Plagiarism, copyright, tropes

I had planned to write a blog on the subject of copyright theft - which as some of you will know is something that I've experienced in the past. I'm not going into the details - they're here if you want to read about it.

On this occasion, it's the other way around. Kate Walker, who has been writing best-selling romances for more than twenty years, was accused of stealing the work of a woman who had been submitting the same first chapter and synopsis to endless competitions for several years. There are a whole raft of reasons why this was nonsense. Kate had never seen the work and her editor is in the Mills and Boon office at Richmond, not Harlequin in Toronto. The judge, having read both The Proud Wife and the other work dismissed the case with prejudice.

A happy result? A relief certainly, but a dear friend had suffered a a year of stress and misery and has left the deluded complainant considerably poorer (that "with prejudice" meant that she had to pay everyone's expenses, which were considerable.) What made her believe she had a case? Drove her to court? She's not the first failed author to take this course, or the last. The latest victim to be accused in this way is Stephanie Meyers. The problem appears to lie in the misunderstanding of the use of tropes in genre fiction.

Fellow author, Michelle Styles, explains it all with with breathtaking clarity on her post "A Troupe of Tropes" at the Pink Heart Society -

"As some of you may know, an unpublished author recently brought a case against PHS columnist Kate Walker and Harlequin claiming that they had used her contest entry to craft The Proud Wife. The unpublished author had submitted her 20 pages and synopsis into many RWA sponsored contests and cited one where  she thought Kate Walker had been one of the judges. In fact Kate Walker had never heard of the contest and had never judged it. The unpublished author felt so strongly that the works were similar, citing 40 different points of commonality that she took the case to court.   What followed was many months of agony for Kate Walker who knew she was innocent.  Harlequin’s legal team asked her not to speak about the case to anyone.  Earlier this month the federal judge dismissed the plaintiff’s  claim with prejudice..."  read on - A Troupe of Tropes , read the judgement for yourself. And then read the book. It's terrific!

Here's the blurb -

Her husband wants her back!
Marina thought her dreams had come true when her husband placed a wedding band on her finger. But their marriage was not the fairytale she'd hoped for, and eventually Marina walked away, her heart broken.
But two years on Pietro DInzeo no longer haunts Marina's dreams. She knows the time has come to move on, and even a summons to join him in Sicily won't deter her However, with his wife standing before him, about to sign on the dotted line of their divorce papers, Pietro wonders why he ever let her go?

To read on click here for Amazon US
or here for Amazon UK

First Page Friday - The Proud Wife

My First Page Friday guest today is not only a colleague, but a dear friend who has been writing wonderful books for Harlequin for more than twenty years. The Proud Wife isn't her latest, but has that special, original, Kate Walker touch so I wanted to share it with you.

Here's the blurb -

Her husband wants her back!
Marina thought her dreams had come true when her husband placed a wedding band on her finger. But their marriage was not the fairytale she'd hoped for, and eventually Marina walked away, her heart broken.
But two years on Pietro DInzeo no longer haunts Marina's dreams. She knows the time has come to move on, and even a summons to join him in Sicily won't deter her However, with his wife standing before him, about to sign on the dotted line of their divorce papers, Pietro wonders why he ever let her go?

And here's the first page -

THE letter lay exactly where he had left it last night, right in the centre of his desk. The single sheet of paper was aligned carefully square, in the centre of the polished oak, straight in front of his chair where it could not possibly be missed. All it needed was his signature and it would be folded neatly, placed the already addressed envelope and sent on its way. 

            And after that there would be no turning back.

            But until he made the final move, added the swift, determined scrawl of his signature – the work of just a couple of seconds – nothing at all would happen. It would just lie there,  untouched, until he was ready.

Of course it would, Pietro told himself, his mouth twisting slightly wryly at the corners. He hadn’t spent almost half his lifetime building up the sort of  retinue of employees that any man would envy. The staff who would not only obey his every command but anticipate it perfectly, knowing exactly what he wanted and when. They would remain poised, waiting, until he would give the word to act. Then  - and only then – would they carry out his instructions to the peak of perfection he had come to expect so much that he no longer even noticed it was there – only coming up against the system that created it when something went wrong. Which happened so rarely that he couldn’t actually recall the last time it had ever ruffled the controlled surface of his world.

He would never allow it to happen.  Lack of control, the wildness of emotion, brought confusion and chaos with it. Confusion and chaos of the sort that he never ever wanted to experience again.

‘Dannazione!’

The curse was torn from him, the flat of his hand slamming  down on the polished surface of his desk so that the letter lifted slightly in the air current it created, fluttered,  shifted, landing back down again an inch or two further left before lying still again.

He had known the sort of chaos that could be created by lack of control. Once, just once, he had been fool enough to let that sort of wildness invade his life and take with it the organisation and the rule of rational thought he valued so deeply. He had loosened his grip on the reins and lost control. And he had hated the results.

Just once had been enough.

Just once. Never again. And it had all been this woman’s fault.

To read on click here for Amazon US or here for Amazon UK