This is such a fun topic. We had it fairly recently with J K Rowling being sued for plagiarism, here is the latest on that one, the man making the claim has been asked to pay an enormous sum of money before the court will actually hear the claim. This makes me wonder if they think he won’t win.

The latest claim is with E. Nesbit’s Railway Children. It has apparently had quite a number of passages lifted from a book called The House by the Railway by Ada J. Graves. You can read more details here. I enjoyed reading the comments with this story.

I’ve been told that there are very few original stories and that every modern story is a take on some previous story which makes it hard to actually have an original story. Does this mean we should pay royalties to the families of the people who wrote the original stories even if they were first written hundreds of years ago? I’m not actually making a suggestion here, I’m only positing the question. In the case of The Railway Children the books were published in 1906, a time when there was a lot of ‘borrowing’ from other people’s stories and in some cases it was known about by the original author as they’d actually asked permission but in others it wasn’t.

If we did have to pay the descendents of the person who wrote the original story that could create all sorts of problems. There’s one story that springs to mind. Beowulf was written between the 8th and 11th centuries and has been rewritten a number of times in the last 100 years. The one I know the best is Dragon Slayer: The Story of Beowulf by Rosemary Sutcliffe. The story was also made into a movie in 2007. How would we identify the descendents of those authors and pay them royalities? Maybe we should just choose the first person to rewrite it in modern times and pay them royalties? Just imagine the worldwide furore emanating from that court case…I’d suggest the only people to win there would be the lawyers.