There is also the fact that ideas are easy and thus cheap - good execution is hard and thus expensive. Look at grand successes that are essentially formulaic and others which take interesting concepts and squander them.<p>I have found some B-movies have 'moments of potential' or shockingly intelligent concepts hinted at that are quickly lost or go nowhere. One can often dig up obscure precursors to a concept - and find that there is a good reason that it remained obscure that they weren't very good even when released.
I think great art develops through a sort of evolutionary process. Everyone is influenced by the writer's they admire and so the good ideas get replicated. But good ideas by themselves aren't enough to attract an audience, so authors have to creatively combine and mutate those ideas. Harold Bloom called this the "anxiety of influence". The ideas they copy might be stolen, but the ways they combine those ideas might not be.
"Then again, sometimes ideas simply stick with you and resurface unknowingly. I have no doubt that every author has inadvertently thought of an idea that was actually something they read about years ago"<p>This. Especially on topics where the work is based predominently on a concise/small core idea, such a tune in music. I once had musician friends psyched that they were writing a song based on a really cool riff, only to discover later that said riff was in a track they had heard a decade ago, and that had stuck in a corner of someone's head. They had copied by accident. And they found that out by accident, too, and might very well have ended up pushing a track that would have had them getting called plagiarists.
>Agents and editors do not hold onto manuscripts to pillage for ideas (and if they did they would do so with a proven commodity like James Patterson and not an untested debut author.)<p>I would guess that big name authors would have the reputation to fight back against that kind of thing. Whereas no one is going to believe the little guy.
For those interested in the court's opinion, which includes summaries of the works in question, you can find it here[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2017cv06984/480492/26/" rel="nofollow">https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...</a>
> Green thinks this scenario is so unlikely to occur twice that he hired a sports analytics firm to determine the odds were a mere “1-in-8 sextillion.”<p>The fact this plaintiff implicitly argued the probability of fictional and non-fictional events are equal, made me realise that perhaps the seemingly moronic arguments we hear about from litigation in the technical world aren't all down to incompetence in reasoning about technology - just incompetence in reasoning about reality in general, but I guess people will say anything when they believe the opposition is wrong regardless of the implications of their insane reasoning.
We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped that because we confound the actual natural progress of technology and society with the appearance of these concepts during that progress and end up thinking that it was these concessions that fueled such progress. Instead, they just popped up when things started to gain vast momentum worldwide.
A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest me.<p>Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good style or take time to craft it carefully into their works, "lesser" writers are satisfied with perfecting their skills and a certain artistic base level. Most of those "lesser" writers could probably write works of much higher quality if they wanted to, because the literary quality of a work depends to a large extent on the amount of time and care devoted to it. (There are bad habits, though.) Writing is mostly handcraft. It also depends on the genre, if you don't intend to write a work of high literary quality - for which there is a very small market and not much income -, then it's unlikely that the end result will have that quality.<p>I don't believe that any writer consciously steals from anyone, not even the crappiest pulp fiction novelist would want do that, because it takes all the fun out of the writing.<p>Writing is always about humans and there are only so many themes, so at a coarse look it might seem as if there is some stealing, but that is only a coarse and superficial look.
There are no 'great' anything. Short of royalty and inherited wealth, there is just hustle, hard work and plain luck. Every great was just a regular guy or girl who persevered and got better at his craft, until chance or connections pulled him out of that pool of 'good' and into the rarefied, socially defined and self-fulfilling category of 'great'. Outright stealing might or might not be part of that journey - it's a risky individual choice driven by morals and desperation, not a recipe.