Plagiarism...funny spelling, eh? I had to look it up in a dictionary. Whoops..does that mean that I plagiarized because I took that word DIRECTLY from a book?
I'm kinda confused about the recent rukus about O'Bama (anyone with an "O" before his name must be Irish) using a couple of lines from a speech made by a fellow Democrat a couple of years ago. He didn't read an entire chapter of a book...just a couple of lines.
Are there any real original phrases, statements or even thoughts?
I wrote a silly little book for my great-nephew, Griffin a while back. I slapped a title on it and had a few printed and forgot about it. The title was "I Can Do Anything" and was about learning to tie shoes. I never marketed the book and had no intention of it being an even "not-so-best" seller.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter from an attorney in California insisting I "cease and desist" selling any of the aforementioned book and that I needed to retrieve any of those that were in bookstores and destroy them "or else"! Apparently their client had spent $200 to trademark the phrase, "I Can Do Anything" and they had published a little kids book and put the phrase on a half dozen t-shirts...in California. I looked on Amazon.com and saw that two other books had the same title, one that had just been release last month. (Boy, are THEY in trouble!)
What was interesting was that they obviously didn't think I was much competition because they offered to "sell me the rights" to use the title for a "reasonable sum".
Wow...Now I'm wondering if I can even SAY the phrase again without being accused of being a "Cheater McCheat"...
Oh, well..I guess I can do ALMOST anything.
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