A memorization machine can steal poems and own them as originals

Evidence

There is a popular twist to this notion in a story told about a court poet who was exceptionally talentless in invention but who had a prodigious gift for memorization. He had to hear a poem only once to know it by heart. His wife had an almost equally amazing memory, but she had to hear the poem twice. Their son had inherited his parents’ gift, but he had to hear a poem thrice to remember it. And the household’s nearly-as-talented servant had to hear it four times. The entrepreneurial consequence of these four prodigious memories was that whenever a poet came to the court to recite a new poem for the king, the court poet would call him a liar and a plagiarist, and to prove that even the lengthiest poem was his own he would proceed to recite it from beginning to end. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 331

Categorization

• FICTION: The escalating-memory family and the plagiarism-by-memory trick is a vivid comic set-piece begging to be adapted.
• CANDY: A neat, self-contained trickster story — each family member needs one more hearing to memorize, so four of them can replay any theft.