Copyright Question

NiennaC said:

Kay, so I got bored and opened up the Fantasy Novelist's exam just for fun, and wrote a short story with as many of the cliches as possible. I posted it, and then I wondered: Wait, that list isn't mine, did I infringe a copyright? . . .

Click to expand...

Highly unlikely.

You wrote a story incorporating cliches? Relax.

Reposting the list itself would be a different matter. Using it as fodder for a story, chill. Have fun with it.

--Ken

The reason they are clichés is that they're overused, by lots of people.

caw

I'd like to see the original story to see if I could Google all the cliche's and manage to find that 'exam' site?

Now I'm looking through the 'exam' list, it doesn't even have cliche phrases that you might pull out and use as-is in a story. It's a bunch of questions about cliche' characters, actions (or lack of them) and situations that might be in a (bad) fantasy novel. There's hardly any way you could write a story and be able to trace its roots back to this webpage. Perhaps if someone looked at your story side-by-side with this thing, and noticed you used EVERY cliche' listed, in order, they'd get a good laugh that you used THAT webpage as direct inspiration, but it still wouldn't be copyright infringement. IMHO, IANAL, etc.

And if if WERE copyright infringement, it wouldn't matter if you were making money off it or not (well, not much, I think they could sue for more if you were making money hand-over-fist).

Going through the list, this one caught my eye:
63. Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?
This question has Piers Anthony written all over it.