I watch thousands of video contest entries every year and surprisingly I see very few obvious cases of plagiarism.  I’m not sure if this means that most video contest filmmakers respect other people’s content or if it means that they’re just smart enough not to rip-off anything that’s recognizable.

But every so often I do see contestants trying to pass off stolen ideas as their own.  And when I do see possible acts of plagiarism, I usually post it.  Why? Because ripping off another filmmaker is wrong…but ripping off another filmmaker in an attempt to make money is despicable.  It’s also straight up dumb.  If you win, eventually someone will probably realize what you’ve done.

Obviously, there are different degrees of plagiarism and the line between “inspiration” and “theft” are different for every one.  While I might not see flat out plagiarism much in video contests I do see a lot of low-grade copying.  By that I mean that non-professional actors will sometimes copy well-known characters or new writers will sometimes use lines they’ve heard somewhere before, (e.g., “That’s gonna leave a mark!”)  That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me because almost all viewers will realize those bits were copied from well known works.  Non-malicious copying is just something you can expect to see in videos created by young or new filmmakers.

But what does bother me is when professional (or aspiring professional) filmmakers consciously take ideas other people created, change them in the hopes that no one will recognize those ideas and then present a new work as if it was 100% original.  And that brings me to the point of this post.  The other day a reader sent me a link to a Doritos commercial that was submitted to the Crash the Super Bowl contest.  He said he thought the idea was a rip-off of a Skittles commercial from a few years ago.  I think he’s totally right.  The entry in question is called “The Soprano Dorito.”  It’s a pretty good ad and more than one person sent it to me and said they thought it was good enough for the finals.  Here it is:

And now here’s a Skittles commercial from 2006:

Yeah, both of those ads feature a lot of big differences.  But big differences don’t mean that the Doritos ad isn’t a rip off.  I can maybe see how two filmmakers could independently come up with commercial ideas about a guy who finds/gets an opera singing creature that he soon gets sick of and has to think about getting rid of.  But it’s the rainstorm scene in the Doritos video that seals the deal for me.  It’s like an artistic artifact from the original work that survived the adaptation process.  I guess it was just too perfect to leave out.  In my opinion, the fact that regret-during-a-rainstorm scenes appear in the middle of both ads reveals that the person who created this CTSB entry didn’t just steal an idea, they copied the mood, pacing and story arc of the skittles ad.

The Soprano Dorito is an incredibly well made entry.  It really does have a serious shot at making the CTSB finals.  It looks amazing, the acting is good and the CGI is funny (in a good way.)  On the CTSB site, the entry is credited to someone named Douglas Jessup.  I googled him and according to his website, Jessup is about to graduate from USC with a masters in film production.  Why do I bring that up?  Because a guy like that should know better.

I can understand how some might think I’m over-reacting by outing a complete stranger like this but idea-thieves always deserve to be called on their actions.  Because if they get away with it once, they’ll probably try again.  If you ever come across a video contest entry that you believe plagiarizes another work, let me know at .  Now if you’ll permit me a moment to cover my ass legally I’d like to point out that I have no direct proof that the makers of The Soprano Dorito plagiarized the skittles Singing Rabbit ad.  The points made in this post are just conjecture.  For all I know, the similarities in both ads could just be coincidences.

But one thing I do know for sure, that Dorito is a tenor, not a soprano.

12/1/10 UPDATE: A few people have left comments on the CTSB page for The Soprano Dorito saying they thought the entry was too similar to the Skittles Singing Rabbit ad.  The director left this comment as a response:

“DouglasJessup:  I wasn’t going to respond to the Skittles comments, but here: search “one froggy evening” – it’s an old WB cartoon. This was my inspiration…”

Frankly, I don’t buy that explanation.  The Doritos entry contains too many important elements that appeared in the skittles ad but didn’t appear in .  For example, in One Froggy Evening, the main character’s problem is that he can’t get the frog to sing when he wants it to.  But in the Skittles ad, the main character’s problem is that the rabbit won’t STOP singing ever.  The main character in The Soprano Dorito has the same problem as the main character in the Skittles ad.  The Opera-singing Dorito, like the Opera-singing Skittles rabbit won’t STOP singing.  The main character in One Froggy Evening tries to get rid of the frog because it won’t sing enough.  The main characters in the Skittles and Doritos ads try and get rid of their creatures because they are being driven crazy by the non-stop singing.

One more thing; a reader said that I must have written this post because I was “feeling the heat” of a competing video.  Just for the record, I did not enter the Doritos contest this year. So I have no dog in this fight.  I’m just an observer who thinks filmmakers should respect other people’s ideas and content.

12/3/10 Update: Doug Jessup, the creator of The Soprano Dorito left a comment to this post and provided a link to a blog entry explaining why he thinks I’m an idiot (check the comments for the link.)  If you ignore all the weird insults aimed at me, Jessup’s post kind of reads like a film school paper on how all great filmmakers copy ideas from one another.  Jessup also goes to great lengths to IMPLY that he didn’t copy ideas from the skittles ad but he never actually comes out and says he did NOT use it as a source of “inspiration.”

A reader named Scott posted a handy definition of what Plagiarism is in the comments.  To qualify as plagerism an artist must “steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own,” “use (another’s production) without crediting the source,” and “present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”

After Jessup left his comment I left one of my own and asked him point blank, Yes or no, did he get any of the ideas for The Soprano Dorito from the Skittles Singing Rabbit ad.  I can tell from my my web traffic logs that Jessup has checked the comments for this post many, many times in the last few days but he has not responded to my question.  I think it is obvious that Jessup took ideas from the Singing Rabbit ad and because he is refusing to credit the ad as his source material and because he has gone to tremendous lengths to avoid citing his sources (creating a blog that implies he didn’t steal ideas from the Skittles ad without literally making that claim) I think this incident definitely qualifies as plagiarism.