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In contemporary fiction, however, there are plenty of examples that would give Disney's lawyers heart failure. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is a reworking of King Lear. Michael Dibdin's thriller Così Fan Tutti relies heavily on Mozart. In the cinema, Peter Benchley's bestseller Jaws essentially modernises the plot of that great Anglo-Saxon narrative poem, Beowulf.
Those narratives, of course, are all out of copyright. It's in the evolving world of international copyright that the real interest of plagiarism resides. The constant redefinition of "intellectual property rights" is at the cutting edge of 21st-century copyright law. No amount of new technology can disguise the fundamental clarity implicit in the act of scratching words on paper, or tapping them on to a screen.
Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are, says Malcolm Gladwell in "Something Borrowed", few simpler ethical propositions than this. Any fool can see when plagiarism is afoot. As the role of the writer became increasingly professionalised during the 20th century, more and more legal and institutional resources were directed towards the defence of intellectual property rights. There was now even a name for it, borrowed from those swashbuckling Elizabethans: piracy.
It has, however, become more complex with the IT revolution. Suddenly, the mass consumption and reproduction of original "content" turned this carefully constructed legal playground upside down. Free-thinking American professors such as James Boyle (The Public Domain) and Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) have begun to develop radical new theories about what is, and is not, permissible in the Wild West of the "creative commons".
Happily, there was a supreme authority from the American past to whom they could turn. Lessig quotes Thomas Jefferson in support of his argument: "He who receives an idea from me," wrote Jefferson, "receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."