBlue
Joined 11 Years Ago
- Joined
- May 10, 2014
- Posts
- 19,378
When I lived in a college in the late seventies, we had a guy protest at the quality of the meals by emptying out a can of dog food, filling it with soup, and bringing it into the dining room to eat. Long time before 2016, that's for sure!
Worrying about plagiarism with only five words on the table is ridiculous, frankly. Someone, somewhere, will surely have written those same words, and readers in 2026 would never know.
Similar threads
