How to prevent plagarism?

March 22, 2007 9:00 PM

A friend of mine recently wrote a play, and now someone who read it has written and is producing a show very similar to it. What can be done to prevent this?

A friend of mine wrote a play and had it read by a number of people in the business. Now one of those people has written and is currently producing a play with a plot and characters that are extremely similar to my friend's story and characters. If it's not a word for word copy of my friend's script, is there anything that can be done to prevent this plagarism?

posted by dazed_one to writing & language (16 comments total)

Yes, have your friend hire a copyright lawyer. Access plus reproduction, even with changes, is not a good thing.
posted by caddis at 9:06 PM on March 22, 2007

Contact the Writers Guild of America. Look for a similar organization in Canada - or contact the WGA and ask them what similar services are available in Canada. They provide services to register your script.

If you're already in a big mess, keep in mind that if you have to go to court there are two things to prove that will help your case:

1. your friend actually had a physical copy of the script produced/registered before the other guy did

2. that the "plagiarist" in question had access to the script that you say he plagiarised.
posted by phaedon at 9:19 PM on March 22, 2007

Keep in mind this is one director-turned-professor's opinion, and it related to screenplays rather than plays so it may not be applicable, but here it is anyways for your consideration.

When I was getting my film degree, the topic of plagiarism came up in a screenwriting class. The prof, who at that point in the lecture was discussing how to get into the industry more than screenwriting, put it bluntly: be glad someone liked your idea enough to copy it, and leave it alone. Basically it boils down to this: you might legally have a case, but thereafter you'll be blacklisted and no one will want to work with you because you'll be a liability. And in any case, even if they steal one idea, the real equity isn't in ideas but in idea factories, i.e. talent is far more valuable than a mere concept. So even if you have the law on your side, the way the industry works pretty much guarantees that they'll either get away with it or bring you down with them.

To this day I don't quite know how I feel about that advice, but he did manage to plant the right idea in our heads: ideas are cheap, but the imagination behind those ideas is priceless. Good luck to your friend if he or she decides to sue—it'll probably be a long and hard road that may or may not provide satisfaction at the end.
posted by chrominance at 9:46 PM on March 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Damn, chrominance, that's bleak. Like Robert Duvall in an SNL sketch bleak.
posted by GooseOnTheLoose at 10:07 PM on March 22, 2007

Having been through something similar (and I'll skip the details), let me say that chrominance is entirely right: he could win the fight, but it almost certainly will end their chances at further work.

You have to shrug, chalk it up to experience, and move on. And make sure that person doesn't see another good idea, ever, if you can prevent it.

It sucks. I know.
posted by dmz at 10:59 PM on March 22, 2007

But before we tell whoever to shrug it off, perhaps we should clarify exactly what 'the business' is and who read it? Are we in a small town in Iowa or on the streets of New York? If it's a place where the business is isolated from the larger "Business" then I say screw 'em and do what you can to get them to take down the show (but be sure you got a case...similarities are nothing. Downright stealing lines and scenes and characters are a whole bunch of something).

Otherwise, Chromiwise and I got the sam advice in film school. Get pissed about it. But move on.
posted by ryecatcher at 11:06 PM on March 22, 2007

All other things aside (blacklisting, etc) - exactly how similar IS this new play? If it's just the same sort of idea, but completely re-written, I think your friend is fairly well SOL. However, if lines are directly lifted, just with different character names, then your friend could have a better chance.
posted by antifuse at 2:19 AM on March 23, 2007

People always overvalue the value of ideas. Writers are no exception. Ideas are cheap.

Like chrominance says, the value of a stage production isn't solely in its script, or the idea behind the script. It's in the staging, the direction, the acting... We see this all the time when a previously successful play is revived and then fails because the parts just don't add up.

Be careful of talk of copyright and plagiarism too. In a legal definition (and they are, essentially, legal terms), both relate to directly copying sentences, phrases or paragraphs. Ideas can't be copyrighted. Damn right too, because otherwise JK Rowling would copyright the boy wizard concept, for example, or Disney would copyright anthropomorphized animals.

It sounds like the concept or idea was stolen here, which is actually very common in literature.

Get your friend to pick himself up and dust himself off. Try not to be too angry with the thieving director. Bear in mind that few people will care about his predicament, and some might even admire the director for being so bold and decisive in adapting a good idea.
posted by humblepigeon at 3:03 AM on March 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

tell your friend to suck it up and steal somebody else's ideas instead
posted by matteo at 6:26 AM on March 23, 2007

Your profile says you're in Toronto, and if that's where this is happening, I'd think it would be pretty high up on the list of places where one does not want to burn bridges.

How about this perspective instead: a rare opportunity for your friend to constructively and somewhat objectively critique his or her "own" work, seen through to the end, without the huge time commitment or financial investment.

I think your friend should follow this play as closely as he or she can (or can stand to). How are they casting it? What are the sets like? How much of the script have they retained? How is all of this working for them? Does the play ultimately meet with success? What factors made it so it did or didn't?

It may be the case that the person putting on this play does something that your friend wouldn't have thought of that contributes to its success, or that this person does something that your friend would not have that contributes to its failure. Or any combination of those factors. Your friend gets to learn these lessons for practically free.

I'm willng to bet that he or she is not the first person this has happened to, and there will be other ideas. Your friend should make the best of this situation and move on.
posted by AV at 7:17 AM on March 23, 2007

Thanks for all the responses. I haven't read the new script, so I'm not sure how similar the two are - whether there's sections of lifted text or what-have-you. It seems that just chalking it up as a learning experience seems to be the way to go, despite how bitter a pill that seems to be.

The business is the Toronto theatre community. The person who read and stole concepts from the play is an up-and-coming playwrite with a couple of shows already produced. My friend was just starting to be noticed as a playwrite; the copied script was her attempt to break into the scene.

C'est la vie.
posted by dazed_one at 7:22 AM on March 23, 2007

It should be noted, also, that this is a big world. It's a bummer that the Toronto scene might not be receptive to your friend's script now that this other, similar play has been staged, but that doesn't mean the play is wasted. If the play is good, Toronto is just a drop in the pond.

If he spends some time with google, he should be able to find submission opportunities all over the web. Here, for instance.
posted by tsmo at 8:47 AM on March 23, 2007

I've produced both theatre & film and I've worked for the Writers Guild, so I'm fairly knowledgeable about this subject:

A play is not the same as a screenplay. The Writers Guild only deals with screenplays. In the US, The Dramatists Guild deals with plays, and it's important not to conflate the two worlds. Plagiarism in the theatre world is dealt with much more seriously than in film. (In Canada the Playwrights Guild is the comparable organization.) The blacklisting issue is really a film industry thing - theatre is generally much more principled. If it were film, I would agree, don't make a fuss, move on. But in theatre, the plagiarist is the one likely to be ostracized, if you can prove it. It's worth a call to the Playwrights Guild (they're in Toronto, contact info is on their site) to ask about how they deal with these matters.
posted by ljshapiro at 11:17 AM on March 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks ljshapiro, I've passed that contact info on. It's very much appreciated.
posted by dazed_one at 11:38 AM on March 23, 2007

You're welcome.
posted by ljshapiro at 11:51 AM on March 23, 2007

A lot of ideas float around in the zietgeist, and are acted upon by more than one person at a time. There are also a lot of ideas based on archetypes that appear in some way in everyone's unconscious, even if you don't know to look for them. In other words, even knowing for sure that your idea was truly original is very difficult.

When I was getting my master's degree in screenwriting, I had a classmate who was convinced that American Beauty was a rip-off of one of his scripts. He was very angry about it, and often brought it up as an example of just how tough the industry is.

But my classmate was wrong. I read his script, and it wasn't like American Beauty at all. But he was so proud of himself for coming up with a few specific scenes, that he just couldn't accept the fact that they weren't so unique that someone else couldn't have come up with them on their own.

But here's the real crux of the matter. Writing is not about ideas. Every creative person (including me) has a large reservoir of cool ideas that could become great books, plays, or movies, if only those ideas could be executed well. But that doesn't mean shit.

The real talent is in putting your ideas into play in an effective manner. So your friend wrote a play, and someone who read it has written a play "with a plot and characters that are extremely similar to [your] friend's story and characters"? Here are the possible scenarios, in order of likelihood:

1) Your friend is delusional about the originality of his work, and most people who are not your friend will be able to tell this is true right away. The two plays have almost nothing to do with each other.
2) Both plays are takes on a particular genre and/or set of archetypes that have already been used in thousands of other dramatic works, and your friend just doesn't know enough (or have perspective enough) to realize this.
3) Your friend's play influenced, in some infinitesimal way, the writer of the other play. For example, he decided that he too should write a play about the bully who used to take his lunch money in elementary school.

"Extremely similar story and characters" doesn't mean shit. What about the dialog, suspense, depth of characterization, etc.? In other words, what about the aspects of dramatic writing that can actually speak to the writer's talent?
posted by bingo at 12:58 AM on March 24, 2007