Copying complaints about copying

Plagiarism seems to be in the air lately. Fareed Zakaria is back at Time, though Jonah Lehrer remains (it seems) out at The New Yorker. It turns out that lawyers copy, or plagiarize, too. In fact, there is an interesting issue of “knockoff lawsuits” that we will return to in a future post.

But today, we just note the interesting case of a copycat letter complaining about copying. LA’s own Silversun Pickups recently discovered that a song of theirs was used in a Romney campaign event. Their lawyer sent a cease and desist letter, as is common.

What’s interesting is that the letter tracks VERY closely (Zakaria-like closely) the language in a letter sent by the lawyer for former Eagle Joe Walsh to congressional candidate Joe Walsh (weird, right?). The Hollywood Reporter has the full story.