Beyond any armchair discussion of intellectual interest, this is an interesting real-life case of how criteria are defined to evaluate the novelty of ideas.
The Prize "Juan Rulfo" is organised by several institutions in Paris and awards 5,000 euro to the winner: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2008/12/24/retiran-premio-juan-rulfo-a-escritor-cubanoestadunidense-jorge-davila
The author was accused of submitting a story previously 'published' in a local and obscure magazine in Madrid. First, it'd be interesting to analyse the relevance of such a criteria in relation to its merit. However, if the rule was set beforehand, there is no room for discussion here.
Second, and more interestingly, the author claims that the original published version of his own work was changed significantly: "un trabajo en progreso que sufrió desde entonces cambios de lenguaje, sintaxis y estructurales"... which makes me wonder whether the jury should have taken this into account instead of literally applying a rule when defining something as slippery as novelty.
In this case the matter was easily settled by the jury (top-down), but in a bottom-up self-organising assessment it'd be interesting to find out how a social group would take this type of criteria to ascribe novelty.
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