Using Other Writers' Work

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'You don't have to be faithful to the facts. History has to be faithful to the facts. Drama has to be faithful to the spirit of the facts.'

-- Milos Forman

So if you boil the life out of OEDIPUS and end up with "Somebody unintentionally hurts their family," there's a long line of playwrights who've used this subject. And it can be your turn next.

As a general rule, Copyright protection does not extend to the barest bones of a story. But how writers actually develop their own original versions of these stories is protected. And particularly in the case of Film characters, their names and specific traits may also be off-limits.

So you can't run off to your keyboard with this great subject of an orphaned farm boy named Luke Skywalker who gets involved with a princess from another planet and dukes it out with an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike who goes by the name of Darth . . ..

What you can do is a play about "a teenager who comes of age by overcoming terrifying odds." Neither you nor George Lucas can get a copyright on that.

As you're thinking about the posibility of using someone else's subjects to feed your creative urges, there's one short-cut that's often no short-cut at all . . .

Then there's the question of simply . . .