Plagiarism is not the same thing as copyright theft. You can't copyright an idea. Copying ideas is perfectly legal. Passing it off as your original idea is unethical but not illegal.
Copyright theft can be one form of plagiarism. "The Urantia Book" comes to mind, a fairly popular supposed cosmology of the universe written by extraterrestrials, several famous musicians and some musician friends of mine were heavily into it in the 1970's, and it has been the inspiration for a few songs. But it later came out that it was largely plagiarized:
en.wikipedia.org
"
n 1992, a reader of
The Urantia Book, Matthew Block, self-published a paper that showed
The Urantia Book utilized material from 15 other books.
[128] All of the source authors identified in Block's paper were published in English between 1905 and 1943 by U.S. publishers and are typically scholarly or academic works that contain concepts and wording similar to what is found in
The Urantia Book.
[126] Block has since claimed to have discovered over 125 source texts that were incorporated into the papers.
[129]
The use of outside source materials was studied separately by Gardner, and Gooch, and they concluded, consistent with their respective conclusion that the book's author(s) must have been human, that the book therefore plagiarized many of the sources noted by Block.
[130][131]
For instance, Gardner and Block note that Paper 85 appears to have been taken from the first eight chapters of
Origin and Evolution of Religion by
Edward Washburn Hopkins, published by
Yale University Press in 1923.
[132] Each section of the paper corresponds to a chapter in the book, with several passages possibly used as direct material and further material used in Papers 86-90 and 92. (In addition to the book's "heavy indebtedness to Hopkins," Gardner discovered that Hopkins was a major reference in an earlier book authored by Sadler, adding to Gardner's view that it is more likely Sadler had a hand in writing or editing
The Urantia Book than that celestial beings wrote it.) Likewise, much of
The Urantia Book material relating to the evolution of mankind appears to have been directly taken from
Henry Fairfield Osborn,
Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory of Man published by
Princeton University Press in 1928.
[133]
In one example cited by Block and confirmed by Gardner and Gooch, the original author discusses the periodicity of the chemical elements and concludes that the harmony in the construction of the atom suggests some unspecified plan of organization. The authors of
The Urantia Book assert that this harmony is evidence of the
intelligent design of the universe. W. F. G. Swann writes on page 64 of
The Architecture of the Universe (italics indicate edits as compared to
The Urantia Book, bolding indicates deletions):
[134][135]
Starting from any one of them [i.e., chemical elements], and noting some property such as the melting point, for example, the property would change as we went along the row, but as we continued it would gradually come back to the condition very similar to that which we started ... The eighth element was in many respects like the first, the ninth like the second, the tenth like the third, and so on. Such a slate of affairs point not only to a varied internal structure, but also to a certain harmony in that variation suggestive of some organized plan in building the atom.
Contrast with The Urantia Book's version:
Starting from any one element, after noting some one property, such a quality will exchange for six consecutive elements, but on reaching the eighth, it tends to reappear, that is, the eighth chemically active element resembles the first, the ninth the second, and so on. Such a fact of the physical world unmistakably points to the sevenfold constitution of ancestral energy and is indicative of the fundamental reality of the sevenfold diversity of the creations of time and space.
Block and other believers do not see the use of the source materials as plagiarism, but express a view instead that the quality of the way the material was borrowed is consistent with authorship by celestial beings and that study of the sources leads to an even deeper understanding of The Urantia Book.[136][137] Gooch, a professor of English, assessed that the use of the sources "does reveal to us an author with a busy genius for metaphysical invention and poetic turns of phrase whose scam was at worst benign and at most visionary."[138] Asked by Gardner what he thought of these plagiarisms, Sprunger responded in a letter by saying that if humans wrote the book the plagiarisms would indeed be disturbing but not if it was written by supermortals.[139]"
www.findlaw.com
We think we're all the way out, but who really knows if we ever fully get there, or how long that will take.
