Stefan Lawrence is a much-loved designer whose work graces such Maximum Fun podcasts as Judge John Hodgman and Bullseye, noticed that the "fast-fashion" brand Topman (a division of the notorious slavers Topshop) had ripped off one of his designs and used it without license or credit in a bunch of its products. Read the rest
Marine Le Pen, leader of France's nationalist movement and one of two candidates remaining in the country's presidential race, is a plagiarist—or at least one of her speechwriters is. The BBC reports that a speech of hers "seems to repeat one by beaten rival François Fillon" all but word-for-word.
Read the rest• Mr Fillon's speech: "Then there is the Rhine frontier, the most open, the most dangerous, also the most promising - a Germanic world we have been so often in conflict with and with which we will yet co-operate in so many ways" Ms Le Pen's speech: "Then there is the Rhine frontier, the most open, also the most promising - a Germanic world we will yet co-operate with in so many ways, as long as we regain the relationship of allies and not of subjects"
• Both speeches refer to "waiting lists for the Alliance Française in Shanghai, Tokyo, or Mexico, for the French secondary school in Rabat or Rome"
• Both speeches quote World War One PM Georges Clemenceau, saying: "Once a soldier of God, and now a soldier of Liberty, France will always be the soldier of the ideal"
• Mr Fillon's speech: "France, as I have said, is a history, it is a geography, but it is also a set of values and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords. It is finally a singular voice addressed to all the peoples of the universe" Ms Le Pen's speech: "France is also a set of values and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords.
The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that grad students working at private universities can form unions, something that the universities themselves have fought tooth-and-nail for years, with elite universities posted FAQs explaining why trade unionism was a bad match for academic institutions: that each academic institution was unique, and so unlike any other place, that collective bargaining just couldn't work. Read the rest
President Obama, in his speech at the DNC, used the phrase "That is not the America I know." Donald Trump Jr. claims this was plagiarism, as he had used the same line in a speech he delivered last week. Read the rest
Dissernet, a leaderless collective of Russian scientists and journalists scrapes the doctoral dissertations of Russian elites -- who have been attaining advanced degrees at an unprecedented rate -- runs them through plagiarism detection software to flag probable frauds for human review, and publishes the names of officials who've been caught cheating, one or two every day. Read the rest
This video is pretty rabid Reddit rage-fodder today.
Certainly, selective video edits by someone with a point to make can be damning where nothing wrong has been done, but--come on. This looks pretty bad.
[From Brandon Farley (MischiefMaker37), YouTube » Reddit]
Looks like there are a bunch of these newly out, via Reddit. But it's been brewing for weeks, or months, really. Vox has a good explainer here. I am not the comedy police, so I do not know.
A plagiarist was caught after eagle-eyed readers spotted the novel Coming Home Texas was nearly identical to My Kind of Trouble, by New York Times bestseller Becky McGraw.
Author Laura Harner's trick, allegedly, was to change a heterosexual romance to a gay male one—hoping, perhaps, that the lack of overlap between the two audiences would be enough to escape notice.
In the age of book search, though, that's not how these things go down: despite changing words, ages, names and descriptors, even the most superficial comparison demonstrates the lifting.
In one scene, "Since she’d gotten the call from Imelda, the closest thing to a mother that Cassie had known since her own mother died when she was ten" becomes "Since he’d gotten the call from Isabella – the closest thing to a mother that he’d known since his own mom died when he was nine."
The Guardian's Alison Flood reports that legal action is pending, and that the plagiarist has admitted mistakes were made. The astonishing speed at which Harner's novels are published suggests many more of them may have been made.
“Her book was almost a word-for-word, scene-for-scene duplication of my book, except the characters’ names had been changed, and short M/M love scenes had been inserted,” said McGraw. “The only scene she didn’t include was the epilogue, which couldn’t be altered to an M/M scene. It involved the heroine in labour and the hero having sympathetic labour pains.”
In a better world, we learned of this because the final birth scene had remained in the plagiarized M/M version of the story. Read the rest
"Let's put a red dot here and call it a day." [via] Read the rest
Among professional comedians, joke theft is no joke. Now Twitter is allowing members to use DMCA notices to take down tweets posted by accounts that copy and paste them without attribution. PlagiarismBad's name-and-shame campaign has already netted a few celebrities. Read the rest
Remember when Shia LaBeouf plagiarized a Daniel Clowes comic book story almost word-for-word and made a short film about it? When he was found out, he tweeted a series of apologies, which turned out to be plagiarized, too. I interview Clowes at Meltdown comic in Hollywood last month and I asked him for an update about his experience with the serial plagiary. Here's the video, queued up to part in the interview where he talked about it:
Clowes explained that LaBeouf had powerful "motherfucker" lawyers who would have ground Clowes into hamburger, had Clowes not had his own motherfuckers to make sure LaBeouf paid Clowes for using his work without permission.
A few days ago LaBeouf released a video demonstrating his freelance rap skills. But it didn't take long for the original lyricist to come forth:
The NY Daily News reports:
Rap group Anomolies called LaBeouf out on Instagram, claiming that his flow comes from their song "Perfectionist," which was written in 1999.
"You can't rip songs from my ANOMOLIES crew, recite them in a freestyle as your own, get credit for it, then not expect to be called out by ACTUAL MCs!" the post stated.
From Watch Loud:
Read the restAt the the 2:23 mark in his video LaBeouf hushes the crowd and says “The rare commodity, the quality is what it’s gotta be, and my philosophy is farther than what your eyes can see.”
However, on the 1999 track “Perfectionist” you can clearly hear Helixx spit at the 45 second mark, “I recon you want more of that rare commodity/the quality is what it’s gotta be/ and my philosophy is much farther than what your eyes can see.”
Later on in their track you can hear the “Gas mask/last laugh” punchline as well.
Cody Foster & Co is an art-swiping tchotcke maker, used by big retailers to source fashionable cloneware they want to sell. Accused last year of ripping off a batch of independent designers, Cody Foster wanted to settle. Fast Company's John Brownlee reports the incredible conditions they want to impose on the victim.
Read the restCody Foster's conditions? That the independent designer accusing the company of piracy license her designs to Cody Foster & Co. for $650 and submit to a gag order, deleting any complaints about the company from the web. ... Smith and her attorneys initially declined the offer, indicating that $650 was not worth a gag order on what they had been through, and reached out to Co.Design. Since then, Cody Foster's attorneys have indicated that they are willing to discuss a larger payment in exchange for licensing Smith's designs. As of publication, this remains unresolved.
It's easy to spot the superficial rewriting of others' work when they're lists and you haven't changed so much as a single item. [TNW] Previously. Read the rest
Jonah Lehrer got caught. Jonah Lehrer got a new book deal anyway. Then, Jonah Lehrer got caught again, according to Slate's Daniel Engber: "He’ll recycle and repeat, he’ll puke his gritty guts out." Read the rest
Since at least 2001, Colin Purrington, a former Swarthmore Evolutionary Biology prof, has been publishing a great guide to conference posters that is widely read and linked. It's also widely plagiarized, and Purrington sends notices to people whom he catches passing it off as their own work, asking them to remove it. Normally, this works.
But not in the case of The Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, Inc., a company that receives millions in federal grants to fund biotech research. When Purrington sent CPBR an email telling them off for plagiarizing him, they responded by accusing him of being the plagiarist, threating him with massive damages, and demanding that he remove his own work immediately and permanently.
Purrington responded with a pretty good note about the whole awful mess. Though I think he overstates the copyright case here. In particular, he discounts out of hand the idea that reproduction in educational contexts can't be fair use; this is just wrong -- fair use is fact intensive, and educational use tilts the scales in favor of a successful defense. On the other hand, plagiarism (though not illegal) is a cardinal sin in education, and educators who pass off his work as their own may not be breaking the law, but they are unambiguously violating a core ethic of education and scholarship.
But back to CPBR. This is not only plagiarism, it's also copyright infringement, and it's copyfraud -- claiming copyright on something you hold no rights to. It's unethical, it's illegal, and it's fraudulent. Read the rest
Jane Goodall's new book isn't just filled with plagiarism, writes Michael Moynihan at The Daily Beast, it also drastically misconstrues agricultural science and presents poor sources — for instance, books published by the Maharishi University of Management and written by people with no scientific training at all are probably not the best sources to use if you're trying to build a legitimate case against the technology of genetic engineering. Read the rest
My latest Guardian column is "Internet copyright law has to have public support if it's going to work," and it goes into the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism, and tries to understand why so many people got upset at Glee's legal ripoff of a Jonathan Coulton song:
Read the restCopyright experts were quick to explain that Fox's plagiarism was legal – the same rules that allowed Coulton to record his cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's original "Baby Got Back" also allow Fox to produce a sound-alike version. But it's shoddy, because it is, at heart, a lie.
(Coulton got his own back on Fox: he rereleased his own "Baby Got Back" and billed it as a cover of the Glee version, with proceeds to charity – it climbed the iTunes chart while the Fox version was clobbered by angry Coulton fans who gave it one-star reviews)
Why does Fox's sin stick in the internet's craw? I think it's because Fox hasn't just wronged Coulton: they've wronged the public. We have been misled about the origin of a product we're being asked to purchase.
This is different from, say, a fake designer handbag that's offered as a cheap knockoff, where there's no intent to fool the purchaser, who understands that a 99% discount on a Vuitton bag means that it's really a "Vuitton" bag.
This kind of plagiarism is more like selling horsemeat labelled as beef burgers. Horsemeat can be perfectly harmless, and many people happily eat it, but when you buy beef burgers, you expect that you're getting what you paid for.
You'll have heard that Jonathan Coulton's iconic cover of Baby's Got Back was plagiarised by the Fox TV show "Glee" (it's not the first time). Coulton's story has been widely reported, but Fox/Glee have remained shameless about this.
Coulton's got a brilliant solution to this: he's released a "cover" of Glee's plagiarized version of his song, put it on Itunes as a rival to the official Fox version, and has announced that the proceeds will go to charity.
(Thanks, Larry!) Read the rest
