copycat

One who imitates or plagiarizes others' work.

And in it all they are merely copy-cats—servile followers of the aristocratic creed, but without the genuine prestige of the old-time nobilities.

I wanted to make them brilliant. I wanted to make them interesting. And of course I could not do it by myself. I am nothing but a copycat. I just quoted a lot of things I had heard you say; and I did worse than that, Peter.

A criminal who imitates the crimes of another; specifically, a criminal who commits the same crime, especially a highly-publicized one, that has just or recently been committed by someone else.

a copycat strangler

Imitative; unoriginal.

copycat crime

“Because of my size, I was a natural leader in junior high school. Gangs are the most copycat of subcultures. It used to be zoot suits; now it's tattoos. When I was thirteen, I got a tattoo.”

To act as a copycat; to copy in a shameless or derivative way.

Because beasts don't talk with words, they talk with sounds, and I copycatted my language from beasts and birds[…]

In a genre that is rife with copycatting, Ms. Cain deserves some credit for having gotten a potentially interesting new series off the ground.