Stephen Blease says... this is all my own work!

The parishioners were keen to fix it but were struggling to raise the money needed. Services there can’t have been dry events.

At the time I was working for a newspaper in those parts and my job involved covering this small town.

It must have been a slow news day, because I decided it was time for an update on the scheme.

How much more money did they need? Were any more fundraising events planned? When did they hope to start work? And could I string this out to 300 words?

Exactly three weeks later I was leafing through the parish magazine and found my entire article reprinted word for word, under somebody else’s name.

I guessed that one church member had been asked to provide an update for the magazine and had just copied it verbatim from the paper, hoping no-one would notice.

I was amused rather than annoyed, and in one way mildly flattered.

Maybe she was just lazy or lacked confidence in her literary powers.

It could be that she’d volunteered to write for the parish magazine but found she didn’t like the paperwork.

Or perhaps she felt that I had put it much better than she could. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and this was very precise imitation – an exact replica.

I let it pass. The fundraising was a good cause. But it was still an infringement of my newspaper’s copyright, so the publishers of the magazine could have been sued. In America they probably would have been.

A bitter copyright dispute is going on there at the moment.

Singer-songwriter Neil Young is suing Donald Trump’s re-election campaign after two of his songs were played at Trump rallies without his permission.

The lawsuit alleges copyright violation – specifically, that the Trump team didn’t obtain a licence to play Rockin’ in the Free World and Devil’s Sidewalk at campaign events.

And the lawsuit adds: “The plaintiff in good conscience cannot allow his music to be used as a theme song for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate.”

Trump of course isn’t the first politician to try to enhance his popularity with popular music.

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt used Happy Days Are Here Again.

Sometimes they seem less than entirely suitable, as when Ronald Reagan’s campaign appropriated Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.

Whoever chose it obviously hadn’t listened carefully to lyrics such as: “End up like a dog that’s been beat too much,’Til you spend half your life just covering up”, or: “They sent me off to a foreign land, To go and kill the yellow man.”

Closer to home, the Labour party memorably harnassed D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better to their 1997 election campaign – although they did at least ask permission first.

But there must be plenty of times when copyright appears to be infringed and it may be hard to be sure whether it’s intentional.

They say that if you steal from one author it’s plagiarism, and if you steal from several it’s research.

Is it plagiarism if you copy your own work? Or is that just recycling?

A music critic once said that Vivaldi spent his entire life writing the same concerto over and over again.

Richard Curtis also seemed to rip off his own work. His occasionally funny film Four Weddings And A Funeral was on TV yet again last week, twice.

And it occurred to me that his follow-up, Notting Hill, was the exact same movie duplicated.

In both of them Hugh Grant plays a slightly awkward, posh English guy with a set of posh friends, who falls for a breezy, glamorous American girl.

And despite his awkwardness, the girl’s initial involvement with someone else and the other obstacles in their way they get together in the end.

If the leaky-roofed church had asked first to use my article in their literature, I’m sure my old paper would have allowed it – perhaps with the proviso that they included a line such as “by kind permission of.”

I wouldn’t have minded either. I supported the campaign myself, by buying a mug with a drawing of the church on it.

I toyed with telling people I’d done the drawing myself.