One other thing, about important distinctions between copyright, patent law, and trademark (in the United States).

Copyright is exactly what it says on the tin: It is a right (or really, a set of rights) that protects against copying.

If you have a patent on an invention, you can stop someone from using that invention—even if they have never heard of you! or seen your invention! even if they spent twenty years working on their own version!

It’s YOURS, and too bad.

But if someone writes a book that ends up sharing a lot of elements with yours, you don’t actually own those elements.

The only thing you can do is protect against someone *copying* those elements from you.

That means that if you were both weirdly inspired by a combination of a wolf documentary and 90 day fiancé to write a werewolf marriage reality show, and as a result, your books share a lot in common...

You have to suck it up.

If they didn’t copy you, you get nothing. You have the right not to be copied (without permission). You don’t have the right to those elements.

When you are dealing with elements where there are significant outside forces that tend to lead people to make similar choices, you have to be particularly careful.

”Is this copying or is this just market forces plus obvious outside influence” is a really, really relevant question.

As an example, I would not count “royalty from a made-up European country” as a similarity.

Modern royalty is usually from a made-up country, and that country is usually European, because publishing is racist.

Think of all the times that people retweet news stories or reddit stories or sexy governors (no, none of them are sexy) saying “plot bunny!” and you can see that it’s entirely possible for two people to independently end up with similar ideas without copying each other.

That’s the thing we are looking for when we look for similarities in this context: We are looking for evidence of copying that is so incontrovertible that it can be distinguished from “inspired by the same prominent items in our pop cultural soup.”

The question is not, “can you find cross-contamination in these works?” but “are these works so similar that we must conclude that they are copied.”

This question is extremely *easy* when someone has copied a substantial number of actual words from another source, because as the number of words increases, the likelihood that those words was copied becomes vanishingly small.

It would also be easy if you had a full paragraph of text spinning in which you could identify the bones of the original paragraph and find a one-for-one correspondence between the new paragraph, with words substituted.

(This is why I want to see Exhibit D.)

It is a lot harder when you’re talking about plot points. What I want to see, before I presume that copying has occurred, is not just a list of similarities, but a list of differences, and a list of where those plot points occur.

It may *look* like a similarity to say, “In both books, the hero tells the heroine he sees ghosts” the hero telling the heroine he sees ghosts on page 1 is an entirely different book than the hero telling the heroine this at the black moment.

I wrote this about Omegaverse, but it’s applicable here, too.

A list of similarities does not, by itself, provide sufficient context to determine whether copying has occurred. https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1264298457507827712?s=20

It literally never makes me any friends when I point out that a list of similarities is not proof of plagiarism, and it will not this time.

But I have been saying this pretty consistently for a very long time.

It’s been at least since 2016, on Twitter. https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/697071375001845760?s=20

I know that Certain People will always take this as time to subtweet how Courtney only cares about this shit when it’s her friends or something like that, and you know... I get it, whatever, I’m inconvenient.

But I literally went to law school and became a law professor because I had a bug in my brain about the over-expansive reach of IP, so everyone who isn’t Certain People, I hope you understand that I am just very invested in limiting IP claims to reasonable dimensions.

I am so invested in this that I spent six figures to get a law degree and became an IP professor, and weirdly enough, I haven’t stopped being invested in this just because it ended up being more fun to write romance.

Sometimes people will say, “but what if someone writes a book that is weirdly similar to yours? how will you feel?”

I mean, I dunno? Sometimes readers have emailed me about that and I’ve said, “it’s probably just a coincidence.”

As long as they don’t steal my words, I’ll probably suck it up?