I have never really worried about people stealing my ideas or concepts. I don't think there really is a new idea; everything has been told before in some form or another, and it's how you tell it that counts. So I found this article - an edited extract from How to Read a Novel, published by Profile - really interesting, and a must read for all budding writers.

The article explains: There is no copyright in ideas, merely in the linguistic form in which those ideas are expressed. Here, an author may reap where he has not sown. This means that plot lines, scenarios, character types, gimmicks are all there for the taking. A new idea in fiction, if it catches on, will quickly be snapped up by other writers. Take, for example, the alternative, or parallel, universe gimmick often used in science fiction. The pioneer is generally taken to be Ward Moore, whose Bring the Jubilee (1953) fantasises an America in which the south won the civil war, existing in some neighbouring universe alongside ours in which, of course, the north won. This was picked up by Philip K Dick in one of the greatest of science-fiction novels, The Man in the High Castle (1962), in which in one universe Japan, and in another the Allies, won the war - characters slip between the two. Since then there have been any number of creative plunderings of Moore's alternative universe gimmick: Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978) and Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), in both of which Germany won the second world war, are two bestselling examples.

But the "no copyright in ideas" freedom may be under threat. In 2001, the estate of Margaret Mitchell moved to have a burlesque of Gone with the Wind suppressed. Called The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's spoof retold Gone with the Wind from a slave's viewpoint. Randall, herself an African American, was sardonically reminding readers that Mitchell's novel (unlike the film, which MGM carefully sanitised) has admiring sections on the Ku Klux Klan (with whom Rhett rides) and diatribes against post-bellum "uppity darkies". The Mitchell estate's argument was, as I understand it, that Gone with the Wind was not a novel but a franchise, like McDonald's or Burger King, and a veritable industry based on intellectual property which could be protected by patent or trademark. The Wind Done Gone was duly injuncted, and the injunction lifted after the novel's publishers, Houghton Mifflin, made an out-of-court settlement with the Mitchell estate. The © may, it seems possible, be replaced by ™ at some future date, and novelists' freedom to reap where they have not sown may be curtailed. It would be a serious loss.

As a general rule, with authors' names only one question is worth asking: "Do I know it?" If the answer is yes, it will have the status of a brand. How strong that brand is expected to be for the general reading public will be reflected in whether it is in larger print on the cover, or dust jacket, than the title of the book. If the author is really "big", it is giants and pygmies.

All that the title has to do, in such cases, is reassure you, the reader, that you have not already read it. The name Stephen King sells the product as effectively as Coca-Cola.

If you do know the name, previous pleasures, or disappointments, come into play. Walter Scott, for instance, was adamant for the first 12 years (and 15 novels) of his fiction-writing career that his name should not be printed on his work, nor otherwise divulged. He was "The Great Unknown". None the less, his publisher, Archibald Constable, was careful to put prominently on the title page, and in advertisements, "By the author of Waverley" - that being the first and most explosively bestselling of the series. After a while, of course, the identity of "The Great Unknown" took on the status of the first great sales gimmick.

The full article is worth reading when you have five minutes.