Abstract

According to The Writers Guild of America, roughly around 50,000 scripts or screenplays have been registered by several established and aspiring writers to protect their work from the prying eyes of plagiarists. Like, The Writers Guild of America, India too has got an association to protect the rights of these budding screenwriters in the form of the Screenwriter’s Association (SWA, formerly known as the Film Writer’s Association). These associations are often created to effectively safeguard the creations of screenwriters. But certain screenwriters register their creations, knowing that their work is outrightly copied from another. A large number of screenwriters evade legal troubles by saying that they were inspired by some of their previous works; under Copyright Law in India, getting inspired does not amount to plagiarism or infringement of copyrights, but the inspiration must be kept in check because if the content is inspired too much from the original, then it is said to be a copy and that amounts to infringement of copyrights. The laws and other statutes that were passed for the protection of piracy of films have been extensively discussed in recent days but in today’s world, plagiarists often evade legal consequences by stating that their work has only been inspired by the original and not copied.

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