....BUT FIRST A POST SCRIPT TO MY PREVIOUS BLOG ON THE ROCKET SCIENTIST
(its frightfully important not to take sides - YET - in the MDC battle)
Other opposition spirits whose lives were wasted in battle will surely be around wherever there is a plan to help to re-unite an incredibly brave band of democrats in peace - or at the very least, to bring friendship and co-operation between the two factions. No harm in dreaming.
Here's what happened when I sued somebody who pinched my work in 1980:
I went to see my lawyer friend in Harare. "Look at this!" I shouted, "that bleary editor of the Herald has lifted my biographies of our nationalist leaders and published them without acknowledgement. No payment either!"
"So he has. Now your book will not sell because the paper is publishing biographies which people can read with their morning news".
"I can't afford to sue. You lawyers are the rich ones". (aside: Neither can I sell 40 million books, worse luck).
"Never mind that. Come into my office and sit down and count the exact number of words - they have to run in sentences - that have been lifted from your writing, then I will send the editor a letter demanding compensation - pro rata. As I am your friend, you need not pay". (Famous last words)
It took me hours picking my way through the turned-around sentences - syntax was no real disguise - nor the little frills that were supposed to disguise the theft. Since I was the only local writer who had foreseen the advent of the day our new rulers would take up the reins of power, and had rushed around interviewing those who had been left out of my first book of biographies (Who's Who, published 1977)I KNEW that the biogs were mine. I wanted compensation for the cost of self-publishing my second volume this time around and for the estimated loss of sales.
To cut a long story... my lawyer friend rang to say I had three hundred dollars - paid by the Herald for those exact words, and the amount was exactly percent of the amount I had claimed. Clever!
Cleverer still, the lawyer's firm sent me a bill for three hundred dollars.
The perfect cure for me. Counting the words in the days before computers could do the job was a terrible waste of time. Dan Brown's book is a big one and the word count is not the problem. The problem, perhaps, is with THE WORD.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
I think this is fascinating! I always wander as to the extent to which I can 'use' another person's words. I recently re-phrased and re-worked a piece I found in a church newsletter- it had no 'author' note and lacked even a reference or proper title. Was I wrong to do so?
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