With one of his fall building blocks about to be upstaged, ABC's president of entertainment has joined the chorus denouncing FOX's premise-filching tactics.

"I think it's really upsetting. I think it's bad for the business. And I don't think it's right," Stephen McPherson told TV critics Monday (July 12) at the summer press tour.

McPherson, appearing via satellite from Paris -- he just got married and is on his honeymoon -- was answering what has thus far been a prime question during press tour: networks poaching one another's concepts for reality shows. It appears to have happened with ABC's "Wife Swap," scheduled for a September debut, and FOX's "Trading Spouses," which was announced after "Wife Swap" but will premiere first, hitting airwaves later this month.

The practice isn't exactly new -- ABC itself has the son-of-"Apprentice" series "The Benefactor" in its fall lineup, and "Bachelor" and "Survivor" clones have come and gone -- but FOX has upped the stakes with "Trading Spouses" and its boxing show "The Next Great Champ." Both sound like copies of a rival's show -- "Wife Swap" and NBC's "Contender" -- and both will beat the other nets' offerings onto the air.

"In terms of the ripping off or cloning or whatever you want to call it, I'll put it this way," McPherson says. "If I was a member of the creative community, it would be incredibly disconcerting to me that if you take a show, a pitch, into FOX, and they can't, don't or decide not to buy it, they will steal it. Plain and simple."

His comments echo those of DreamWorks exec and "Contender" executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. Saturday, he said he was "disheartened" when he heard about "The Next Great Champ," adding: "If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then theft is the lowest form of creativity."

McPherson acknowledges that networks have long tried to develop their own versions of successful shows. (In fact, ABC's search for its own "Friends" severely damaged the network in the mid-1990s.) But he draws the line at "a direct ripoff."

"I would like to be in business with the people who create great, kind of hallmark shows on other networks," he says. "But we don't have any intention of ripping them off."