Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer

artist who designed the cover for Stones of Aran, said he had never seen the other cover.
    Fiona Carpenter, art director of Viking, who published the guidebook, said it was just “a very unfortunate coincidence.”
    Was this simply coincidence, or was it a slightly more subtle example of the technique employed by the junk shop in Clapham that shamelessly called itself Harrods, reproducing the famous colors and typeface? When Harrods threatened legal action it changed its name to Selfridges, claiming the name was valid because it did sell fridges.
    When a case of theft of intellectual property comes before a court, the judge or jury must decide if the alleged copying is, in fact, nothing more than coincidence. They must consider what the chances are of someone completely independently coming up with an almost identical design or invention or, indeed, name for a store.
    In 1998 director Mehdi Norowzian took brewer Guinness to court claiming a commercial for their famous brew was a copy of his short film “Joy.” Norowzian argued that the ad, which showed a man dancing around a pint of Guinness, was a substantial copy of his film and not just “a repetition of an idea.” But the judge ruled against Norowzian and ordered him to pay costs to Guinness.
    It is probably no coincidence that the people who tend to come out best from litigation over infringement of copyright are the lawyers.
    As we’ve seen, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had another possible explanation for how two people might come up with the same creative idea—his theory of the collective unconscious that people tap into: “a force of nature which drives us to come to the same conclusions to the same problems, to follow the same creative processes.”
    Plagiarism even raises its ugly head in the sublime world of laughter. Ownership of jokes, one-liners, and sketch ideas can be aggressively disputed.
    Can more than one person come up with exactly the same joke, by coincidence? Kit and the Widow had one of their comic creations apparently stolen from under their noses, passed round the neighborhood and then served back to them cold. Kit Hesketh-Harvey recalls, “The Lloyd Webber musical Aspects of Love had controversially cast Roger Moore in a singing role. Rehearsals went ahead and Roger left the cast and there was not much explanation of why. The gag we came up with was that when Lloyd Webber discovered that Roger Moore couldn’t sing, he wanted to marry him. It required you to know that he had married Sarah Brightman, the star of his show Cats, and that there had been snide remarks in the press about her singing ability. The idea of Roger Moore, the man who played James Bond, being pursued by Lloyd Webber was so absurd, it was funny. Anyway we did this joke once at a party—and within three weeks Lionel Blair had told me that joke and so had Christopher Biggins. And Christopher had told the joke to Simon Fanshawe, who told it to us on air.” Kit and the Widow are not convinced that this was just coincidence. They think a little “recycling” had been going on.
    Arnold Brown is a stand-up comedian, a profession of eggshell egos and fierce competition for the most original topical gag. Paranoia about having material stolen is a professional inevitability.
    Says Brown, “Comedy is about searching for new ideas—it’s almost like a scientific process. Suddenly you find that little Rubik’s Cube combination—a DNA of comedy which no one else has got to.” So when he hears one of his jokes being told by another comedian, does it make him want to sue or does he put it down to coincidence? “Neither,” says Brown. “It makes me want to kill them.”
    Arnold Brown believes he was the first to come up with the comic idea that cell phones were a godsend to the mentally ill, as they could wander around in public talking to themselves and no one would take any notice. But before