Knock-Offs and Placebos
by David Pyle
Oftentimes it is discouraging to go into a store and see every other item on the shelf is either a cheaper or useless version of its original creation. An inventor came up with the idea, went through all the trouble to put pride and effort into the creation, applied for patents, spent good money to sell the idea to a manufacturer, and finally…, one day it hits the shelf.
One month after the product of the inventor’s creation becomes available, there on the shelf is a cheaper ‘great value’ sitting next to it, flying off the shelf.
One of the big conglomerates has sent off the said product to ‘the Borg’, a third world country with cheap slave labor and stolen the idea, only to replicate it with a ‘toy’ version marketed under a pseudonym or parody name.
Of course, the person is livid that the intellectual property has been stolen. The beloved Widget is now marketed as Wijet and there is no way to recoup any losses to the much bigger competitor.
The same thing happens every day to authors, writers, novelists, poets, bloggers, songwriters, and journalists; any variant of wordsmith with a pension for pouring out something unique.
Regardless of the hours spent in research, the unique spin, the personal touch, that product is almost immediately plagiarized with a change of title, rephrasing a few sentences, or restructuring of content.
These knock-offs show up as HBO specials, B-movies utilizing dissected scenes from books and stories, with little concern for their origin.
Copyright laws are so useless and unenforceable today that unless you hide your written work until the last possible moment, it can be subject to reenactment in some ‘made for television’ movie of the week before the year is out. I’ve seen it happen, had it happen to myself.
Unique narratives, unique characters, and unique scenes, even by bestselling authors, regularly show up as a Television special.
Most recently, I noticed how some of the unique characters, furtive imaginations, and written works of Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Bentley Little, Anne Rice, and many, many more end up in series like ‘True Blood‘, ‘Buffy the VK‘, or sad movies such as ‘Drag me to Hell’ or ‘Scary Movie’. In a matter of weeks, love trysts between werewolves, vampires, and impressionable young humans are commonplace. Oh…, and witches…, let’s not forget the witches.
The ‘crack of the whip’ has been effectively stolen by the plagiarist.
No matter if they ‘shape-shift, howl at the moon, raise the dead for a living, stake the dead, or cavort with the dead’, the original creator, the author that dreamed up the original character, the original scene, should get some credit.
A line should be drawn somewhere even in the name of rewrites.
The best we can hope for is to guard our product with the fervor of a paranoid schizophrenic until the day we give it the first slap on the ass and let it take its first breath; then all bets are off.
Comments are welcome, even if I don’t agree.
© 2012 Pentwist.com
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