I’ve seen the inspiration/education/theft debate a lot in web design too. I mean, the web was BUILT by people copying and pasting (and improving on) each other’s code… that’s still part of the open-source movement, relinquishing ownership = greater good. But then there are instances where entire websites are downloaded, renamed, and relaunched, without changes or thanks. And obviously at that point, they’re not trying to learn a technique, or playfully one-up the previous site.

Proper credit is the key, to me, but I just read a crazy interview in Wired where an author argued that art (including literature) = use, reuse, and abuse of previous works: http://bit.ly/bKZORU

Judith’s book is quite nice, and makes a great companion to ours, as we do not cover some basic anatomy that she does. Her publishers used our illustrator, Sharon Ellis for their anatomical drawings – a fact of which Judith was unaware until I pointed it out.

It seems that more than one publisher has taken note of the success of “Yoga Anatomy.” An Indian publisher actually stole our cover illustration and put it on one of their older titles. We shut them down, and had all the unsold copies destroyed. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon practice in the publishing world. Success breeds imitation, and sometimes outright plagiarism.