Obviously it's "possible" that they just legitimately took one thousand years longer to record the story but it's extremely unlikely.

It's fun to excuse plagiarism for Christianity but if anyone else just started blatantly stealing shakespeare's shit people wouldn't say "well it was just based on the same traditions and the stories were orally told until 2009 when someone decided to write them out!"

Post edited at 2:34 pm on July 5, 2009 by medjai

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O` tru apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick.
Thus with a kiss I die.

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When you consider that Gilgamesh was written one thousand years before the Biblical flood story it is extremely far fetched to assume that it just coincidentally had the same story and that the entire Hebrew culture just didn't write it down for a thousand years especially considering the fact that Gilgamesh itself started out as just oral retellings, then it was written down on stone tablets as Gilgamesh, then a thousand years later the Hebrews were inspired  by god to write the same story.

Obviously it's "possible" that they just legitimately took one thousand years longer to record the story but it's extremely unlikely.

It's fun to excuse plagiarism for Christianity but if anyone else just started blatantly stealing shakespeare's shit people wouldn't say "well it was just based on the same traditions and the stories were orally told until 2009 when someone decided to write them out!"

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When you consider that Gilgamesh was written one thousand years before the Biblical flood story it is extremely far fetched to assume that it just coincidentally had the same story and that the entire Hebrew culture just didn't write it down for a thousand years especially considering the fact that Gilgamesh itself started out as just oral retellings, then it was written down on stone tablets as Gilgamesh, then a thousand years later the Hebrews were inspired  by god to write the same story.

Obviously it's "possible" that they just legitimately took one thousand years longer to record the story but it's extremely unlikely.

It's fun to excuse plagiarism for Christianity but if anyone else just started blatantly stealing shakespeare's shit people wouldn't say "well it was just based on the same traditions and the stories were orally told until 2009 when someone decided to write them out!"

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*shrug* I'm just going off the Biblical history courses I've taken, though I wouldn't call it necessarily plagiarism, considering I've yet to read anything in the Bible that actually looks like it was stolen in anything but story from any other work.

I mean, nobody's flipping their shit about The Lion King or West Side Story, and both of those had stories blatantly stolen from Shakespeare.

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Let yourself be enchanted,
You just might break through
To ever ever after

I can't write the Lord of the Rings but just not copy it word for word and then claim it was all my own inspiration or god told me to what to pen, I'd still get sued for plagiarism.

-------
O` tru apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick.
Thus with a kiss I die.

---

Stealing a fictional story and publishing as your own original is plagiarism.

I can't write the Lord of the Rings but just not copy it word for word and then claim it was all my own inspiration or god told me to what to pen, I'd still get sued for plagiarism.

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Stealing a fictional story and publishing as your own original is plagiarism.

I can't write the Lord of the Rings but just not copy it word for word and then claim it was all my own inspiration or god told me to what to pen, I'd still get sued for plagiarism.

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Except that's entirely different. We're not talking about copying something word-for-word and changing up a few here and there so that people don't cry foul; we're talking about "hey, that plot's interesting, let me revise it for today's audiences" if any copying was happening at all. Kind of like turning Hamlet into Simba and Juliet into Maria.

Also, frankly, for a legal claim to have any weight, you'd have to actually prove that the original writer of the Bible is profiting by stealing the work of the original writer of Gilgamesh, which...good luck with that, kid.

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Let yourself be enchanted,
You just might break through
To ever ever after

You are claiming a motive which is unsupported. From a legal perspective, the story of Noah gives no indication of being taken directly from another story. Instead, it is both implied and stated that it was a story written by the biblical author as he was divined it by god.

Additionally, you can't "adapt" a story for "modern audiences" and then claim it's not theft.

It IS still theft of the work. Many stories have been "adapted" for a modern audience, all of the ones that weren't stolen reference the original and explain that the story is an adaptation, as is required regardless of whether or not they make a "profit."

Additionally, regardless of if the offending party is making a profit (they are but whatever), you can sue for losses.

In other words, I could argue that the story of Gilgamesh suffered heavy losses both monetarily and as an establishment of literature and as a religious foundation when another religion came in and stole its stories resulting in one of the world's richest and biggest religions in history.

It'd be extremely easy to argue that if the Old Testament is stolen, whoever it was stolen for had the same potential for insane profit as the Christian religion did, being as it's original stories were counterfeits.

-------
O` tru apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick.
Thus with a kiss I die.

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Like if I write a song and then Eminem steals my song but he only performs it for a charity and makes no money off of it I can still sue the fuck out of eminem provided I can prove he stole it.

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You can, if he's claiming it as his own, but I don't see why someone would sue someone over a song that's only been performed for charity, unless that person was an asshole.

If you're really this butthurt, btw, you should also be writing angry letters to Disney and the producers of West Side Story, for the record, on behalf of poor Shakespeare who can't fight for his widdle self.

-------
Let yourself be enchanted,
You just might break through
To ever ever after