When my cell phone rang the other day, I was driving, so I let it go to voicemail. I’ll admit that I felt a brief spike of panic a few minutes later when I glanced at the caller ID and noticed that the call had come from my editor.

Had I forgotten to attach next week’s column to my last email? Perhaps I’d mixed up the dates on my calendar. I knew the quickest way to shut down the inevitable explosion of worst-case scenarios rattling around in my brain was to retrieve my messages and see what he was actually calling about.

It certainly wasn’t anything I’d expected. As it turned out, the message was a classic good news/bad news story. The good news was that I hadn’t missed any deadlines, or fouled up the paper’s schedule. The bad news was that he’d received a complaint regarding a recent column of mine. While I wasn’t overjoyed with the news, I wasn’t all that surprised, either.

Don’t get me wrong. I was confident that I hadn’t written an inaccurate or misleading column. Nor had I set out to offend any particular individual or group. That’s just not my style. But, when you’ve spent as many years as I have expressing yourself in a number of different public forums on a wide range of topics, every now and then, without even meaning to, you’re going to wind up ticking somebody off. It goes with the territory. You can’t please everyone.

Nevertheless, when I heard the nature of the complaint lodged against me I took it plenty seriously. After all, it’s not every day you wake up and find you’ve been accused of plagiarism! You heard right chummy, the “P” word, plagiarism, stealing, ripping off somebody else’s work claiming it’s yours, and worst of all, getting paid for it!

It’s one thing when folks disagree with your point of view or your method of expressing it. Frankly, if you’ve never generated a negative response when expressing your opinion, it’s a pretty good indicator that you don’t really have one. But, an accusation that you’re stealing somebody’s intellectual property is a whole other kettle of fish and it’s not one I like being tossed into.

Of course, this is hardly the first time I’ve found myself on the receiving end of such scurrilous allegations. Early in my career I answered my phone one day, only to discover that the highly agitated voice bellowing at me through the receiver belonged to legendary Maine humorist and author John Gould. Barely pausing for breath, the celebrated Christian Science Monitor columnist proceeded to systematically upbraid me for maliciously and illegally appropriating his copyrighted material.

He’d taken umbrage with what he alleged to have been my unauthorized use of a humorous “Maine story” punch line, on which he claimed to hold the legal copyright. I explained that any such action would have been entirely unconscious and therefore unintended on my part. So, after blowing off considerable steam and extracting the requisite sincere, heartfelt apologies, along with a promise to mend my ways, our conversation concluded on a reasonably civil note.

I suppose I could have left it at that. But, Gould’s assertion had piqued my curiosity. Is it actually possible, I wondered, to “own” the punch line of a joke? Keep in mind that all this happened long ago when the concept of copyright infringement actually meant something to the world at large. That being the case, I took it upon myself to call the author’s New York publisher W.W. Norton for a second opinion.

A few minutes of elevator music later I was on the horn with Mr. Gould’s editor. I certainly never expected the response he gave me. Upon hearing the details of Gould’s phone call, including the claimed legal ownership of a joke’s punch line, the editor burst into hearty laughter. He then proceeded to explain that details as minute as a single phrase aren’t actually covered by copyright law, especially when, as with Gould’s material, the work contains anecdotes drawn from regional folklore. Lifting whole paragraphs verbatim would be another matter entirely, but a punch line? That’s not something likely to be covered by copyright.

And though the recent allegations were voluntarily retracted for similar reasons, the incident did bring to mind a successful lawsuit once brought against former Beatle George Harrison over similarities between his #1 hit “My Sweet Lord” and “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons.

I’ve always believed that particular judgment, based on a handful of guitar chords shared by literally hundreds of other pop songs, was less about copyright law than the high price of fame — and feel free to quote me on that.