How do you decide when something is a violation of intellectual property? For ex

Question

How do you decide when something is a violation of intellectual property? For example, if you tried to publish a book called “Sally Potter and the World of Bogwarts” about an English orphan girl who finds out she is a witch and goes off to a magic school, where she has lots of exciting adventures and learns to play quodditch, it would be considered an infringement on J.K. Rowling’s copyright on her Harry Potter books, even if you did not actually copy a single sentence out of those books. But at some point we have to take ideas from other books. Where do you draw the line?

Explanation / Answer

It is true that our learning and our readings affect the content and quality of our writing. As writer, we take ideas from multiple sources, such real life stories of others, personal or other’s experiences, books, journals, articles. There is bound to be reflection of our readings in our writing. In such situations, violation of Intellectual property might happen inadvertently.

However, line must be drawn to ensure that creativity do not suffer when we draw upon our learning. There is nothing wrong with taking ideas from other books. But every literary piece of work has to be creative, with a novel approach and style. Writers need to draw the line to ensure their literary works have distinctive plots and their own characteristic usage of language and expressions used in writing and that novelty is not lost in drawing inspiration from literary works of other writers. Even if plots are somewhat similar, characterization, theme, screenplay should be significantly unique. There is a lot of subjectivity involved in literature, and therefore it is difficult to measure and quantify the extent to which the content is copied, (not verbatim or paraphrased), so writers should use their own ethical judgments and discretion to draw the lines in order to create unique literary works while not infringing upon the intellectual property rights of other writers. It is in the interest of the writers themselves and also a service to literature to create something new. Writer can draw the line by analyzing if the majority of the readers would perceive the creation to be a copy of another literary work. If the answer is yes, then the writer should stop there to incorporate the ideas from other books into their own work.

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