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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9439426" data-attributes="member: 177">I know nothing, and care less, about the argument you are having.  However, this is an interesting bit.  Bringing up this theft is a bit ironic.J. Michael Straczynski, the person who may have been stolen from in this instance, has thoughts on ideas in writing.  Excerpted from his book Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer: The Artistry, Joy, and Career of Storytelling, published by BenBella Books:"... ideas are worthless, a dime a dozen. Give ten writers the same basic idea and you’ll get back eleven stories. What matters is the execution of that idea (rather than its assassination), which is entirely a function of the person writing it."He continues..."As much as we like to think we’ve come up with an idea no one’s thought of before, the odds are pretty good that whatever we’ve stumbled upon has been encountered by other writers over the long course of human history. That should not be taken to mean that there is nothing new under the sun, or that all art is just reinterpretation of what went before, justifications that are often used for plagiarism and excessive sampling. There is a profound difference between an idea, which can be, and in many cases is, generic or broadly thematic, and the expression of that idea in ways that are unique to the artist and specific to the time and culture in which it is created.It’s the interpretation of an idea that makes it feel fresh; by the time it comes out the other end of the crazy-straw of your particular talent as a finished work, it looks like nothing that’s been done before because you haven’t been here before."Nobody can watch B5 and DS9 and mistake them for each other.  If someone "stole" his ideas, they stole something worthless, and went on to do their own thing with it.</blockquote>

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