Plagiarism or "Borrowed" thoughts

You know a lot of movies are direct adaptations of popular books. However, there are certain movies that say, "Inspired by..." which means they've sort of used the content but not enough to really call it plagiarism. While its great for movies, do you think that this kind of borrowed thought is good for novel writers as well? I mean I have seen indie authors pick up on trends and write almost similar stories. This happened with all those "werewolf" stories that after a while all felt like they were in some way an adaptation of Twilight or other books.

Do you consider "similar" stories to be plagiarism or just borrowed thought? Are other books a "source of inspiration" or a source of content?

 

I noticed indie books and films both tend to trend, kind of like Deep Impact and Armageddon and then all those mockbusters. There's been vampire and werewolves flood after twilight, and a flood of zombie titles etc, and these are all inspired by each other.

"Inspired by" tends to mean they've paid the author though. I think it was Cliffhanger, the Stallone film, that bought rights to three mountain rescue books just so to avoid being accused of rights violation.

 

Exactly my point. We had a flood of vampire and werewolf stories after twilight and the whole trend continued until the readers themselves stop showing interest. However, I know that there are die hard fans of these specific sub-genres who'll read absolutely everything.

I didn't know Stallone had actually paid the authors. But, the point is that other authors generally tend not to. No one wrote at the front of their books, "Inspired by Twilight".

 

But Twilight didn't write at the front "Inspired by Dear Emily" or "Inspired by A Taste of Blood Wine". Sparkling vampires with angst already existed, but you couldn't mistake those two for Twilight or the other way round.

There's a real difference between borrowing an idea like vampires, and borrowing whole chunks of text and slightly rewriting it which is plagarism.

 

Inspired by: when an editor on wikipedia summarises an external article's conclusions and adds a reference link.

Plagarism: When an editor on wikipedia copies several paragraphs from that external article and pastes them directly into the body with no reference link, and google assumes wikipedia is the original source.

Why no, even if it was a few years ago now I don't forget and I haven't forgiven. I'm going through the same thing with a university at the moment who copied the entirity of one of my articles and made it available in PDF. As I only get paid per views, these people are cutting directly into my income and refuse to acknowledge contact or remove it... You'd think a university would care about plagarism.

 

That's terrible @tirial I didn't know univs could do that. Although, I have myself found quite a few expensive textbooks in PDF format on some of the university websites, which clearly is bad for the publishers and bad for the authors.