Agree with Delilah 100% - you have nothing to fear if you've been inspired by an act to do something that uses elements or aspects of it, the problem is when you are inspired so much that you do litterally the same thing i.e. virtually the same outfit, the same props, the same music and the same storyline.

Obviously as Cherry said, some acts are very hard not to be similar - i.e. parasol/fan dances and balloon pops - and I suspect over a hundred performers have a housewife routine - but the line must be drawn when the similarities are so close they might as well be the same act.

An example of good peformer ettiquette comes from my wife who temporarily canned a developing routine after watching a new act by Diva Hollywood, their ideas where too similar. Angel will eventually do the routine, but she wants to make sure the routine has plenty of differences so that comparrisons are minnimal. Sometimes it's very hard - I've even heard of cases of performers doing the same kind of routine to the same kind of music, a fan dance and a secretary act are two types of act that I have become aware of - it can be very tough sometimes to be original, but watching an act one week and then doing virtually the same the next week/month will only cause trouble for the copy cat once exposed. And once someone is accussed of being a copy cat they will end up being tagged by that for anything that looks remotely similar

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