Bible and Plagiarism

Normally when people are justified in saying this, they've strung together a list of unlikely sets of events. So I hope you are going to make more of a case than you have in the OP which cites two things.As for the date of Christmas being the 25th, the Bible says absolutely nothing about that, so we cannot claim that the Bible copied it from anywhere. So we're left with your example of 12 disciples. Not much to work with, but I'm sure you're going to give us some more similarities.I always thought it was kind funky that Isaac and Abraham both used the rather goofy sounding tactic of telling strangers that their wife was really their sister so that vagabonds might do what they willed with her and leave them alone. Even more coincidence was that they used the trick on Abimelech.Compared to that coincidence, I don't see much here, yet.

qs Not plagiarism of any "fact" but plagiarism of your intellectual property ... your ideas.[/qs]Not quite right. Plagiarism is almost orthogonal with intellectual property.Plagiarizing means taking credit for someone else's work. So yes, you can plagiarize facts. As an example, claiming personal credit for someone else's scientific or historical research would be plagiarism despite the fact that there no intellectual property protections that prevents you from doing such claiming.So if I learn that the sky on Pluto is marmalade colored by reading your book on the subject, it would be plagiarism for me to take credit for that discovery when I tell Mary. I can cure that aspect of things by giving you the credit instead.Perhaps one or more of whoever wrote the books of Luke, Matthew, Mark, and John are plagiarizers.I agree with an aspect of your example regarding Mary and the blue sky. If someone wants to argue that a story in the Bible is plagiarized from some preceding mythological work, they are implicitly arguing that the story did not happen. But you cannot generalize from that to saying no factual account can be plagiarized.

Stealing expression is copyright infringement. Plagiarism is lying about authorship. Plagiarism is not about ownership at all.Facts have no owners. I agree with that. But presenting someone else's scientific research as your own is plagiarism and you cannot cure that by rewriting in your own words.

This seems a lot like a word game to me. The distinction being made here is between plagiarizing facts and non-facts. What you argue here is correct, but it's really not what is under dispute. Not having been written by their purported authors does not make them plagiarism. For example if you wrote a book about President Obama, and claimed to be a member of his staff, or his gardener, that would not be plagiarism. It would be some other form of dishonesty.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

If you bought the catalogue, then you can surely sell it after the lecture, regardless of what the author wants. A closer issue is whether you could make and sell your own copies of ringo's book.In some cases you might be able to do something pretty close to that. If the catalogue were merely a list of the position and brightness of all of the stars above a certain brightness, the catalog might well be unprotectable by copyright. Kinda like the famous telephone book case involving Feist vs Rural Telephone phone book case. The Supreme Court found that the alphabetical listing of everyone's phone number was not protectable.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Your economic analysis is a quite a bit off. Your statement of the law is even further off.First, copyright beyond protecting the right to copy, assigns to authors, the sole right to copy, distribute, to publicly perform a work, and to make derivative works. Authors get paid for assigning one or more of these rights to publishers. So to pretend that protecting copyright does not protect the author is just wrong. Publishers pay because the right granted by the author can be exclusive.That's not to say that authors in some industries don't get the bad end of the deals, but without copyright protection, there would be no deal at all.Secondly, the ease of copying actual makes the right to restrict copying more valuable rather than less valuable. The economics has been favorable to pirating or illegal copying at every time since Guttenberg. Despite the fact that people are downloading music with impunity, the music industry is still thriving.