Plagiarised Programmes

There's still quite a lot of borrowing of ideas in TV news sets - have a browse through Jago Designs' portfolio and see if you can spot the foreign broadcasters who'll have called them up and said "we quite like BBC/Channel 4/Sky News. Can you do us one like that please?"

I kind of see your point, but you can't plagiarise your own ideas, though.

If Simon designed the set for ITV News, then Canal 8 El Salvador go to him and say "like your ITV News work, can we have that, but replace the grey and teal for blue and maroon" and heres xx million pasos for doing it - he's going to do it, knowing full well ITV News - unless they had an exclusive design buyout on the original studio set concept - can't do anything about it.

There is a difference between that situation, and say a programme on one network about competitve shopping, and then two months later a virtual identical format turning up on your main competitve rival.

Could it be like radio jingles? You can have that package jam made for z100 resung at a fraction of the price of commissioning a bespoke package providing nobody else has already licensed it for your market?

I guess in this case it is the scale of the, er, homaging that went on. Of course news is news and there’s only so much you can do with someone reading the news and introducing reporter packages. In this case though everything was aped - set, lower thirds, windows, the wide shot at the start of the bulletin with the virtual glass, everything (except the titles, I guess). What makes it particularly blatant is at the time, a large chunk of the audience would only have had to hit the number “3” on their remote controls to see the original in action.