I Really Don't Get Why People Steal Other People's Work [A Twist of Things to Come]

I know that legally fanfiction and other fandom things like fanvids and such are in a large gray area. Some copyright holders encourage fan activity to a certain degree, or at least ignore it. Others very aggressively defend their intellectual property rights.

But, among fans, there seems to be a growing tendency to steal the work of other fans. A fanfiction story, or fan vid. Do a few rub-outs or slap your own watermark on something and call it yours.

I don't get that. I really don't. I mean, I understand that people may realize their own work is bad, or that it is hard to realize their own vision. They still want people to think well of them, so they snatch something they like and say they did it.

But the praise they get (and that is all anyone in fandom ever gets for their hard work) is empty, because it is praise for something they had no part in creating. If I put a picture of Michelangelo's David on my journal and said, "Look what *I* did!" I don't think I would get any satisfaction at all from the response (even if no one knew it was really Michelangelo's, which is unlikely).

I mean, the last time I posted a drawing of mine - totally original and something I was really proud of - I didn't feel particularly buoyed up by the response, and that was something I actually did. Praise, condemnation, whatever -- it doesn't change what i did. People liking it doesn't make it better than it is. If you like my drawing or my story or whatever, it doesn't change who I am, or one word/dot of graphite of what I did.

Maybe I'm becoming a better being, one not so ruled by the need for approval.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike;
One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike. - Ben Jonson

The first time I heard that quote, I honestly believed, deep down in my heart, that Jonson was lying his ass off. Now I'm just beginning to see that some people have achieved this state, and that some day I might be one of them.

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Preach it sister! ;)

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:) I'm sure you know that this came from what has happened to you recently, but several other people on my flist have been plagiarized in one way or another in the past. It just... boggles my mind.

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Indeed. I've only had that happen to me once, sort of, that I'm aware of - a young person on YouTube grabbed some of my vids and used my clips to make her own because she didn't have the knowledge/means to get her own source. Yeah, it shouldn't be THAT hard, but I had to ask around, too, when I started. I pointed her toward the tools I used and set her free, with an admonishment that taking other peoples' clips was a HUGE no-no and that she needed to make her own, so don't swipe any again. She promised she wouldn't, lol.

At any rate, yes, I think I'm working toward that quote myself. Folks may not like everything I do, but I'm still me.

Well, you are certainly very talented -- you've done some amazing things. What happened to

tickles_ivory was wholesale theft. Someone took her video and put her own name as a watermark type of thing on every frame. O_O At least your youngster wasn't trying to be deceitful, but yeah, that still would be uncomfortable. I know

splix has had her work swiped, among others. I suppose some young people are accustomed to not having to work for their praise. It's horrifying.

I don't think I'll ever be completely free of the need for outside approval :). But I get what you mean about people stealing other people's work and getting praise for it. I just don't get how that praise could feel meaningful to the recipient. Whoever it is must be so self-deluded that they've convinced themselves the praise is deserved. Or perhaps they don't care what they think of themselves, they only care how other people perceive them.

I hope, for the sake of the world and our future as a species, that individuals who do this grow beyond that sort of behavior. People do this sort of thing on their college papers and things now, quite regularly. It's horrible.

I was a teaching assistant for a while back in University; this'd be really early aughts. Heh.

For coding problems, we wrote a cheat-detection program that analyzed all the students' programs and spat out ones that were too similar. This sounds like we were being freaky, but we did hand-check, and usually it was right (replace some variable names, but don't replacing the spacing or the style of the code---and code does have a distinct style from programmer to programmer. Especially if there are commments...).

One time we had a 30% cheat rate. This was too horrible in a class of 200 and we'd be questioned heavily by the department for accusing so many students of cheating, so my professor came up with the brilliant idea: tell people we'd found out and if they confessed to us we wouldn't zero out their grade for the course.

Almost all of them confessed.

A TA friend of mine on the other side of campus (liberal arts) routinely googled intriguing sentences in essays in Google. The amount of cheating was pretty scary....

However, those are more cheating for passing/not doing work. The glory cheats here are different; they're purely for online peer glory. If you could use "pure" as such a term. Some people are really are so shallow that work they didn't honestly do can still be a source of pride for them if they can steal it.

There are also many people out there who scrape sites and RSS feeds and replicate the content on their own site, peppered with ads. Sometimes if they're fast enough, the original site will be suppressed in Google searches. It's happened to me.

I, of course, feed on self-made glory and haven't flipped yet to Jonson's side yet.

Back when I was in college, the Internet was made of tin cans and wire strung between colleges (just kidding) so plagiarism wasn't as easy as it is now. I remember one girl almost got booted for plagiarizing a cited source because she didn't change the wording enough to suit her professor. It was one of those where you cite the source at the end of the paragraph. She should have changed it more or used quotes, but it was a really gray area. The board decided in her favor (it was not at all intentional) but it was a HUGE thing.

But I'm with you -- I want credit for what *I* do. Jonson just gives us something to aspire to.

I've had a story of mine stolen right from theforce.net's fanfiction Archives along with several other people's stories. It took forever to get it removed on adultfanfiction.net despite numerous emails to the mods. But it's finally gone.

Luckily I noticed it right away so I put a review in listing the links and who the real authors were. **sigh**

I didn't understand why people do that but they do.

It's got to be a peculiar form of mental illness. I don't understand how getting praise for something you didn't do wouldn't eat away at you. I mean, what is that worth?

You were one of the ones I was thinking of when I wrote this. Yours was teh most recent before Tickles Ivory's. It had me thinking.

The only answer is the person desperately craves approval and attention in a way that we cannot comprehend. They have pretty much killed the voice inside of them that should be telling them that there is no satisfaction to be derived from receiving praise not earned. If the voice was capable of being heard or even just louder, the person wouldn't do it.
It would be like eating chocolate cake with worms in it.

I'm sure there is a very interesting pathology to the phenomenon, it's just one of those rare things that I cannot at all imagine what it would feel like from the inside. Probably why it interests me.

A Twist of Things to Come

I Really Don't Get Why People Steal Other People's Work

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May