Plagiarism is essentially taking the work of others and attempting to pass it off as one's own. It's almost always considered an unforgivable sin in academia, but has also gotten people in disgrace in the broader creative world as well. In the case of copyright infringement, it may even land the perpetrator in some nasty legal trouble. There is a lot more to it than that. If you care about that, look it up on Wikipedia,
WestLaw, or our Media Notes page. Around here, we're more concerned with plagiarism showing up as the topic of a story.
The more complicated plots may involve Time Travel, with somebody discovering that William Shakespeare has been earning acclaim for years for the play he accidentally left in the past. That trope is Fantastic Plagiarism if fantasy or sci-fi elements are a factor. A more mundane plot involves a Ridiculous Procrastinator trying to pass off a straight-A older sibling's report or assignment as their own, eventually getting busted because the teacher recognizes it.
It is worth noting that plagiarism and copyright infringement are two different issues, despite high-profile improper appropriation lawsuits in the US being called "musical plagiarism" or "plagiarism lawsuits". Plagiarism is taking full credit for another person's work, or implicitly doing so by not crediting it. Copyright infringement is using it without express or automatic permission to do so. Arguably, using an Apple Loop or using Clip Art you have the right to copy is a consensual form of plagiarism. Whether either is literally unethical is honestly a matter of opinion, and one people might have some very complicated opinions on.
Likely to end with An Aesop that Cheaters Never Prosper, or (more cynically) Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught. It may also end in a Stolen Credit Backfire.
Sister Trope to Stealing the Credit, which covers broader ways of wrongly claiming other people's ideas or accomplishments. Compare Cheating by Copying, the difference being that this trope requires the copyer to take credit for someone else's work.
Subpages:
Examples:
- In an advertisement for chocolate chip Eggo Waffles, a man calls to complain that what he thinks is a chocolate chip waffle (really, actually covered in mud) tastes terrible. The complaints clerk says they don't make chocolate chip waffles... yet. As a result for suggesting the idea, he gets a promotion.
- Action Heroine Cheer Fruits: At the start of the series, the protagonists put on stage shows based on the popular Kamidaioh character, though it begins going in its own direction. However, when they start making their own merchandise, the owners of the Kamidaioh IP serve them with a Cease and Desist, which serves as the impetus for the girls to create their own original property. Later in the series, the girls see a clip from another Action Heroine show whose plot was almost identical to one they were going to use; even though it's a total coincidence, they have to throw out their original script and start over because using it now would look like plagiarism.
- Billy Bat first starts off when the maker of the titular character (an anthropomorphic bat detective in an American comic) realizes he may have accidentally plagiarized it from a character he saw while in Japan. The origin of the character turns out to be far more complicated than he'd ever imagined. Notably, there's also one scene where the cartoon character come to life, or a hallucination thereof, actually questions the concept of plagiarism, stating most of what humans regularly do had to have been copied from someone at some point.
- Case Closed: Being another detective series, it also deals with people being murdered over stolen ideas.
- In Haganai, Yozora does this in a rewrite of her screenplay for the club's movie in episode 9 of Season 2. While Maria mentions at the end of episode 8 that the story seems familiar, it's not until episode 9, and after they've already shot some scenes, that Kate points out to Kodaka the similarities with an obscure movie. He then checks the movie and finds out their film was a shot-for-shot remake of that obscure film. Yozora is forced to kneel while wearing a sign saying she plagiarized, and the club goes with Sena's script, which she wrote as a backup just in case Yozora's script didn't work out.
- The Kindaichi Case Files: Plagiarism that causes the person stolen from to be Driven to Suicide (or outright murdered) becomes the motive for murder in several of the mysteries, and in fact provides the Start of Darkness for Kindaichi's greatest opponent.
- Kizuna no Allele: ADEN has a class about avatar design, where students have to write a report about a costume from a selection. When Miracle asks about it, she's reminded that copying the design for herself would be a copyright violation.
- Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Shouta's father funded his magic research by ripping off an author from Earth via precognition (while unstated, it's implied that the author was J. R. R. Tolkien). He states that it didn't count as stealing since copyright isn't retroactive.
- My Girlfriend Without Wasabi: Soon after they met, Rino tells Nozomu the story of a girl who blanked out on the entrance exam and copied from Wikipedia. When Nozomu asked if the girl had a death wish Rino just smirks and gives a thumbs up.
- In Ojamajo Doremi, the backstory for Hazuki's mother, Reiko Fujiwara, involved a man by the name of Yoichi Sakuragi, who passed himself off as a fledgling poet by stealing previous poems. His motive? To marry her and get her family's fortune. When she confronted him after finding out, Sakuragi revealed his true Jerkass nature and basically told her he tried to sucker her for For the Evulz. Reiko was heartbroken.
- An episode of Pokémon the Series is about someone who needs actors for a film. When asked what it's about, the director pretty much sums up Romeo and Juliet. After listening, Brock and Ash are moved to tears, but Misty asks, "Hasn't this already been done?'
- In Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, one of the main characters, Umika Misaki, had her first novel stolen by her editor, who published it under another author's name and actually had the nerve to ask Umika for more work. Because of this, she made a contract to become a magical girl and used her wish to meet an editor who would recognize her writing talent.
- Time Paradox Ghostwriter centers on a struggling mangaka who recreates a manga sent to him from ten years in the future. At first, Teppei feels free to do so because he assumed the manga he read was just a hallucination. He discovers the truth only after publishing a oneshot for his own version, and decides to continue because that's the only way the story will be made at all in the current timeline.
- Avengers Arena: Arcade acknowledges that his plan (kidnap a large number of teenage heroes and force them to kill each other) was "inspired" by Battle Royale. The result: the supervillain circle considers him a laughable, copycat hack, making his efforts to impress them completely worthless.
- Emiko Superstar: Emiko makes a name for herself by reading pages from a stolen diary and presenting them as poetry she wrote herself. After giving the diary back to its rightful owner (with a note saying "I'm sorry"), her last performance has her shredding the pages she copied on stage under the name "The End of Suburbia."
- Shazam!: In The Marvel Family #8 "Forest Symphony", Mary Marvel meets an awful, glory-hungry songwriter called Ike Plugger, and later runs into a talented hermit musician called Lester Hinote whose songs Mary cannot help but replay. By chance, Plugger eavesdrops on Mary talking to a music publisher about Hinote's songs, and comes up with stealing his songs. Nonetheless, Mary listens to "Plugger's" "Forest Symphony" and exposes him.
Ike Plugger: "I'll find the hermit and steal his songs! Then I'll be famous! Heh-Heh! No one will know I didn't write the songs myself!"
- She-Hulk: In She-Hulk (2004), it's revealed that tourists from an Alternate Universe without supers are sneaking into the main universe (gaining the powers of their counterparts in the process) and enjoying the lives of their alternate selves. When discovered and captured by S.H.I.E.L.D., we get to see a montage of attorney meetings, Beast is suing his counterpart for stealing and patenting his theories in the latter's universe. Apparently in the Marvel Universe intellectual property laws have interdimensional jurisdiction. Seriously!
- The Simpsons: In one early issue, Bart and Milhouse create their own superhero comic book, which is so popular at Springfield Elementary that fights for an issue break out. They try to sell their comic to real artists at a convention but are turned down. Months later, a new comic comes out, starring a blatant expy of Bart and Milhouse's character with only the name changed. However, this shows the problem with stealing someone's idea—because the company isn't imaginative enough to create new ideas, the comic's stories become stale, and the publisher has to blackmail Bart and Milhouse into making new comics for them.
- Spider-Man:
- The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) kicks off with Peter being accused of this thanks to a program designed to figure out who has been plagiarizing their work in colleges. When Peter's is used, it's revealed that it's copied wholesale from something done by Otto Octaviusnote . Since Peter can't explain how it happened without revealing he's Spider-Man, he loses his diploma, his comfy job at the Daily Bugle, and his Aunt May's respect.
- In one issue of Ultimate Spider-Man (2000), a teacher berates her class for plagiarism after almost all of them try using the lyrics of rap songs to do a poetry assignment. Several of them even used the same song.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: Lana Kurree's boyfriend steals her formula and research into cancer treatment, and then frames her for murder so that he can try and pass it off as his own. Given who her friends are, this does not work out for him.
- A storyline in Funky Winkerbean has Les Moore dealing with a student who's buying essays off the internet, and pointing out that she's not learning anything this way. In the end, he says that if she's struggling with writing essays, she can write a song for her English assignment instead. Because that will help her learn... something, probably.
- One Stone Soup story has Holly downloading someone else's term paper and passing it off as her own. She gets busted instantly because she forgot to change the original author's name to her own.
- Zits:
- In one story, a classmate strongly advises Jeremy to visit www.bootleg.com in order to get better grades and save time and energy. Her soulless eyes indicate the alleged price. Jeremy is tempted, but the end of the arc implies that he didn't give in — and a teacher's suspicion makes the inveterate cheater do a Loud Gulp.
- In another story, Jeremy "borrows" his mother's credit card in order to buy an AP essay from what is clearly a scam website. Not only does Jeremy get a zero on the essay and a twenty-minute lecture after he confesses to his teacher, but said credit card also ends up hacked, and he's grounded for two weeks by his parents.
- The Infinite Loops: Loopers travel to infinite worlds, including worlds where they can access real fiction. Therefore, in their infinite boredom, they occasionally steal some of the plots they've read for use in their own loops.
Trixie: ...plagiarists.
Twilight: (eating popcorn) Oh, hush. So what if they stole the plot of Shrek?
- Somos Familia explores a world where Ernesto did give Hector proper credit for all his songs. However, this still comes into play when Ignacio, a rich suitor of Coco's attempts to pass off a variation of Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain, My Captain" as his own original work.
- In Certain Dark Things (rentachi), Harriet discovers that Lockhart has been copying from various Muggle books, passing the work off as his own.
- Leave for Mendeleiev: Chloé's mother Audrey attends the hat contest that Gabriel holds as a guest judge, making Chloé even more determined to catch her eye. Rather than making her own design, however, she still steals Marinette's, then attempts to accuse her of stealing her design. Unfortunately for Chloé, this completely backfires; the artist that she had recreate Marinette's design made a perfect replica, right down to her hidden signature. Audrey is less than amused and immediately declares her daughter to be blacklisted from all future contests.
- Scarlet Lady: Chloé is prone to trying to steal the hard work of others and pass it off as her own.
- During "Mr. Pigeon", she attempts to frame Marinette for plagiarism by sneakily taking a photo of her design for the contest, hiring an artist to replicate it, then accusing the other girl of stealing from her. As this copy included Marinette's hidden signature, the deception is revealed, and she gets blacklisted from participating in any other contests held or sponsored by Gabriel.
- When Bob Roth and XY openly discuss the idea of holding a contest specifically to trick inexperienced artists into submitting their work so they can rip it off and claim it as their own in "Silencer", Chloé dreamily thinks that she's with "her people". She gleefully joins in their scheme by pretending to be the one responsible for making the things they steal from Kitty Section's submission, even complaining about how difficult Marinette's designs were to copy when confronted.
- In "Reverser", Chloé's habit of brazenly Stealing the Credit from others gets thrown back in her face when she tries insulting her past victims:
Chloé: (pointing at Juleka and Rose) No one cares about your dumb baby unicorn songs!
Juleka: You seemed to care when you helped XY rip us off. We literally have a recording contract.
Chloé: (whirling on Marinette) Y-your designs are trash!
Marinette: Gabriel Agreste and Jagged Stone don't think so. And you also tried stealing my "trash" designs. Twice. - The same episode has Alix ask the art teacher why they'd want to welcome her to the art club, given her history of plagiarism. The teacher is stunned into silence.
- Played for Drama in Reality Check; Shinsou struggles to keep up academically, misattributing his struggles to the Hero Course being unfairly biased against Quirks like his own (when in reality, it's more like he's Ambitious, but Lazy). He expects that he'll be able to bang out their final research assignment for the year at the last second; when this doesn't work out, he panics, then decides to Brainwash one of his classmates into giving him a copy of their essay before deleting their own and forgetting the whole exchange. As far as he's concerned, his victim deserves to have their work stolen and efforts sabotaged, simply by virtue of being "privileged" enough to have gotten into the Hero Course on their own merits. Ultimately, his plan fails; the only reason he doesn't get expelled on the spot is because Aizawa sacrifices the rest of his own standing to save him, and it's only delaying the inevitable, as he's now Hated by All of his classmates for trying to screw over Momo.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- This is one of the main sources of wealth for Navarone in Diaries of a Madman. Though it should be noted that, as the original creators are all dead and the art doesn't already exist in the world, he is providing a service by transcribing it.
- Friendship is Failure: Fallout Fashions reveals that Rarity had taken credit for one of Needle Stitch's dress designs. Though he'd given her permission to do whatever she pleased with the design, and she profusely apologized, he was so enraged by what she'd done that he broke off their friendship, changed his identity, had his cutie mark removed (since she'd helped him earn it and he no longer wanted anything to do with her), and dedicated his life to trying to ruin hers.
- In The Non-Bronyverse, Ted came to Equestria with a laptop's worth of movies, including The Terminator and Wolf Creek among others. He has no qualms with the Equestrian film industry ripping them off, largely on the grounds that it's not his work they're plagiarizing.
- Glass Marionette: Tangled Shards reveals that Kankuro has taken what little he remembers of pop culture from his previous life and crafted his own puppet plays based heavily on them. Gaara's favorite of these is his brother's take on The Hobbit, while Temari likes his version of Daredevil and Kiba enjoys Jujutsu Kaisen. Kakashi is also noted to be a fan of his takes on The Magnus Archives and The Song of Achilles.
- Ships Ahoy!: Odie has noticed that Oscar keeps copying his hairstyles, and it's made clear that he really doesn't like that... though he keeps that to himself.
- In Please Ignore the Wanted Posters, it's revealed that the "Malleus Maleficarum", the holy book used by the Titan faith that Belos founded, copies large swathes of the Bible's text almost word-for-word, mainly altered to suit his needs. He also plagiarized other media from Earth, such as the story Romeo and Ghouliet.
- Brought up and Averted in Sacrifice (Ravenshell). When Donnie questions Rockwell about why he's willing to work under him, wondering whether he's planning on using his Telepathy to rip him off, Rockwell reassures him that he's not that kind of monkey. Besides, their situation is far too dire for him to even consider such things in the first place.
- Rainbow Rivalries:
- Ghetsis stole the concept of sending somebody off on an unfair hunt for evidence from the Queen of Hearts. After he's defeated, she shows up alongside Colress, ordering her cards to chop off his head.
- Right before she sends everyone into Vanille's witch barrier, Maleficent copies one of Dr. Nefarious' speeches from Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, which Lightning immediately points out.
- In Taylor Hebert, Medhall Intern, Taylor and Greg use The Book as a study aid to help dramatically improve their World Studies assignment. Julia accuses them of having copied somebody else's work, but Taylor proves the accusations false by demonstrating how well she understands the material.
- The Reveal of Coco is that Ernesto de la Cruz, the true Big Bad of the film, the most famous musician of all time who was known to have written all of his own songs, actually stole said songs from his best friend, Héctor, after murdering him.
- In Meet the Robinsons, Bowler Hat Guy tries to pass off Lewis' invention for his own. Unfortunately for him, he has no idea how it works, and after a series of disasters, the chairman kicks him out of the building and onto the street.
- In Back to School (1986), Thornton Melon turns in an essay about a book by Kurt Vonnegut, written by Kurt Vonnegut himself, which he passes off as his own. The English professor gives him an F, telling him that whoever wrote the essay "doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut." Later on, Thornton gets called in by the dean of the college, with accusations that Thornton has committed academic fraud by turning in homework done by someone else.
- In Big Fat Liar, Jason Shepard is given a creative writing assignment, but has such a noted history of chronic lying that he is forced to write it by hand so the teacher is sure he didn't plagiarize something off the Internet. Then, through a stroke of bad luck, major Hollywood producer Marty Wolfe steals his paper and turns it into his next big film. Hilarity Ensues as Jason tries to get Wolfe to admit to plagiarizing his work while unable to convince anyone but his best friend that he's not lying this time.
- Bring It On: New cheer captain Torrance learns that her squad's winning routines were all stolen from another school by her predecessor. Determined to win the national championship honestly, she resorts to hiring a professional choreographer, only to learn too late that he's sold the exact routine to several other schools (one of which performs immediately after them, outing them both).
- The Dead Pool: Subverted; when Harlan Rook reveals himself as the Dead Pool killer, he rants and raves that prima-donna director Peter Swan had stolen his film ideas and so his killing spree, which was designed to try to frame Swan, was justified revenge. He also kills a film critic earlier while ranting about how dare she denigrate and mock his work. The subversion is in the scene that reveals Rook's the man Harry Callahan is looking for: a psychiatrist explains that Rook is just a Loony Fan of Swan that has devolved and the plagiarism is merely a delusion (the fan believes that Swan is literally capable of entering the fan's dreams to steal said ideas, for one).
- Jamal in Finding Forrester is accused of plagiarism when he turns in an essay written with Forrester's help. Fortunately, Forrester shows up at the disciplinary hearing to explain what happened.
- In the 2009 film Gentlemen Broncos, a teenager's science fiction story is plagiarized by a writer he idolizes.
- Gulliver's Travels (2010): Gulliver is made to write a travel article for a newspaper. Stuck with writer's block, he plagiarizes from several other travel columns. The paper's editor, Darcy, is initially fooled, though she notices that it's a blend of different styles, sounding like they come from different sources, only to later realize that they are indeed from said sources.
- IQ: Ed Walters falls in love with Catherine Boyd, a brilliant mathematician and doctoral candidate at Princeton. However, she's only interested in academically accomplished men, and Ed is just a mechanic who barely passed high school. He gets hold of a scientific paper on a theory for cold fusion which was written, but never published, by Albert Einstein. He then pretends to be an undiscovered prodigy by presenting this paper to the academic community and passing it off as his own. He succeeds in getting Catherine to notice him, and she slowly starts to fall for him. Unfortunately, his paper also attracts the attention of scientists and the government, who are excited about the possibility of cold fusion. Meanwhile, Catherine's jealous fiancé is convinced that Ed could not have written the paper, and he sets out to prove that Ed is a fraud. Eventually, the attention from so many different parties is too much, and Ed is forced to admit that he did not write the paper. Despite his deception, he still ends up with Catherine in the end.
- In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the reason Spencer and Fridge are in detention is that they were caught plagiarizing. Spencer wrote a paper for Fridge to turn in, but it was so similar to his previous papers, the teacher recognized it.
- Kapoor & Sons: Part of why Arjun dislikes his brother is that he suspects Rahul stole his idea for a novel. It turns out their mother Sunita gave Arjun's manuscript to Rahul because she didn't believe that Arjun was serious about becoming a writer.
- Ji-yun of Korean horror film Killer Toon becomes a prime suspect for murder after the grisly deaths she draws in her horror comic books start coming true in Real Life. She is then forced to admit that she is a plagiarist who has been publishing as her own work comic books that are being emailed to her by an anonymous author.
- The Milk of Sorrow: Aida, a singer with a bad case of Writer's Block, takes a song written by her maid Fausta and passes it off as her own. When Fausta makes an innocuous comment about how the audience at the concert liked the song, Aida promptly throws her out of the car, leaving her stuck by the side of the road.
- In the 1962 version of The Phantom of the Opera, the titular Phantom's backstory is that he was a Starving Artist who went to an influential aristocrat for help in getting his musical compositions published. That man ended up claiming the works as his own, triggering a chain of events that would result in the real composer being horrifically scarred from acid and becoming the masked Phantom. He is determined to sabotage the premiere of his stolen opera.
- In Raising the Wind, a drunken Mervyn sells Sid and Harry what he thinks is an original tune, unaware it is the "Alexandra Valtz".
- In Reign of Fire, the protagonists are shown putting on a play which is clearly a rip-off of Star Wars to entertain the children (and claiming credit for inventing the story).
- Secret Window is about an author who gets a knock on the door from a stranger who accuses him of plagiarizing a short story he wrote. The truth is more complicated and leads to several dead people.
- The B-plot of The Social Network has the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra suing Mark Zuckerberg over his alleged plagiarism of the idea (though not any of the code or assets) for their social networking site, The Harvard Connection, which they consider intellectual property theft.
- In The Squid and the Whale, Walt tries to pass off Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as an original song he wrote for the school talent show.
- In Throw Momma from the Train, Larry's ex-wife Margaret gets rich publishing a novel he wrote as if it was her own work. The anger Larry feels about the theft (and has made clear to everybody he knows) is such that the moment Margaret disappears and is assumed dead, he knows he has become a person of interest.
- The plot of TRON is triggered by Flynn’s hacking into his old employer’s systems for documented proof of his old rival plagiarizing a series of games he created while he worked there.
- Twister: Jonas does many things in his role as the film's resident Hate Sink, and one of these is the reveal that he stole the concept of Bill's "Dorothy" project and passed it off to corporate sponsors as his own, named "D.O.T." (the jerk couldn't even think of a different name). The way Jonas puts it, the fact that the idea was still "unrealized" at the moment he took it means he felt he had free rein.
- What's Up, Doc?: One of the film's many subplots regards Hugh, The Rival to Howard for the Larrabee Foundation grant, a grant that he has already in his pocket with an even better research paper than Howard's. However in the film's epilogue, as he gloats about his victory and explains his research paper, Manic Pixie Dream Girl Judy (who has Photographic Memory and has been expelled from every major university in America) mentions to Mrs. Larrabee that Hugh's research is replicated from a book by a foreign musicologist, which was translated and printed only once sixty years ago. Hugh really, really hoped nobody else had ever read that book.
- In the 2012 movie The Words, a writer who is having trouble getting published happens upon an old manuscript which he passes off as his own and becomes a success.
- This exchange from World's Greatest Dad when Robin Williams' character stops a student during a poem recital.
Lance: Stop. Jason, you didn't write that. It's a Queen/Bowie song, "Under Pressure". What Were You Thinking??
Jason: I didn't think you knew that one.
Lance: Jason, I'm white. Sit down.
- A teacher discovers that one student's essay has been copied word-for-word from another paper they found on the internet. When they call them in and confront them, the student is aghast — they'd paid somebody else to do their paper for them, but had no idea they were hiring a filthy plagiarist...!
- I made up a new word: "Plagiarism".
- I made up a new word: "Plagiarism".
- Animal Farm: Snowball — by which I mean Napoleon — comes up with the idea to build a windmill.
- Animal Inn (by Virginia Vail): In book 3, Val Taylor has written an essay for a contest being held by the Humane Society. When she hands it in in class, her Alpha Bitch classmate Lila Bascombe manages to steal it and submits it under her own name. Fortunately, having written it longhand (and then typed up two copies, the second after her temporary roommate Gigi the monkey tore up the first one), Val's got it memorized and is able to recite it from heart, proving she was the original author.
- The Baby-Sitters Club: In Mary Anne Misses Logan, Cokie plagiarizes her essay about author Megan Rinehart, as she plagiarizes most of her English essays. Unfortunately for her, she’s one of the students chosen to read her essay aloud to the school, in front of Megan Rinehart and two other visiting authors. Mary Anne and Pete Black both recognize her essay (Pete even recites the essay along with her under his breath), and it’s heavily implied Megan recognizes it as well. Cokie is ultimately not punished, but she has humiliated herself in front of the school and a published author.
- The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: In book 12, Charlie meets two different men, each claiming to be the author of the play "Careless Whispers" — Micah Krause, and Jackson Arthur Howell the Third, who's been using the alias "Ulrich Zwingli Dingelbach". The latter, it turns out, was Micah's boyfriend, but at one point stole a thumb drive containing both that play and a draft of a different one, which he tinkered with and then tried to pass off as his own.
- One of the subplots in Changes has to do with the discovery that Master Bard Tobias Marchand is passing off his student's work as his own.
- Dear Mr. Henshaw: At one point, after he starts keeping a diary instead of writing to Boyd Henshaw on a regular basis, Leigh enters a story contest, with the top three winners getting to meet a certain famous author. His story "A Day on Dad's Rig" wins Honorable Mention; later, the second-place winner was revealed to have copied their winning poem out of a book and lost their prize as a result, and Leigh gets to go in their place.
- In the opening to the Discworld spin-off Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, the overseer at the publishing house points out to his superior that Nanny's writing consists of taking any work she finds interesting, copying it out onto old sugar bags, and signing it G. Ogg in crayon. His boss reassures him that this is "research", and perfectly fine.
- The protagonist of Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside makes his (not very good) living by selling plagiarized papers to college students.
- In Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "EPICAC", the narrator steals poems written by the computer EPICAC and passes them off as his own, in order to get Pat Kilgallen to marry him.
- Family Skeleton Mysteries: The plot of the fourth book involves Georgia and Sid discovering someone has been responsible for stealing and selling artwork belonging to the students at the art college she's now working for, and one of her co-professors was killed over it.
- In Fangirl, Cath writes some Simon Snow fanfiction and turns it in for a college assignment. Her professor gives her an F, arguing that while the story might have been original, using someone else's world and characters makes it plagiarism.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Gilderoy Lockhart is a celebrity world-traveling Hunter of Monsters who wrote a best-selling series of nonfiction books about his adventures. As the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, he very much doesn't live up to his own hype, and Harry and Ron finally realize off of a slip of the tongue that he's a fraud who's spent his entire adult life taking credit for real monster-hunters' deeds, and memory-charming them so they can't expose him.
- I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is presented as TV character Alan Partridge's poorly-written and nakedly self-serving autobiography. At one point in this book, he copies much of Wikipedia's article on frequency modulation.
- Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Death of a Neighborhood Witch, this is revealed to be the motive for Peter Connor murdering Cryptessa. Cryptessa showed him the horror story she had been writing for years because he is a book editor. Legally, he couldn't take it because it was unsolicited, but when he read the manuscript she left on his doorstep, he found it was actually pretty good. He had grown jealous of his clients making big bucks on books, and figured he wanted in on the action. He murdered Cryptessa once he found out she hadn't shown the manuscript to anyone.
- One of the motives in the Judge Dee mystery "The Lacquer Screen". The villain wanted to be rid of his wife because she was cheating on him, but the reason he had to kill her was that if he divorced her, it would come out that all of his best poetry was actually her work.
- Stephen Fry's The Liar contains the oft-quoted line, "An original idea? That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
- The Ramsey Campbell short story "Out of Copyright" centers around an arrogant publisher who plagiarizes speculative fiction authors' stories and publishes them under pseudonyms so he won't have to pay them, changing the words just enough that they won't have the legal grounds to sue him.
- The Nero Wolfe novella Plot It Yourself revolves around plagiarism accusations.
- The Prague Cemetery. The protagonist adapts earlier conspiracy theories for later clients, just changing the Big Bad concerned (Jesuits, Bonapartists, Jews). Doing so helps reinforce each conspiracy theory in the public mind, as people would vaguely remember hearing something similar, thus helping to 'authenticate' his own work.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Main character Oliver Horn is warned by Richard Andrews in volume 1 that Professor Darius Grenville has a habit of taking promising students under his wing so that he can later steal their research for use in his own projects, and ruining their careers by publishing their findings as his. Later, Grenville indeed offers to make Oliver his apprentice, but Oliver kills Grenville in a Wizard Duel for unrelated reasons before that can happen.
- In Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, the "Poetry" chapter opens with Mrs. Jewls assigning her class to come up with poems based on colors. She gives an example poem with the word "brown". Joy asks Mrs. Jewls to repeat the poem again, but more slowly, to which she does. When the kids turn in their poems, we see Joy had just copied Mrs. Jewls's example poem, word for word.
At the circus I saw a clown.
On his face was a great big frown.
His sad eyes were big and brown. - P. G. Wodehouse wrote two very similar school stories in which a compulsory poetry competition is run and the protagonist asks a friend for help. In one, the friend copies the entry out of a book; in the other, he writes an entry, but his drafts get misplaced and copied in turn.
- In "Who's Cribbing?", first published in Startling Stories in 1953, a would-be science fiction writer gets every one of his story submissions rejected, each time with a letter saying it's too similar to a story already published decades before by an obscure author named Todd Thromberry. Further investigation leads him to form a theory that Thromberry somehow found a way to look into the future and steal his stories before they were written. In the end, he writes up an account of the experience and sends it to a science fiction magazine in the hope that its readers can offer some explanation — only to have it returned with a letter saying they can't publish it because it's too similar to a story by Todd Thromberry.
- The plot of Yellowface (2023) revolves around June stealing an unpublished manuscript from Athena following the latter's death and passing it off as her own.
- Zombies of the Gene Pool:
- Played with; the book starts off with English professor Marion ripping an unnamed freshman a new one, after said freshman wrote a paper accusing Joseph Conrad of plagiarizing Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. note
- Comes up again later — Marion points out the similarities between various stories written by the Lanthanides; Reuben Mistral brushes it off by saying they lived out of each other's pockets in those days and were bound to have hung onto a few ideas from the old times. But then Marion reveals the real point, namely that Erik Giles' writing style is nothing like his supposed Pen Name C.A. Stormcock's, but Stormcock's is very similar to the late Peter Deddingfield's writing, revealing that Giles and Deddingfield traded their names many years ago.
- The title track of Cledus T. Judd's album I Stoled This Record is "Stoled: The Copyright Infringement Incident", a parody of a John Michael Montgomery song that talks about plagiarizing a song and being taken to jail for it.
- "This Song" by George Harrison may or may not count as fictional, given that it's a semi-autobiographical song about a real-life incident of plagiarism that also went before a judge: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case.
- "My Iron Lung" by Radiohead. "This/this is our new song/just like the last one". It isn't literally a retread of any Radiohead song before or since.
- An Oscar Wilde quote, "Talent borrows, genius steals", was etched in the run-out groove of The Smiths single "Bigmouth Strikes Again".
- Parodied in Tom Lehrer's "Lobachevsky", which describes how the protagonist plagiarized their entire textbook from other math texts, right down to copying the index from a Vladivostok phone book.
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!
Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it, please, "research."
- A sample character in the New World of Darkness book Asylum is "The Fraud", a member of the mental hospital's facility who made his career by stealing a colleague's work. Now he's screwed, because in order to keep his reputation, he has to keep stealing from the other researchers. Sometimes he wonders whether to kill himself or commit Suicide by Cop when they finally catch him — he can't imagine surviving the scandal.
- BioShock Infinite:
- "Tears" to alternate universes sometimes open, letting you see the contents of another universe, often at a different time. Musician Albert Fink found some tears that had music playing, and readily claimed their lyrics and melody as his own while making them more like the kind of music played in the early 1900s setting. The result are anachronistically-arranged versions of songs that in our universe won't be written until decades after that universe's time, including a barbershop quartet arrangement of "God Only Knows" and a ragtime piano cover of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World".
- Albert's brother, industrialist Jeremiah Fink, used the tears to steal technology from Rapture and pass it off as his own inventions, such as plasmids, which he figured out how to make drinkable and marketed them as "vigors". Plasmid inventor Dr. Suchong found out about this and gave Fink a taste of his own medicine by stealing his drinkable plasmid idea and passing it off in Rapture as his own, earning praise from Andrew Ryan for "his" genius idea. "Theft of intellectual property... two-way street."
- Borderlands 2: In one sidequest, Sir Hammerlock shamelessly asks you to find his dead boyfriend's notes so that he can plagiarize them for his own manuscript.
- The Caligula Effect 2: It's eventually revealed that all of Bluffman's music was plagiarized, with him having stolen unreleased music from Thorn and passed it off as his own.
- OG Loc in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a try-hard gangsta rapper wannabe who finally achieves his big break when he enlists CJ to help him steal the rhyme book of the far more successful rapper Madd Dogg. It's enough to make him famous... at least, until Madd Dogg finds out and has CJ steal it back and publicly humiliate Loc.
- In Hollow Song of Birds, Shiran's "Chirplagiarism" Spell Cards mimic Spell Cards from official Touhou Project games. If you play as Reimu, she'll threaten to expose Shiran's plagiarism.
- Hotel Dusk: Room 215: Summer's debut hit was actually written by his then-friend Alan Parker. During the game, he promises to reveal himself to the public and write something of his own.
- Life is Strange: Double Exposure: Chapter 3 reveals that Lucas Colmenero plagiarized Wilder Beasts Than These, almost word for word, from his student Maya Okada's manuscript. It's the reason why Maya died by suicide, leading to Safi charting a course of vengeance.
- In NEO: The World Ends with You, it turns out that Motoi, the popular influencer known as An0ther, stole his content from other people.
- Persona:
- In Persona 5, Ichiryusai Madarame is an artist who steals his students' work to pass off as his own. Fittingly, he represents Vanity of the Seven Deadly Sins. In a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, this is also reflected in his boss battle. Several of Madarame's skills are the same as your own skills, only with fancier names (Thunderclap = Zionga, Flame Dance = Agilao, Silent Snowscape = Bufula, etc.). The best example being his special attack Madara-Megido, which, unlike the real Megido spells, does pitiful damage (~10 at a point where your characters' HP are above 200). This truly cements Madarame's creations are pale, inferior imitations of other works.
- In Persona 5 Strikers (a sequel spin-off to Persona 5), Ango Natsume is an author and the Jail Monarch of Sendai whose novel Prince of Nightmares is a highly plagiarized, and at times incoherent, Frankenstein's monster of a story based on various anime and video game sources. Unlike Madarame, though, Ango openly admits to being a plagiarist, only caring that he gets to one-up his publishers for talking down to him. He also shows genuine respect for those whom he acknowledges the talent of, such as Yusuke, and instead represents the sin of Greed.
- Psychonauts 2: Hollis Forsythe's memories reveal that during her time as a nurse, she developed a research paper on using Mental Connection to treat patients. Her superior Dr. Potts renamed, published, and took all the credit for it, which caused a very upset Hollis to use her Mental Connection technique on Potts to mess with his mind in revenge.
- In The Sims 4, Sims in college have the option to plagiarize their homework or term papers to save time. However, it's Schmuck Bait and more often than not gets caught, resulting in humiliation, a penalty to your grades with suspension in the case of repeat offenses, and a disappointed text from your mom.
- In D3's detective attorney game The Trial, one of the cases Momota has to solve is about Paul, a fictional character from Show Within a Show anime The Stars, who is actually traced and modified from Kasuga, the mascot from the Kasugaya sweets shop. Momota the defense attorney must prove that the company that made the anime has plagiarized the shop mascot.
- In Hotel Dusk: Room 215, one of the supporting characters is a novelist named Martin Summer, who is unable to write another successful novel, despite having a strong debut work. It turns out his first novel was actually plagiarized from a former friend's manuscript.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice features a popular Khura'inese TV show called The Plumed Punisher: Warrior of Neo Twilight Realm, which is a shameless knockoff of The Steel Samurai: Warrior of Neo Olde Tokyo, complete with its own off key version
of the Steel Samurai theme song
. Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, a huge closeted fanboy of The Steel Samurai, has to use every ounce of self-control in his person to not call The Plumed Punisher a total ripoff while in court, eventually setting on simply commenting that it is "very similar" to The Steel Samurai. Privately, he's right down outraged, specially at the fact that people from Khura'in think it's a completely original show. The other Steel Samurai fan, Maya Fey, however, loves it just as much as The Steel Samurai and wants to pitch a crossover between the two when she gets back home.
- Girl Genius: Lucrezia plagiarizing and passing off her "friend" Francisia Monahan's college projects as her own research is one of the many reasons why the latter absolutely hates the former.
Francisia Monahan: "-Not only that, your project for the Midwinter Abominations Festival in our senior year was clearly stolen from my work on variable mechanics in dormouse thought patterns, and you never gave me credit—"
- Hark! A Vagrant depicts a simplified version of the real-life theft of Rosalind Franklin's research and innovations by male scientists in "Every Lady Scientist Who Ever Did Anything (until recently)"
.
- The Order of the Stick: Vaarsuvius gets Zz'dtri dragged off by the lawyers by realizing he's a rip-off of Drizzt Do'Urden. Eventually Z returns because he declared himself a parody of the character rather than a copy.
- Penny Arcade: Played for Laughs with one of Gabe's later Dungeons & Dragons games, which is simply Dragonlance. Not even the campaign setting—the novels.
Tycho: So you're just running Dragonlance? Are you switching it up at all?
Gabe: No way. Actually, I'm just reading directly from the book. Every couple of pages I ask them to roll some dice. Then I just nod and keep reading. - "Twintails"
's climax starts with Tammy, who had been left Too Upset to Create when her pitch about the titular character was openly mocked, finding out that her higher-ups had stolen her idea and made a TV series from it.
- In XY Adventures, the outfits that Xavier and Yvonne wear when trying to meet Diantha look like Palette Swaps of each other. Yvonne's convinced that Xavier stole her design.
- Yumi's Cells: After Isabelle reads Yumi's manuscript, she takes one of the ideas for her own story and publishes it first. Yumi is initially devastated but is able to learn from the ordeal and make a new manuscript. By that point, she's no longer upset, but she still wants Isabelle to face the consequences. Meanwhile, Isabelle is wracked with guilt over her actions.
- American High Digital: "Plagiarizing In High School" parodies the intense focus on not copying in schools by having a teacher treating it as worse than student fights, admissions of drug use, and sex toys being brought to campus.
- In Oxventure Presents Blades in the Dark, Edvard Lumiere accuses public innovator Amadeus Astor of stealing his ideas and not having a single original idea in his life. It turns out this is Not Hyperbole and Amadeus stole a lot of Edvard's research and most unknown inventors in the city.
- The Castlevania episode of Third Rate Gamer uses the title character lifting material from The Angry Video Game Nerd as a gag. Audio from the AVGN's review is used throughout the video, and at one point, TRG even overlays audio of them both asking "What's the point?" and cries out "You Know What's Bullshit?" as a pop-up then flashes exclaiming "What I'm saying is so completely different than what the AVGN says. Honest!" This parodies The Irate Gamer, which was accused of lifting material from the AVGN.
- Played for laughs in the Nineteen Years After live-reading sequel to Puffs the Play, where Megan Jones has become a "famous wizard author." Since wizards have no clue about Muggle fiction and pop culture, she essentially just steals popular Muggle books, adds the word "wizard" to them, and presents them as her own work.
- Text Theater: Leonard
took Marcus's book and published it as his own even though all he did was add illustrations to it. Marcus fell into a deep depression after that but he decided to write another book about it and people soon found out about Leonard's plagiarism even though Marcus didn't mention any details about it.
