In the time of William Shakespeare the concept of attribution and borrowing of words, ideas, plotlines and literary craftsmanship was often commonplace and expected. Homage was paid via inspiration, not necessarily imitation as “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness’ is the full quote. Shakespeare is felt to have borrowed to craft Othello, Macbeth, A Midsummernight’sDream, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, which are considered to be part of the backbone of Shakespearean and thus English drama.
However, in today’s world of litigation and need for attribution, with Blurred Lines and Marvin Gaye’s estate lawsuit versus Pharrel and Robin Thicke have erased the wide lines that once existed in sharing creative ideas and influence. So much so that many musicians pre-emptively give part ownership of songs, if an interpolation or two sounded way too similar, such as Olivia Rodrigo‘s ‘Good 4 u’ to the writers of Paramore’s Misery Business or her ‘deja vu’ with credit to Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent all without the use of a lawsuit.
So for one Dennery Segment (DS) artiste to have been able to heavily borrow from another without the threat of a lawsuit, yet, in an age where Lizzo once had to credit someone for a tweet in her hit song ‘Truth Hurts’ seems a rather magnanimous act on behalf of Umpa. Now this is not a call for Brendon Thourille to sue the writers and producers of ‘Biscuit’ nor to seemingly tout him as a heroic white knight in the field of scallywags. But rather to illustrate that in a rather litigious society where even the hint of similarity may arise in a call to an attorney that his restraint is to be applauded and perhaps he is a builder of bridges and not walls as he stated.
The question though lies in whether Andrew and the other creative forces behind Biscuit were returning to the Old school art forms of Shaekspeare and his ilk when making the song or if they strayed too far from homage into copying. Umpa has not gone so far as to do so, whilst Andrew and his supporters appear irked at this idea primarily because they perceive themselves as having injected a new joie de vivre in what many considered a moribund Dennery Segment scene not too long ago. A more cynical interpretation of the scenery may be that the thought of being paid homage to another has become antithetical in the realm of DS. Quite peculiar in a society built on nostalgia where Clueless reimagined Austen’s Emma and Bridget Jones Diary, transported the plot of Pride and Prejudice to modern England and 10 things I hate about you owes much of its work from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
There is a question though of who gets to borrow, who gets to be inspired by and thought of as original. Earlier this year a fracas broke out over allegations of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist where two stories were alleged to have used AI. “The Serpent in the Grove was accused of being a fabrication of AI madness, although the Commonwealth Foundation denied the use. Moreover, in recent times the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing Simbarashe Kundizeza ‘The Blue Fighter’ was also accused by an Atlantic Essay of using AI wholesale in order to develop his story. The fact that all the writers recently accused are minorities and have been accused through the use of Pangram, an alleged AI detector which was fed the work without the approval of writers has raised further questions. The small writer being hammered as a nail whose brilliance is sticking out is a tale as old as time. There are barely any accurate sources to determine the use of AI, the notion that pansters would have notebooks sketching out their story from the first adaption to the last. When I began this column I had no idea how it would unfold far less if it was a piece of fiction.
Who decides that writers have used AI apart from the faulty AI checkers, and when AI has been trained on our work how can we determine who came first? The chicken or the egg?
Or more importantly when do we blur the lines between homage and copyright, between imitation and flattery.