Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Recently there was a lawsuit filed by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne against Sam Smith and his producers for the song “Stay With Me”.  They claimed that if sped up, the song sounds exactly like their 80’s hit “Won’t Back Down”.  The video below illustrates this very well:

I have mentioned before on this blog that the novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is extremely similar in plot with the Koushun Takami novel Battle Royale written in 1999.  The similarities are striking, and if one reads the Takami novel they will immediately wonder if Collins plagiarized the novel entirely.

A postmodernist would say that these are not plagiarisms at all (unless perpetrated intentionally), as much as Star Wars is Harry Potter.  These stories are not intended to be similar, but in many ways they are.  A postmodernist would say that these unintentional copies of stories are inevitable because all stories…