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Comment by everling | Hacker News Reader

It's an homage. It's easier to argue the "rip-off" case when the movie being stenciled is commercially successful, like when 2 Days in the Valley tried to ride the success of Pulp Fiction. Filmmakers are film nerds and they reference other works constantly, given the freedom (I'm watching Euphoria on HBO and suddenly there's a tracking shot lifted from the 1927 silent film Wings?). I like identifying these homages and connecting the linage of the art form. A few years ago I made an algo for it that doubles as a recommendation engine: https://cinetrii.com/

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A homage usually means taking one or two shots, or perhaps a motif, from another film. It's common for a film to contain homages to many different films, and that's great - like you say, watching films and picking these out is a lot of fun.

But when a film takes lots and lots of shots and motifs from one single other film, there's a point at which it stops being a homage and becomes plagiarism.

It's been years since I've seen either of these films - although I remember Perfect Blue having a huge impact on me around age 20 - so I don't have an opinion on whether plagiarism happened here or not. Certainly the author of this article wants us to believe it did but I didn't find the article convincing one way or another.

I also wonder how common it is, and what's considered to be an acceptable level in the film industry - are there hard and fast rules about what constitutes plagiarism, like there is in academic writing? Or is there an acceptable level in the US that's different to Japan, perhaps?

> Or is there an acceptable level in the US that's different to Japan, perhaps?

Or more simply, suing cross-countries in such a complicated field as copyright, is extremely hard. In many cases, tbf, this goes both ways - which is why the US is always very keen to "harmonize" copyright laws whenever they are discussing trade deals. But the imbalance in economic resources typically means richer players in the US have a degree of recourse that non-US players will almost never get.

> But the imbalance in economic resources typically means richer players in the US have a degree of recourse that non-US players will almost never get.

Imbalance between the US and Japan? Remember this happened in the year 2000. Look up which of the two countries had higher per capita GDP back then.

In any case, it doesn't seem like anyone is suggesting this was plagiarism at a level that could be sued over - it's not a case like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly which was a shot for shot copy. I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US and how that might affect the respective outlook of the two directors.

In creative industries the US always had the upper hand economically on pretty much any country you can mention, since WW2. The Japanese creative sector continues to struggle with profiting from exports to this very day, their income is overwhelmingly driven by domestic audiences (which themselves are a fraction of American ones). There is absolutely no chance that a Japanese film company or distributor could ever find the money to sue a major US player, whereas the opposite is very doable.

> I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US

I don't think there is any particular stigma with the concept of suing for plagiarism in Japan, or any higher tolerance for copying, at least since the '90s (in the '80s and earlier, their mindset was definitely different - more similar to modern Chinese attitudes for which ripping off is just a fact of life; but newer generations are less hungry and hence less unscrupolous).

It seems like your algorithm is mostly scrapping stuff from websites? Considering your post, I thought it was either user-contributed or made entirely by you.

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