Plagiarism: in the words of someone else… there's little new in literature

When the French novelist Camille Laurens lost her son in childbirth in 1995, she responded with a moving account of her trauma, Philippe, which touched a nerve with her public. A few years later the infinitely more successful Marie Darrieussecq published a novel, Tom Est Mort, the story of a woman whose baby dies after a terrible birth agony. Laurens, in a fury, accused Darrieussecq of "psychological plagiarism". Ever since, these two writers have been at each other's throats, trading elevated Gallic insults, to the scandalised fascination of Paris.

In the latest twist, Darrieussecq has published not just another novel but a scholarly treatise about literary theft in general and Laurens in particular. Darrieussecq, who is also a psychoanalyst, claims that her rival was trying symbolically to "assassinate" her with accusations of plagiarism and that, unconsciously, she was exhibiting "a crazed desire to be plagiarised", a savage dig at the senior woman's faltering career.

All very thrillingly French, you might think, but you would be wrong. In the bitter history of plagiarism, there is an equally vicious exchange from the records of Elizabethan literary London that leaves Laurens and Darrieussecq very much in the slow lane.

In 1593 Robert Greene, a prominent playwright and braggart, the author of Orlando Furioso and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, was dying in penury at the age of 32. But before his inevitable rendezvous with the churchyard near Bedlam, in Bromley, Kent, he dashed off a pamphlet, A Groat's-worth of Wit Bought With A Million of Repentance, in which he settled some old scores.

Having accused Christopher Marlowe of atheism, Greene then turned his attention to the literary jack-of-all-trades whose outrageous success really stuck in his throat. This "rude groom" was not merely too full of himself ("in his conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country"), he was a provincial arriviste and inveterate plagiarist, "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers".

This denunciation of young William Shakespeare was a deranged polemic by a dying man, but actually it was not so far from the mark. If all writers are pickpockets, then Shakespeare was an inveterate "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. He swiped the best bits of Antony and Cleopatra (notably "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water…") direct from Plutarch, and took 4,144 out of 6,033 lines in Parts I, II and III of Henry VI verbatim or in paraphrase from other authors. Apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, the plots for all his plays were ruthlessly appropriated from other, often classical, sources.

There is evidence that Shakespeare was wounded by Greene's attack, but his heirs blithely followed his example. Milton cribbed from Masenius. Later, Laurence Sterne cribbed from Robert Burton, Samuel Coleridge from Schelling, and TS Eliot from all and sundry (in The Waste Land). JRR Tolkien borrowed heavily from the Norse sagas. Four hundred years later, the Darrieussecq-­Laurens row is a stark reminder that plagiarism is one of literature's seven deadly sins, possibly its deadliest.

But why the fuss? Plagiarism is a puzzling vice. No writer, if he or she were honest about it, would ever deny that, when they come across a good thing in someone else's work, consciously or unconsciously they store it up for a rainy day. "Literature," the American journalist James Atlas likes to say, "is theft." He's right. The history of books and writing supports this provocative assertion to the hilt.

Virgil was once spotted scanning a volume of Quintus Ennius. Challenged on this, the great poet replied that he was merely "plucking pearls from Ennius's dunghill", a magnificent retort echoed in Eliot's "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". No one today remembers poor old Ennius, and I've just lifted this anecdote from Anne Fadiman's essay on plagiarism, "Nothing New Under the Sun". Fadiman, in turn, probably inspired the novelist Jonathan Lethem to write "The Ecstasy of Influence", a magazine article on "cryptomnesia" in which, wittily, virtually every line was stolen, warped or cobbled together from other (acknowledged) sources.

Contemporary writers are advised to be on the lookout for plagiarism. In Britain, the roll-call of those scorched by its toxic flame in recent years includes JK Rowling, Andrew Motion, Ian Mc­Ewan, Graham Swift, PD James – and the scriptwriters of The Archers, who were accused, improbably, of pinching a plot point from Günter Grass; a description of a character's escape from Nazi pursuers in the second world war, by hiding under a peasant woman's skirts as she laboured in the fields, was a direct lift from The Tin Drum. A BBC spokesman said it was not "plagiarism" but rather an homage, a traditional defence when under attack.

When someone has a hit in the world of books, less fortunate authors often cry foul. When Yann Martel won the Booker prize with Life of Pi, his success unleashed the worm of prize-envy. But the accusations of plagiarism did not stick; he had already acknowledged that the plot of his novel was inspired by ­Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar.

Amid the cornucopia of Hogwarts, Rowling has been dogged for years by the children's writer Ursula Le Guin's pointed regret that the author of the Harry Potter books was not "more gracious about her predecessors". Le Guin said: "She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them." Possibly more damaging has been the revelation that the 1986 horror film Troll contains a character named Harry Potter.

In these murky waters, perhaps there's a distinction to be drawn between plots and phrasing. It has often been observed that there is an extremely limited number of basic plots available to the novelist or playwright. Some say 10, some seven, others as few as five. In this constricted imaginative environment, the likelihood of unconscious repetition is going to be extremely high.

What's not in doubt is that, even when a writer believes themself to be writing with originality, he or she is often simply exploring an archetypal story. Jungians make much of this. So perhaps in ­judging the sin of plagiarism, there's a distinction to be drawn between copying individual sentences or phrases (obviously wrong) and reinterpreting age-old stories (more understandable).

The Walt Disney Company might not agree. It has somehow contrived to develop a catalogue of animated fairy tales (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood) whose exploitation its corporate lobbyists watch over like Fort Knox (forbidding artist Dennis Oppenheim, for instance, from using Disney characters in his sculpture).

In contemporary fiction, however, there are plenty of examples that would give Disney's lawyers heart failure. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is a reworking of King Lear. Michael Dibdin's thriller Così Fan Tutti relies heavily on Mozart. In the cinema, Peter Benchley's bestseller Jaws essentially modernises the plot of that great Anglo-Saxon narrative poem, Beowulf.

Those narratives, of course, are all out of copyright. It's in the evolving world of international copyright that the real interest of plagiarism resides. The constant redefinition of "intellectual property rights" is at the cutting edge of 21st-century copyright law. No amount of new technology can disguise the fundamental clarity implicit in the act of scratching words on paper, or tapping them on to a screen.

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are, says Malcolm Gladwell in "Something Borrowed", few simpler ethical propositions than this. Any fool can see when plagiarism is afoot. As the role of the writer became increasingly professionalised during the 20th century, more and more legal and institutional resources were directed towards the defence of intellectual property rights. There was now even a name for it, borrowed from those swashbuckling Elizabethans: piracy.

It has, however, become more complex with the IT revolution. Suddenly, the mass consumption and reproduction of original "content" turned this carefully constructed legal playground upside down. Free-thinking American professors such as James Boyle (The Public Domain) and Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) have begun to develop radical new theories about what is, and is not, permissible in the Wild West of the "creative commons".

Happily, there was a supreme authority from the American past to whom they could turn. Lessig quotes Thomas Jefferson in support of his argument: "He who receives an idea from me," wrote Jefferson, "receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Jefferson could never have foreseen the age of the app. The speed at which the transmission of ideas takes place is a game-changer. There are more ways than ever before to be vigilant about plagiarism, just as there are more ways than ever before to appropriate new material. Here the lawyers and the writers are now singing from the same sheet.

Bestselling writer David Shields has just published Reality Hunger, a passionate, ultra-hip manifesto on behalf of what he calls "appropriation art" in contemporary music, design and literature. Shields has several thrusts against copyright law which, he says, has protected "the creative property of artists", but obstructed "the natural evolution of human creativity".

He writes approvingly of the music business, in which "you steal somebody else's beat, then – with just turntables and your mouth – you mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at".

Stripped of its excitable rhetoric, Reality Hunger is really a cool restatement of "anything goes", literature's oldest, and most golden, rule. Whatever medium you choose, it's still as difficult as ever to be truly original.

Copy book

Ian McEwan was accused of copying phrases in his 2001 novel Atonement, from a memoir published in 1977 by another writer, Lucilla Andrews, a former wartime nurse.

Graham Swift faced accusations in 1997 of "directly imitating" William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I lay Dying with his Booker prize novel Last Orders. He responded that his book was an "echo" of the American writer's work.

PD James was forced in 1995 to fend off charges by critics who saw similarities between her book Original Sin and another thriller set in a publishing house. She admitted that she had read the other book, End of Chapter by former poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, but said she had no conscious debt to it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer prize historian admitted "accidentally" using unattributed passages from different works in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.