Besides Dukat, Lyta/Leeta is another possible giveaway.
And I wasn't referring to Piller or Behr. I said Paramount ripped off the general concept and outline for Babylon 5 after they had the story bible in their possession which seems to clearly have helped seed more than a few big scale ideas and general plot hooks on DS9 beyond simple things like shared character names.
Anyways, I'm not attacking Deep Space Nine, as you said they're both great shows. I watched both shows in the '90s when they aired back to back every Saturday night from 12am-2am syndicated on a local station and have fond memories of both. In any case here is the quote from jms for context:
It's bullshit. The original outline of Babylon 5 is avalible in script book 15, and whilst some the stuff from that did happen in the series, there's stuff that was in the series that didn't appear in the script outline or bible. Such as the original scripts didn't make Sinclair Valen, whilst he was important to the Minbari its because he'll have a
son, with Delenn, who will fufill some prophecy and save the Minbari. The Shadow vs Vorlons wasn't some great philosophical thing, it was just a straight power play. Earth and Minbar would have another war which eventually Earth would win. No Earth Coup, though the character would go on the run from Earth. Babylon 4 would be stolen but bought forward in time to become Babylon Prime, which would behave more like a ship! Most importantly most of the big revelations and developments would have occurred in the sequel series Babylon Prime!
Many of the corroborative actions or admittance are distorted: For instance the supposed DS9 actor who told JMS that it was rip off and who loved his show is a distortion of story by Patricia Tallman about one of the set crew from DS9 wondering what she was doing on DS9 'slumming it'. The supposed TV exec who announced that that at one point Paramount was going to just film B5 as DS9 to launch their new channel is a random blog post with no follow up and the person who posted it not being contactable. Even then what they posted seemingly conflates DS9 and Voyager, ie Voyager was devised to help UPN.
As for Deep Space Nine, the person who green light it was Brandon Tartikoff, who only joined Paramount in 1991, long after JMS has pitched B5. They wanted a spin off and decided that it couldn't be another ship based series. Tatikoff pitched it as
The Rifleman in space : A law man, with son come to a frontier town, stocked with the usual characters, barkeep, native, ectera. At it was going to be set on a planetary starbase near a native town, there was some thought given to setting it before TOS, but that was rejected as they thought that it would look to primitive, then it was decided to set it on Bajor(a) Lt Ro Laren would command the base and the main character would be Dr Julian Amos!
Of course they quickly realised that it would cost too much in location shots so swapped to space station. The first iteration was a massive, very ancient space station that had been taken over and built on by thousands of different species. This was refined to what eventually became DS9.
Something JMS doesn't like to mention is that his wife worked for Michael Pillar during the period! He knows exactly what, when and how DS9 came about but the loves playing the plucky under dog.
The only case of copying is where the Baybon 5 sfx guy admitted to copying the
Defiant with the
Whitestar!
