Have you ever watched a movie and suddenly got a strong impression that the plot is somehow familiar to you? Have you ever got the dejavu feeling that you have seen the scene somewhere but you just cannot recall it? I am sure that most of us have. After all, there are really not many stories you can develop from a movie, which can be grouped to genres such as an action flick, a love story, an epic adventure, a touching drama, or even a biography. Those genres are fixed, and for that reason, there will always be a feeling that one movie is similar to the others. However, sometimes there are movies that are just too similar. When this happens, questions will be raised, rumors will be whispered, and accusations will be thrown blindly.
This similarities issue is also something that falls upon last year’s most acclaimed movie, Avatar. This James Cameron’s movie appears to have some, if not a lot, similarities to Disney’s 1998 animated movie Pocahontas. This resulted to a lot of talks and discussions all over the blogs on the internet. A group of people even went as far as to re-cut the trailers and replace the audio of one with the other, simply just to point out how similar these two movies are. Political Remix Radio took the liberty to surf via various sites and chose two of their favorite re-cut videos. Their re-cut videos were Avatar and Pocahontas. Avatar gets this serious attention mostly due to its good reviews and compliments. Additionally, who can deny the amazing visuals it has? Avatar has definitely created a breakthrough to the movie technology, but surprisingly, it has a similar story as Pocahontas. The defends for Pocahontas are pouring as the terms such as copycat, plot theft, mimicry, plagiarism, etc were soon raised to question Avatar. Is Avatar really an upgraded remake of Pocahontas? Has James Cameron really done an act of plagiarism?
Actually, similarities are considered very common in the movie industry. There will always be movies about taking revenge as the plot, singing forbidden love as its music, or even using giant monsters to destroy the world. These themes are used over and over again in a movie. Eventually, it is almost like saying that there are only seven notes in music, but many combinations can be made from those notes. Therefore, a little similarity in music is quite acceptable. However, movies are not just a 5-minute video clip. People will sit and watch a movie for a longer period of time. The elements that form a movie are even broader than music; and the main elements are the plot, the script, the acting, and the music. These four elements alone should make similarity in movies more noticeable than in music. People who really understand about music might have different opinion about this. But in this case, I am just talking about movies in general.
As similar as a movie to another, a movie needs to come with at least a little sense of originality (even though audiences will always spare a small room for similarity). The problem is that there are some people who apparently lack in their sense of originality and try to take a short cut by just following the footsteps of already successful moviemakers. In short, these people would take a plot from famous and popular movies and reproduce it in their movie. The only change would just be the people involved in it. Is there any ways to prevent this dreadful thing from happening?
To protect a creative work such as movies, writings, and songs, mankind has created an instrument called copyright. Copyright protects somebody’s work to be used, copied, distributed, or performed without the consent from the creators. Basically, the owner of the original work has to earn royalty from people who want to copy his or her work. Any violation to this copyright will be considered as copyright infringement, and law will prosecute the offender. This copyright policy seems to have covered all the bases needed to protect a creation but ultimately it has one big weakness: it only protects a work in tangible form. Things like ideas, names, titles, are not in tangible form and therefore are not included in copyright protection. In other words, copyright doesn’t protect ideas, but it protects the form in which the ideas are expressed, such as a song, a video clip, a photograph, a piece of writing, etc.
Just simply by knowing these facts, we can come to a conclusion that there are gaps in these regulations which can be used—not to break the rules, but simply just to bend them and stay in the safe zone. Let’s take a look at James Cameron’s Avatar again. Even though it is said to have dozens of similarities with Disney’s Pocahontas, they are not the same. The characters’ names are different; the setting is different; the tribe’s names are different; and of course the visual is very much different. They only share some similarities like storyline, etc and therefore Avatar cannot really fall to the category of plagiarism. Plagiarism happens when a piece of work is copied entirely. So, just by following this formula, we can always create a movie, take a plot from our favorite movie, mix and match the storyline a little, generate a little upgrade in the visual effects area, and we can still walk away unharmed and even more successful than before. The most important thing is that this kind of act can still be considered legal and acceptable. There might be a couple of lawsuits to face, but it is hard to prove any foul plays in this area.
In the end, we must always look everything from the bright side. Not everybody is that low to just rip-off a story from another movie and re-create a new movie from it. Some similarities can happen accidentally and incidentally. Of course, there are still some honest producers out there. However, when there is a light, there is also darkness. Despite the honest producers doing an honest work, there are others who are not honest and love to take “short cuts”. With this big gap in the copyright law, there will always room for cheaters. It all comes down to the people doing the business. They can work hard and be creative, or they can just work “smart” (copy others’ creative ideas).
