As we dig down, plagiarism is generally defined as copying or taking credit for someone else’s work and presenting it as your own, which may lead up to harsh legal actions and the possibility of losing one’s job. The excuse that is most commonly used for plagiarism is that the reference was taken from similar research as background material. Sometimes to preserve themselves from the backlash resulting from plagiarism, one may say that they forgot to add attribution or a link giving the credit. Plagiarism in the media industry was first recognized by the Turkish media.

Therefore, in the M&E industry, people may confuse plagiarism and copyright infringement. The former not being an illegal act, whereas the latter is a clear violation of copyright law amounting to an illegal act. The long-standing problem of plagiarism in India exists because there is no clause to protect the idea, but the expression of an idea is protected. To protect the work’s originality huge amounts of royalties are also paid to the writer of the work. Plagiarism in the media & entertainment industry is one of the most unethical crimes to commit.

However, in the M&E industry, the viewers and the readers also play an important role as they can recognize if the work is plagiarised and will find its source. Even if someone has taken the copyright permission from the holder, they need to give credit to the author, only then it will not amount to plagiarism. We all know and it is a well-known fact that incidents of plagiarism are common in the music and film industry. The major issue and catastrophe are that many plagiarised works in the M&E industry may go undetected and are ignored by many, as it consumes so much time and money. In a fast-growing world where every day new content is produced it becomes difficult to detect plagiarism.

Examples of Plagiarism in the M&E industry can be witnessed in the Bollywood industry, They are on many occasions accused of plagiarising movie posters and scripts. The natural defence taken by them is an expression of an idea and the work is shown to be different as witnessed in the case of Flora Rossi, a freelancer artist who accused the makers of a Bollywood film “Judgemental hai kya” of plagiarising her artwork and using it as the poster. Urvashi Rautela wrote the same words as a Twitter user named @jpbrammer in reviewing the Oscar-winning movie parasite.

One more example which I came across recently was of Daboo Ratnani plagiarising the work of international artist Marie Barsch, as the photograph was very similar to the artwork and cleared the accusation by putting a picture taken by him and claiming to take the inspiration from that.

Video games can also be plagiarised and it is not very difficult to detect them, as mentioned above., A company “Majestic Studios” released a new game “lost in limbo” in March 2008. It was soon revealed by the players that the game was plagiarised and the scenes, storyline and characters were stolen from other games and it was taken off the market.