Note: This is a direct copy-and-paste from the first big a/n in TBBC, just to put it into context.

Plagiarism

Like I said before, the two people involved were unaware that it was plagiarism.  I wouldn't classify it as a totally innocent mistake, because they both knew which source material they were using as the basis for their respective stories and could (and should) have gone further away from it, but I'm just going to define it here for you anyway.

Plagiarism is the act of taking somebody else's work or ideas and passing them off as your own.  It is not limited to coyping something out word for word.  Only idiots do that.  To prove that something has been plagiarised, you have to be able to show that there are too many similarities -- and close ones -- for it to have been coincidence (this depends on context too), prove that they have had access to the original material, preferably that they have read it, and that theirs was started after the original material.  If you have your work locked to subscribers only on here, then it's actually pretty easy to do this.  Then you take screen shots.

To be honest, apart from when it's copied out word for word, or pretty much word for word, then plagiarism has to be taken on a case by case basis, otherwise everybody who wrote a story about two people falling in love would be spewing accusations of plagiarism all over the place.  What it essentially amounts to is whether there are too many similarities for it to be deemed coincidence.  And, on top of that, whether it's clear that the person producing the copy has definitely had access to the original.  It is possible to come up with the same ideas.  If you look at Japanese mythology and Greek mythology, the two cultures had never been in contact and managed to come up with the same idea of a river god.  Almost every civilisation around the globe managed to invent the wheel.  Some did it independently; others did it after coming into contact with people who had the wheel and thinking it was a great idea.  The thing is, the environment in both circumstances was one that gave rise to the river god being a plausible explanation and the wheel being a plausible solution to making life easier.

Stories are a slightly different matter.  It's fine to be inspired by something.  Also, general situations are liable to give rise to similar plots.  Most people, for example, write from experience of some kind, whether it's interactions with others or things that have happened to them.  This manifests itself most commonly with stories that are set in schools.  An experience of school is something that's common to a large number of us, and similar things happen in schools all over the world because that's the way humanity functions.  We all have teachers we love and teachers we hate.  We all make friends and enemies at school -- sometimes more of one than the other.  People fall in love.  People get into trouble.  Bullying is something that crops up, too.  In many stories, particularly pop fiction as opposed to literary fiction, you get what are called "stock characters" or definable character roles.  It's something you see all the time -- you know, the 2^nd male lead who never gets the girl (but who sometimes gets to kiss her) or the evil cheerleader or the jealous ex.  The nerd.  The jocks.  Stereotypes, basically, or caricatures.  I'm not sure about the evil cheerleader (I personally consider that an evolution of the jealous ex), but most character types are something that we've had experience with in real life, or they're straw men we put up (if they're evil) to give our characters focus when it comes to taking them down, defining our characters, or defining the plot.  That's the nature of storytelling.  You have to have a balance of some kind.  Good guys need bad guys -- or at least challenges -- to go against.  Anti-heroes need some kind of contrast in another character.

Of course, as there are some things which are common to life, there are things which are common to story telling.  I think various of you will have heard of Christopher Booker's Seven Plots theory.  If two people decide to take the Quest plot, using only what is on the Wikipedia page as their stimulus, then it is very unlikely that their stories are going to end up identical.  Having something that general in common does not count as plagiarism.

It's when things get closer together that the problem arises.  Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings both fall under the Quest plot.  Primarily, at least, according to Wikipedia.

If two people came up with the concept of a magial boarding school, then that would either be a coincidence (if one didn't have knowledge of the other) or a similarity (probably inspiration).  That's Hogwarts! you might scream, but it's not plagiarism.

Now the main protagonist has one very nerdy best friend and one very normal best friend.  That's Hermione and Ron! you might scream, but it's still not plagiarism.

Now there's a prophecy and the protagonist is the propechy child.  Oh, and there's a villain.  That's Harry! you might scream.  That's Harry and that's Voldemort!  Well, if the author had read the Harry Potter series, then yes, this would probably be getting a little close to comfort, depending on what the prophecy was and what the villain was like.  But boarding schools, teenage protagonists, and nerdy and normal best friends, villains and prophecies, are something that turn up all over the place.  Not always together, I grant you.

Now the protagonist is an orphan and mistreated by the relatives s/he lives with.  That's Harry.  That's SO Harry, you said.  And yes, this is definitely beginning to become a serious rip off, when all the elements are combined together.

And now there are various items that need to be gathered together and destroyed before the villain can be killed, and the villain was the one who killed the protagonist's parents, which is why the prophecy is about the protagonist.  Those are the Horcruxes! you insist.  That's plagiarism!  And yes, that would likely be plagiarism, and it would be very, very hard to convince people that it wasn't.  While there are aspects that are common to many stories, the particular combination of them in this particular manner in specific contexts means that it's likely to be a copy.

Something like the Horcruxes, specifically, which were very unique to Harry Potter, would be a definite inspiration drawn, or even copy, even if they were on their own.  So would the particular set up of the potential of Harry and Neville being prophecy children, but the villain narrowing it down to one because of a specific choice he made due to the prophecy, though less so than the Horcruxes.  Put those two elements, which were pretty unique, together, and that's actually a stronger case for saying it's a copy than Hogwarts and a blatant rip-off of Voldemort would be.

If, on the other hand, you write a story about a girl who goes to school, is a bit of a loner, has one (or no) best friend, and ends up falling in love and waltzing off into the sunset with her beautifully handsome boyfriend and one of your subscribers goes and writes a story exactly along those lines, that wouldn't be plagiarism unless they started copying out some of your scenes, or unless the characters were absolutely, absolutely identical.  As in not if both the characters were nerds and wore glasses and had one big brother and a family who hates them, but if they both had the exact same taste in music, did the exact same after school activities, plays the same musical instrument and has the same kind of witty comebacks, then you're probably getting a bit too close to the line.

Take Semi, for example.  Arranged marriages aren't that uncommon.  Nut allergies aren't that uncommon -- though they don't often feature in stories.  Playing the piano is very common.  Witness protection is a little less common, and it naturally follows from that, whatever the story setting, that the character's life is in danger and that they are one of the only people -- if not the only one -- able to get the villain arrested.  PTSD or other mental health illnesses aren't that uncommon, though you don't get many people writing about them (at least, not well and accurately).  Needing human contact to sleep well due to nightmares I'm pretty sure has been done before, too.  These are all aspects of Semi's character that are unique to her, though not unique in and of themselves.  The particular combination of all these, though, is pretty unusual.  The actual situation of her marriage is also unique.  If somebody wrote an arranged marriage story with a mafia guy about a girl who'd seen him kill somebody, so he gives her a choice between joining him or death, and she suffers from PTSD, no problems there.  Provided that's where the similarities end, and the rest of the events in the book are clearly ones that arise as a natural course of the book rather than being contrived to be similar to something else (usual obvious by overly elaborate explanations and plot holes).  If she has to marry his blood brother/there's some kind of pact between the guys that you on no circumstances touch their families, for her own protection, and she suffers from PTSD (or depression or something) and need somebody to be with her to prevent nightmares when she sleeps, then you're seriously toeing the line.

So that saying that there's no such thing as an original plot.  Yeah, basically true.  What is original is the way that you combine elements of that plot, whether it's in the events that happen or your setup of the characters.  It's the combination of unique elements, and of more common elements in an unusual way, which make something original.  And the more there is of that, the more likely it is that something similar is a copy.

I'm careful when I pick my plots.  I like to combine things in unusual ways.  I also like to take cliches, or specific ideas (like blood brother pacts -- I've personally never seen anywhere in which people drink each other's blood for this, but that's not to say it doesn't happen) and push them in uncommon directions where I can.  To be honest, God help the person who tries to plagiarise Deer Luhan, With Love.  This might be conceited of me, but I don't think it would be possible without coming out with something vastly inferior.  I have had a bunch of people come to me and say that it's inspired them to write a girl-disguised-as-a-boy story, though, which is fine.

What really matters is distance from the source material.  If you want it to be inspiration rather than copying, then really, focus on only one element and try to forget the rest of the story so that you can make it your own.  And try not to pick an element that's complicated, unique, and obviously recognisable as belonging to only one thing.  If you want to have a convicted criminal who should be in prison living in a house with somebody trying to take down a villain, fine, but make sure there's a reason for it, and make sure that it's NOT the same reason that is in another story that you've read.  And make sure that none of the rest of your story is similar too, beyond what logically follows with the plot.

And one last thing: if you copy an idea but intend to "go in a different direction" with it, you're still plagiarising the original idea.  If I were to write a story about a young farmboy who finds a dragon egg while he's out hunting in the mountains, and then his home is razed to the ground and his uncle is killed and he goes off to hunt the bad guys, that aspect of the story would still be plagiarised from Eragon even if he then joined the evil side and killed all the good guys, wiped out the elven and dragon populations, etc., and even if aliens came to land.  Those ideas are still recognisably Eragon.

I don't know how clearly I've explained this, but hopefully you now all understand it a bit better.

So please, if you see somebody plagiarising somebody else's work, tell the author, link them to the plagiarised piece, and point it out to the copycat.  Report it if it's blatant.  Make sure you take screenshots.  But don't go feeding that name to other people, and don't bash the person in question, because that's bullying.

If you are an author and your work is plagiarised, then for the love of God, don't start a witch hunt on the person who did it.  Most of the time, a message asking them to take it down will do.  If it doesn't, then report it.  But remember that the person on the other end isn't a baby-killing cannibal who ran over your neighbour's puppy and allow them a little respect and dignity, even if you don't think they deserve it.

There.  You now have absolutely no excuse to plagiarise anything ever.  You can't plead that you didn't know or that you're going in a different direction with the story.  Peace out.