Is the idea of plagiarism a modern concept?

by AldoTheeApache

Is the idea of plagiarism a modern concept? I’ve recently listened to two different history podcasts. One dealing with who wrote the Bible and the other about medieval literature (both religious and secular), and on both occasions both the speakers made a similar comment about copying other works; that the idea of plagiarism (and by extension intellectual property) is a modern concept. How true is that statement? And if so, when did the idea of borrowing/ripping off others work begin to get frowned upon?

lukemacu

Hey there!

This answer sorta depends on what you consider 'plagiarism' and how official we want to take it, but there is one very old account of someone getting annoyed (to put it lightly) at someone else because they copied their work. In 563 AD a dispute arose between the Irish Saints Colmcille and Finian. The specifics seem to be a bit vague between the sources I'm looking at here, so I'll go with the version I heard when growing up, but both sources will be presented for you below to make your own judgement.

To summarise: Finian had written a religious text of some nature, which Colmcille then took to copy for his own use. Finian, outraged by this, claimed that though Colmcille had written out the copy, it still belonged to him. It was, after all, his work. The pair took their dispute to be abritrated upon, where it was ruled that Finian was in the right, 'To every cow its calf, to every book its copy.'

Despite this, the Statue of Anne (1710) is the first case of an issue of copyright being written formally into law in British tradition, though it does seem to have existed in some informal sense before then, with publishers holding the 'copyright', not the authors.

Regardless, while the Statue of Anne is the first official, codified ruling on copyright in the British Isles, there is a clear case for the existence of the idea of one's work being one's own long, long before then.

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