In my first year of learning card magic (12 years ago now) I was learning sleights and basic tricks to reinforce use of those sleights (hey that turned out to be a great way to learn btw, kids). In my downtime such as lunchtime with friends (I was in college back then) I would mess around with the sleights I knew already and come up with new versions! new fancy ways to force a card! new sleights!
...and found out most of what I was coming up with on the spot, the late great Nate Leipzig had beaten me to... by 90 years! ;-)
Now, I could publish my "original" sleights & manipulations, make an urban street style trailer with dramatic movie music, and put it online for $24.99 and there would be a large group of (I assume) young magicians who would eat it up as new material, never knowing that nearly the same material has been in print for 2x-3x the number of years I've been alive.
Legal? Maybe.
Moral? Grey area.
Respectful to the art & its history. NOPE!
oooxxxooo
You've hit a few nails on the head here, starting with those that re-invent the wheel and who don't ask questions when it comes to
properly researching the material prior to releasing it and grabbing all the cash that actually don't exist. . . trust me, you'll never get excessively wealthy selling magic unless your blessed with brilliance.
There was a company bought out by Penguin that had a terrible reputation for producing effects & systems that claimed originality but in truth, the guys that came up with the effects, nor the company, took on the task of researching the effect prior to release. The result was having some major players in the industry bad mouthing them for stealing from Dirk Losander, Me and several others. Adding insult to said injury they were deliberately misleading when inquiries were made on their effects. . . for an example, claiming that elbow reading wasn't pencil reading . . . you don't tell a legend in the industry such a thing without paying for it in the long run. (and no, I didn't just expose something).
Too many "newbies" want to make a big name for themselves without realizing that stepping into the general market means you're swimming with sharks. This is why I am always saying, CONTRIBUTE TO ESTABLISHED PUBLICATIONS FIRST and give away your brain farts. You will become better known, faster and in the same course of action, build a reputation that makes what you market more valuable and too, more likely to sell at a higher volume. This is why certain notables boast about buying a home or new car off of one effect; they had built a reputation first as a concept person AND PERFORMER. Most of them don't even release material that's less than 3-5 years old and in use -- stage proven as it were.
If you want to prove that you're creative the second step is to write that book, but NOT a book with two or three effects in it; write an actual book (50+ pages) with a dozen or so effects that you give an evolution to; what first inspired the piece and whose routines were involved that helped you come up with this variation (and 95% of what you come up with does already exist and is little more than a variation on previous thinking. . . it is exceptionally rare that anything genuinely "new" comes along).
Stop Hyping Your New Card Tricks!
Of all divisions in magic Card Magic has the most books and material going; magic buffs are addicted to the things and because of this saturation, the requisite research is a must and it gets deep!
But How Do I Do This Research? You ask
You get to know magic historians that know key areas of history. If you're a card guy you go to the elder cardmen out there. Not one but about a dozen of them, and you ask if they know of anything similar and where you can find it.
Just yesterday one of my publishers caught me on something. I had devised a very cool bit of Psychometry using Tarot cards. Being a history buff Loren knew of a similar effect published 30 years ago in a noted source. He forwarded the article and about 90% of what I'd come up with matched the techniques this older system used.
Now if some old and "learned" dude like me gets caught out, replicating something from yesteryear I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that a newbie is going to to. This is why we MUST research and why, if we are going to focus on developing effects, we must have a sizable personal library with which to work. . . yet, I see many selling their Mark Wilson and Tarbell books saying "I don't need them any more" when in fact, they do. . . such books should never leave your book shelf because you will need to reference them from time to time. . . I still do.
To strive for greatness is not a sin. To do so without integrity and solely for the sake of cash and fame. . . well, that is a sin; one that affects us all in rather negative ways.
