The cream of other men's wit: Plagiarism and misappropriation in cyberspace

Abstract

It began in 1816 when in a landmark privacy case, Lord Byron successfully enjoined Johnston from circulating a ‘bad poem’ which Johnston had falsely credited to him. Henceforth Byron v Johnston established what is known in privacy torts as ‘false light’ privacy. The concept of ‘false light’ privacy broadened privacy tort law by providing protection from “publicity which place[d] the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye”. Since then it has been successfully used to protect plaintiffs from having their names linked to literary works, political statements, and legal documents which they did not author.