Dylan on copyright: "There are different rules for me"

Different rules, perhaps, about what infringes someone else's copyright - though that's not what the great wordsmith meant, as the context will make clear. Last year I blogged about the controversy surrounding some of his paintings (see here). Now the BBC has published a piece (hat tip to the IPKat) about "borrowings" dating back to 2006 and 2001 - and earlier. Of course, even the man's name is borrowed, but Dylan Thomas had few if any rights to stop Robert Zimmerman appropriating it, and little if any reason to try to prevent it anyway. And it's true that folk and jazz music have a rich history of borrowing, but not simply parasitic copying.

Well, Henry Timrod's copyright has long since expired, although Saga is still alive and kicking. Anyway, I don't know how extensive the taking might have been, although if I have time I am now interested enough to find out. It doesn't look to me as if this latest plagiarism accusation has the legs that the paintings thing did, but regardless of that I feel extremely disappointed that such an original, innovative artist should adopt so cavalier an attitude to others' work, whether protected by law or not.

Willy The Wizard struck out

The long-running - if "running" doesn't imply a degree of urgency that seems to have been completely lacking - claim that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire plagiarised a book with the banal title "Willy the Wizard" has been struck out after the claimant failed to make a payment to the court for security for the defendants' costs, which are already considerable. Guardian Law has the story, which suggests that the claim was doomed to failure and may have been nothing more than a publicity stunt. It sounds as if Willy the Wizard is a remarkably ordinary piece of work, an accusation that could hardly be levelled against Harry Potter - which seems to have popularised reading, and reading almost on a Tolstoyan scale, for a whole generation of children. And many adults, though I found insufficient in the first book to draw me in, unlike Philip Pullman's great trilogy.