Putting plagiarists on notice

Sadly, I have to make another serious post here guys.

We've had to remove a couple of audios recently due to detected plagiarism in the writing of them. This is about respect for the original authors, who put their heart and soul into their work and if they do not want crediting and payment to keep the material live, then of course we have to remove the work according to their wishes.

Naturally, we have wanted to assume the best in others' natures and that people are generally good actors in a space like this, without bad intentions when submitting scripts to us. But sadly that is not proving to be the case and our friendly nature in accepting wide ranges of work from different writers has been taken advantage of a few times now.

This causes irreparable harm to most importantly a) the people who originally authored the work who get, very understandably, incredibly upset and frustrated that this has happened and don't know what to do about it. b) you guys - the fans and the communities who listen to the content - because all of a sudden some of your favourite work has to be removed.

c) The voice actors, dialogue editors, sound designers and others involved in the production who were eager to see their work out on BKS, also can no longer have something they worked hard on out on the platform.

So the plagiarist, through their actions, has disrespected and harmed a huge swathe of people all in one go.

I'm not going to name specific names, BUT I will issue a clear warning and statement below.

To re-iterate, if you are a writer and you have been found to have submitted plagiarised work OR work where you have not informed the original creator what you are going to do with it and if it's okay for you to do so:

You will never write for us again.

Your other work (if you have more with us) will be investigated and you will re-pay us the money that we have paid you for 'writing' the script(s).

The decent and human thing for you to do would be to also message the original author(s), on whatever platform they're on and issue an apology to them.

Our new Head of Writing, has been putting together a writing team over the past couple of months. If you are thinking of plagiarising works to land a writing role with us, you will be found out and kicked out very quickly and unceremoniously.

We are introducing a couple of new systems starting tomorrow when the production team is working again (Monday) to detect it at the writing/licensing stage.

I think it is important that we are clear here and send a clear statement and message to anybody thinking of or actively plagiarising.

Rob