Board Thread:Site Questions/@comment-26155111-20150301141329/@comment-25428589-20150301144247

ShizKoE2 wrote: MrDupin wrote: I think plagiarism is when you copy and take credit for someone else's work. Yeah but what if the plot is only similar, as it is inspired by it but not identical or re-worded? By the way, here I'm talking about plot-inspired things, so much so that the plot could be considered overly similar.

If credit is given (i.e: it says in a forward/note from the author that the story is inspired by something else) then being inspired so much that the plot is kinda similar by something else is okay. However, if credit isn't given and the story borrows large parts of its plot from something else, it's plagiarism.

I think the story you were asking about earlier, The Sweeping, is a good example of this. Its plot is very similar to The Disappearance of Ashley, Kansas, but might have been okay if it had credited that story as its inspiration. Whereas, in the sweeping, the author passed it off as entirely his own idea, meaning it was plagiarism.