Homage Vs Plagiarism

How are your standards about that? when a homage becomes plagiarism?

I've done a couple of homages. Most notably, the Breakfast Club, Mallrats, and grindhouse movies. I just have my own plots, but I incorporate key elements to let the reader know beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I'm referencing is in fact what they think it is.

It becomes plagiarism when it's line for line and you try to pass it off as something you came up with on your own.

A homage is when you reuse some things and say "Isn't this cool? It's just like X! I love X!" Plagiarism is when you reuse some things and say "Isn't this cool? I thought it up all by myself! What? No, it has nothing to do with X!"

Basically as long as you admit where you got your influence, it's all good.

edited 4th Jan '12 2:57:40 PM by NoirGrimoir

Seconded, although it might become a more complex issue if you actually get published.

I like George Lucas Throwback a lot, but I tend to mix so many things (for example, old style "invasion fiction" with modern steampunk and pessimissm and some Western influences as well, combined with common action and some low-level superhero ideas, to create the different intertwined plots of Innocence Lost) that it doesn't come out as any one particular thing and thus slides more towards homage than plagiarization...

Ideally, anyhow.

So I was curious about this kind of topic, so I did a quick search with name "Homage Vs Plagiarism", and what do you know, there's a thread with exactly that title.

Random thought.

Would you be safer from plagiarism accusation, if you are making references, liberally borrowing, etc from works that are over at least 30 years?

In theory the age of the work makes no difference; if the rights owners feel like you've stolen something that's theirs, they can sue you.

In practice, however, many classic works have been referenced so many times during the course of time that you would need to pretty much create a pixel perfect copy to get in trouble for it. Whole-Plot Reference is a thing after all...

edited 10th Oct '14 1:48:56 PM by Paradisesnake

There's one quote I heard who's source I can't remember that says the whole thing well:

"It's not a rip-off, it's a homage."

"What's the difference?"

"Whether I like it or not."

Relating to that, Small Reference Pools often cause people to push the rip-off button even in cases where the work being copied isn't even that unique in the first place.

A good example is how people claimed Hunger Games to be a rip-off of Battle Royale. Just by looking our Deadly Game and Blood Sport pages you can see that there are quite a lot of works with a similar idea out there (Schwarzenegger's The Running Man coming first to mind).

Complicating the issue is the fact that genres are born through imitation. You don't see anyone calling First-Person Shooters "Doom clones" anymore, because it's now considered a genre of its own.

Of course the work homaging other work still needs to have a certain amount of originality the same way we expect the newest Zombie Apocalypse movie to have a bit different take on the genre than the ones preceding it.

edited 14th Oct '14 6:54:58 AM by Paradisesnake