Understanding Plagiarism in Creative Media

- $337,000. Tell us the story briefly. [tense music] ♪ ♪ HBOMB: In 1970 in "Analog" magazine, Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova published the short story "Brillo." Ellison's one of the most famous writers in history, but Bova's no slouch. He soon became editor of "Analog" where he was beloved and won the Hugo award for Best Professional Editor six times. This isn't one of his. He accepted this one on behalf of George R.R. Martin, whose career he started. George couldn't make it. He was running a chess tournament at the time. Writers used to have fun. Now we just complain about Twitter. On Twitter. "Brillo" was about the world's first robot police officer. His name's Brillo 'cause Brillo pads are metal fuzz. That's pretty good. This is one of the earliest stories in fiction about a robot cop-- a commonplace trope today, and soon in real life. It wasn't the first example. The most famous earlier one would be Isaac Asimov's "Caves of Steel." Remember this. It will come up later. Ellison and Bova thought the idea had legs and decided to adapt it into a TV show. They pitched the idea to a few companies including NBC where an executive named Terry Keegan said no. They later showed "Brillo" to Paramount where the head of development-- Terry Keegan-- he'd recently been hired there-- said no. The same man passed on the same pitch twice at two companies. Clearly not a fan of the robot cop idea. Six months later, Terry Keegan sold a show called "Future Cop" to ABC. It's a show about a robot cop. - He's an android. A robot. The perfect cop. HBOMB: Our boys realize they've been ripped off. - When I saw it I wanted to file immediately. My attorney said, "Forget it, man." He said, "90% of all plagiarisms suits, "the plaintiff loses. Besides, these guys'll kill you. You'll never work in this town again." HBOMB: They spend years finding a lawyer willing to sue a giant television conglomerate despite the cost and the possibility of being blacklisted from working in television. In his deposition, Keegan claims he never read "Brillo--" an obvious lie. It was later discovered the memos proving he deliberately ripped them off had been burned. The jury found in favor of Ellison and Bova and awarded them $337,000 in damages-- about $1.2 today. Ellison used some of the money to put up a billboard across the street from the studio reading, "Writers: Don't Let Them Steal From You! Keep Their Hands Out of Your Pockets!" Or at least he said he was going to in interviews at the time and later journalism claims it happened but I can't find any pictures which is a shame. Either way, they still made off with all that delicious money. Yum, yum. - I've been waiting four years for this moment-- four years-- to tell other writers they can fight 'em and beat 'em. - So. What's all that about? Okay, you know that trick video essayists use where they open on a semi-related example that sets the stage for the wider topic? It's a classic. I do it all the time. I wanted to open on a recent example of a writer winning a plagiarism lawsuit and getting their day in court. But there isn't one. This ancient case which took place over a decade before I and statistically you were even born is still the best, most recent, and almost only example. Ellison and Bova are among the few writers to ever see financial compensation for their work being stolen. Oh, this always happens. [grunts] [microphone arm clicking] Testing, testing, one, two, three. [snaps] For the foreseeable future, if someone else on here steals your work for money, there's not much you can do except talk about it. A few years ago I made a video with some examples of plagiarism and even covered a time I felt it happened to me. The guy in question, "Lukiepoo" briefly posted a ten-minute response accusing me of overreacting before appearing to think better of the whole thing and deleting this along with the video copying me. - I watched your video, went through it piece by piece, and copied it because you're such an incredible YouTuber. - Thanks, Luke. Apology accepted. He has since rebranded his channel, recognizing the irony in presenting himself as a literal piece of shit, but his videos are still awash with plagiarism accusations, ripping off other YouTubers for hours at a time now. The only new sections being stuff about how homophobia's fine. Maybe the rebrand was a little too soon. But no authority took Luke's video down. He could have left it up and people often do. You can spend ages on a unique video with an original idea and a way more popular guy can rip it off along with its thumbnail, get a bajillion views, and rake in the cash. On YouTube if you have an original idea, if it's good, it won't be yours for long. The fact I'm making this video during one of the biggest creative strikes in history isn't lost on me. Other people's hands have never before been this deep in the pockets of creators. We need Harlan Ellison's billboard now more than ever, but I don't know how to rent a billboard and it sounds expensive. So instead we're gonna talk about plagiarism on YouTube, what exactly it is, why it's wrong, and the many unintended side effects. Only then can we begin to talk about what to do about it or at least what I'm going to do to try to put some of it right. I'm gonna use a few relatively well-known examples you might have heard of already and some new ones I found just for this video. I could even ruin some of your favorite YouTubers for you. Apologies in advance. So, let's start some fights. [upbeat music] Part "eye"--Filip. [static hissing] [snaps] - What's goin' on, everyone? Thanks for clickin' on the video. HBOMB: Filip Miucin was a YouTuber who reviewed Nintendo Switch games and accessories and talked about Nintendo-related news. His videos were surprisingly well-edited and by that I mean they used way too many fancy transition. I mean, they're not even hard to do. You just drag and drop them on your timeline and whoa! But when he applied for a job at IGN, his obvious mastery of a plugin everyone else also has and existing channel with a decent size led to him getting picked as their new Nintendo editor. On August 6th, 2018 his review of "Dead Cells" went up onto the official IGN YouTube channel, but then on August 7th, YouTuber Boomstick Gaming posted a video titled, "IGN Copied my Dead Cells Review: What do I do?" He had noticed some similarities between Filip's reviews and his own published in late July. HBOMB: Speaking of repetition, oh, my God. The review was taken down while IGN investigated the issue further and then later that day confirmed he had been let go from the company, but was this the first time Filip had done this? Catching someone doing plagiarism is difficult Someone has to notice the theft which means having also seen the copied work. And if it's anything obscure, that's quite unlikely. If you catch someone plagiarizing once, chances are they rolled those dice a few times before and hadn't been unlucky yet. People started looking through his other reviews in case there was more. Over at Kotaku, Jason Schreier's article on the firing was updated to mention an anonymous tip pointing out similarities between Filip's review of "FIFA 18" on the Switch and the one on Nintendo Life by Chris Scullion. Filips review was made for his personal channel before he was even hired at IGN, meaning he'd been doing this for a while. Scullion himself would later post a video comparing his review with Filip's, showing off the many similarities, and I'll link that in the description, but I want to zoom in on my favorite example. Filip tries to hide what he's doing by changing words around and he does it really badly. In his article, Chris says compared to the non-Switch versions, the graphics "are a good deal less detailed." Here's Filip's version. FILIP: However, when you get up close and get a good look at some of the character models, it's pretty clear that they do have a good amount of less detail than the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game do. HBOMB: "It's pretty clear that they do have a good amount of less detail." No one would ever write that sentence on purpose. You only create that by trying to change something you stole. There's a great example here of the deeper problems that plagiarism can cause. Filip's review contains false information, for example here when he talks about the game's Women's league feature. "FIFA 18 comes with a standard Tournament and Kick Off modes as well as the Women's League which was officially introduced in "FIFA 16." - There are no Women's leagues in FIFA 18. There's Women's football but leagues are specific real life organizations that do not exist in the game. Filip's plagiarism avoidance techniques caused him to reword a sentence so badly that he invented a feature that doesn't exist. While these discoveries were being made, Filip made the decision to record and post an infamous, quickly-deleted video onto his channel entitled, "My Response." Not an apology. A response. - [exhales sharply] HBOMB: Filip denied everything, took no responsibility, and told numerous lies in this video. At the time this was criticized heavily by everyone for obvious reasons, but looking back on it while trying to understand this kind of behavior, it's actually really useful. This is worth looking at in a discussion of plagiarism because by being so poorly thought out, it's actually a valuable insight into how people react when they're caught and the different ways they try to cover their ass. When someone more competent than Filip uses these techniques in a subtler way, we can recognize them for what they are. Thanks, Filip! - There were a lot of circumstances surrounding it, but at the end of the day, I was the editorial lead on it so if anything, that makes it my responsibility. HBOMB: He claims there was a complicated process to making the review with lots of "circumstances." The point is to make you wonder what really happened so you forget what happened. Another way of doing this is to be passive about the events so it's almost like they happened to him instead of being something he did. - Like I said, I take full responsibility for what happened with the "Dead Cells" review. - Filip doesn't say, "I take responsibility for what I did with my review." He passively takes responsibility for what happened with "the" review. When someone tries to use language to imply what they did happened by magic, they make it pretty clear they're trying to deceive you. - I try to look at all resources that I have available to me before I start formulating my own critical opinions so that I can offer the most cohesive possible review. The bottom line is that what happened with the "Dead Cells" review was not at all intentional. HBOMB: Even if whatever happened, it was an honest mistake of some kind, but the problem is honest mistakes are easy to explain. Dishonest mistakes leave proof behind. Filip didn't unintentionally write a very similar review because he watched another one. He copied their words exactly and changed some of them to try to hide it. Hearing Filip try to pretend this isn't what he did means we're not just dealing with a plagiarist. We're dealing with a liar who has more to hide. Filip's next lie was he had nothing more to hide. - I was lucky enough to get noticed on IGN through my YouTube channel which, if in case you're wondering, is in fact all of my own original work. HBOMB: A truly amazing defense there. Even if it did happen-- which it didn't-- it only didn't happen once. But the goal is to preserve what's left of your reputation by getting people to stop looking for more. This behavior goes hand-in-hand with a special anger directed at the people who are looking. - So you can keep looking, Kotaku, and please let me know if you find anything, which, by the way, their--their news editor Jason Schreier tried to imply that my "FIFA 18" review was also inauthentic by claiming that I copied it from Nintendo Life, and that's-- that's just so not the case. I mean, maybe he was implying that if you have similarly opinionated reviews, then you're just plagiarizing, or maybe he's just trying to get as many clicks off of my name right now as possible, or maybe he just likes kicking people when they're down. I don't know. I mean, check it out for yourselves and--and you be the judge. HBOMB: He's referring to how Jason updated his article to include that anonymous tip. Filip accuses him of deliberately attacking him for attention by reporting what he has done. The section about how absurd it is to suggest he copied Scullion's "FIFA" review is probably why Scullion made his video in the first place. It begins by showing this clip. Bit of an own goal, there. Uh, by the way, Filip, that's a--that's a football pun. Filip is using the reporting on him as a bid to gain sympathy. "Yeah, I did something bad, but really, the bad guys are the people trying "to see what else I did. Not me, the guy who did all of it." This tactic takes a more direct form. - But one thing that I do know is that it's not very fun being the target of a gigantic lynch mob who wants nothing more than to feed into your destruction. The amount of hate and threats that I've been receiving on social media have been pretty staggering, and I get it. I mean, people are mad, and rightfully so, but it's one thing to go and harass me-- berate me with hateful words and--and threats, and it's a whole other thing to look up my family members and spread hateful comments on their social media accounts. That's just-- that's just not okay. I mean, not on any level. HBOMB: Obviously, no one deserves to have their family members threatened over their plagiarism and there is a valid conversation to be had here about how we treat people who we believe to have done something wrong, and it's really unpleasant seeing someone try to weaponize that and use it as a shield against criticism. He just got done shit talking a journalist and trying to make him the bad guy, and lying about the "FIFA" review. Scullion has spoken about receiving a lot of abuse from Filip's fans during this period as a direct result of Filip lying like this-- another potential reason he had to make that video. If you talk about harassment without being cognizant of the harm you are causing to others right now, you clearly don't give a shit about the problem you just brought up. Filip really didn't help his case by making a "Columbo" villain "bet you can't prove it" speech. "You can keep looking, Kotaku," was an especially silly thing to say since obviously people did keep looking. Many more examples came to light. His "Fire Emblem Warriors" video was mostly reworded from one on Nintendo Wire. FILIP: Decimating mobs upon mobs of enemies with the simplest of combos and tearing through forts and mini bosses with some of the most flashiest and stylistic special attacks. HBOMB: Most flashiest? His "Samus Returns" review was stolen from Engadget and his "Bayonetta 2" review from Polygon, and Jason Schreier seemed weirdly invested in reporting on all of it. In several videos Filip just copied text directly from Wikipedia or other related wikis. FILIP: "Super Mario Odyssey's" theme is highly focused on surprises and travel... [speech played at rapid speed] And the developers incorporated many of their travel experiences around the world. For instance, elements of the Sand Kingdom were derived from Kenta Motokura's experiences during a trip to Mexico, and the Luncheon Kingdom's food aesthetics was inspired by Italy and other European countries. [speech played at normal speed] The developers recognized that when traveling to foreign countries, something that really has an impact is the different currencies. All of my own original work. - On October 10th, the apology video disappeared, along with 901,000 views worth of other videos from Filip's channel. For a small YouTuber this means a lot of videos getting privated or deleted all at once. This is actually another important tactic that plagiarists use to try and hide as much of the evidence as possible. Filip has successfully hidden the extent of what he actually stole in his YouTube videos. Many of Filip's videos are now considered lost media, referenced in articles about the plagiarism or in videos showcasing it but not as actual copies that you can watch. This is obviously no big loss but it sucks for me that there's not many archived copies of some of these videos because, like, now I have nothing to cut to as reference footage. It's just now I just have to stand on my set and talk to you. His article about "Octopath Traveler" is a fucking doozy. It steals a bunch of shit directly from Jeremy Parish's review at Polygon, and let me just say, buddy, if you can barely string a sentence together, people are gonna know something's up when you're suddenly using words like "extrudes." When this was discovered, Parish tweeted, "Dang, I got extruded right into the middle of a scandal," which is probably the funniest thing to come out of all this. But that's not the only thing he stole from this one article. It also plagiarized one of his coworkers at IGN. Words from Seth Macy's video review of the game made it in, too. Here's some clips from Macy's video. SETH: Both it's battle system and aesthetics pay loving tribute to the Super NES era while-- This isn't merely a modern retread of past classics, but a phenomenal homage with genuinely fresh ideas in a fantastically charming wrapper of old school meets new. HBOMB: Seth was especially shocked by this, it seems like, and it's not hard to imagine why. To take game criticism and writing original material seriously only to have someone a cubicle over take a hatchet to your stuff and collect a paycheck for it is so deeply insulting. Things were bad enough that IGN pulled the plug on almost everything Filip ever made for the site, just to be safe-- something I've never seen an organization have to do before. He even--and this is insane-- did a video explaining the Nintendo Switch's HD rumble feature, and his explanation is just stolen from a fucking NeoGAF post. FILIP: A normal rumble is just a motor which spins, creating a vibration, right? Well, HD rumble uses linear acuators similar to Apple's haptic engine, which is what they use for the new Force Touch stuff in the new iPhones and Apple Watches. See, I believe that these are different in that they are more likely weighted electromagnets. HBOMB: You believe that? Holy shit. He copied some text from a forum directly into his script and just read it out! Why would you even do that? No, seriously. That's the question we're trying to explore here. Why do people plagiarize? Filip is a great help in finding answers to these questions because eight months after all of this died down, he released a second apology. Well, arguably his first since he didn't really apologize in the first one, but still. - Hey, everyone. I'm not here to make any excuses or to try and justify my actions. I'm only here to apologize to the people that I've wronged. HBOMB: He says sorry directly to several of the people he copied from, but to avoid making himself look too bad, he doesn't mention the forum post or the time he stole from someone else at IGN or a bunch of the other places. He also doesn't apologize for denying everything, pretending it was an accident, or accusing specific journalists of being out to get him by reporting on it. I think this points to what this apology is actually about, which is appearing more humble and honest to try and repair his reputation. Admitting to the truly embarrassing stuff or the dishonest shit he said when he was caught would just make him seem disingenuous. It's hard to come off as honest if the apology includes lying to your face in the past. He wasn't done making excuses, either. Two days later he uploaded a third apology. - Hey, everyone. HBOMB: I'm getting déjà vu from these videos now. In this video he tried to explain why he did all this. He had insecurities about the quality of his writing and his fear of disappointing people. - [exhales sharply] I felt pretty confident with my video editing skills and my abilities to create visually appealing content but I wasn't always confident with my abilities as a writer. [exhales sharply] And when I got that big break with this awesome gaming company my insecurities were amplified by, like, ten million, because the audience was bigger and the expectations were higher. I really wanted to do well but I was also really scared of saying the wrong thing or putting out a bad review. HBOMB: Now, maybe it's because he's lied before and still wasn't owning up to the extent of what he did, but I simply do not accept this as the reason. Lots of people have anxiety about their writing. In fact I'd say most writers do. Not many of them handle it by stealing, so anxiety and pressure feel like an easy excuse. From seeing almost all of Filip's videos-- I feel comfortable in calling myself a Filip scholar at this point-- I can tell you for a fact that he is bad at making videos. He thinks cinematic transition packs equal good editing which is the reddest possible flag, but even in terms of basic content, the videos are just bad. His earliest videos are just news about the then-upcoming Nintendo Switch, or stuff like the top five ways to play the Switch-- a console that no one can play. - The single Joy-Con method, and it's probably gonna be the least preferred way to play the Nintendo Switch. When the Switch was out he branched out into reviewing accessories like carrying cases and stuff and doing unboxing videos. Some videos are just summarizing Nintendo press releases. This is the literal definition of "content." It's like it got squeezed out of a Nintendo-branded tube somewhere. It's the most "how do you do fellow kids" energy I've ever seen coming out of a 28-year-old man. So he started doing the most egregious audience growth tricks for dummies you can imagine, like constantly having giveaways for subscribers. Filip's following didn't grow organically from people liking him or his work. Those people don't exist. It grew from offering free shit if you subscribe. But I'm gonna give Filip some credit here and say at some point he recognized correctly that he didn't know what he was doing. I mean, if it's obvious to me watching them it must have been obvious to him making them, right? So what do you do if you know you won't get ahead without copying someone better? You copy someone better. And I'm not even talking about plagiarism here. Even the stuff that isn't stolen is derivative. There's this one guy called NihongoGamer who's done some pretty useful tech reviews and one of them was of an arcade fighting stick for the Switch. It did surprisingly well and he gives it a proper workout as someone who clearly knows their stuff with fighting games. A few weeks later, Filip coincidentally decided to review the same thing, but Filip isn't a fighting game aficionado so his live game play footage is him playing "Sonic" and, uh, "Mario Kart," making this review functionally useless as a controller made for fighting games, but NihongoGamer also in the same video reviewed this Switch holder that looks like a little arcade machine. Filip coincidentally is also reviewing one of these in his video. NIHONGOGAMER: This game is so much better now. FILIP: This makes this game so much better. - This isn't even plagiarism. It's just strange. Filip didn't know how to build an identity of his own so he just borrowed the style and content of successful videos in an extremely cynical way. He didn't make these videos for the fun of it, or because he cared about making them. It was always just about chasing success by any means necessary, and when that didn't work out, he just borrowed even more directly and got into this mess. In a fairly recent interview, he's described himself during this period as having imposter syndrome, but that's wishful thinking, isn't it? There's a difference between having imposter syndrome and being an imposter. Objectively speaking, Filip pretended to be a reviewer and critic while actually just being a thief and a liar, but I think it's possible to reverse engineer this falsehood and arrive at its core truth. The explanation lies in a little thing he said in apology number three. I consider it the most meaningful thing Filip has ever said. It's not true, but it's meaningful. - [exhales] So I took from sources who I trusted and respected and-- and I agreed with and I tried to change them in a way that I would say it. - Filip claims he sought out reviews from other people he respected to steal and learn from, but, to be blunt, who the fuck is Boomstick Gaming? When this happened, Boomstick's channel had just over 10,000 subscribers. Barely anyone had any idea he existed. And look at the other places he copied from. Mostly random web sites, niche gaming outlets, fucking forum posts. If you consider something so obscure you can get away with stealing it, you do not respect it. Filip copied these people because he thought what they were doing was beneath respect. Remember "Caves of Steel?" I told you it'd come up again, you little bastard. You better not have forgotten. In the lawsuit between Ellison/Bova and the studios, one tactic the studios used was to accuse them of being the real plagiarists-- of ripping off "Caves of Steel" when they were writing "Brillo." The problem is these writers were all friends who knew and respected each other so they could ask Isaac Asimov what he thought of that. - So we went to New York. I've known Isaac for 25 years, and, uh-- and Isaac in is deposition said, "I've known Harlan for 25 years." He said, "You don't steal from your friends." HBOMB: It all sounds so simple when Isaac Asimov says it. At the start I briefly mentioned one of the many times someone's entire idea and thumbnail have been copied. The thief later flipped the thumbnail and changed the color of his shirt. Amazing. This guy's kinda notorious for stealing from people, and there was a really notable encounter where he made fun of a guy by joking about how many subscribers he had. This comes off as generic, former Vine star narcissism, but it's difficult to ignore that he specifically steals from people he considers beneath him, having a lower number. If you're not as important, your ideas are up for grabs. In 2016 Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention was found to have plagiarized one of Michelle Obama's speeches at the Democratic National Convention. The audience hadn't seen a speech given at the other convention so none of them noticed but the media did later. The question going unasked at the time, at least for me, was, "Why Michelle Obama?" Her speech about hope and dignity and respect and dreams had nothing to do with being a republican. They hate that shit. Why didn't the writer rip off a Nancy Reagan speech about killing the poor or locking up black people for using the drugs her husband game them? Well, plagiarizing another republican would annoy republicans whose opinion the writer actually cares about. If you respect someone, or want their respect, you generally don't risk a fight with them by jacking their shit, but if you don't like someone, stealing is almost like getting one over on them, isn't it? No one was ever fired or seemingly punished in any way for stealing a speech and pretending they wrote it, and that's because none of these people give a shit about Michelle Obama. They're probably glad it happened. If you broke into Obama's house and stole some of his silverware, most speakers at this convention would pay you a cash prize. Plagiarism is an insult, and don't people love to insult their enemies? Here's something petty I should have forgotten about but didn't. When Lukiepoo made his short-lived video response, while defending himself on the grounds he actually got the idea from someone on Twitch who saw my video-- and they're definitely real-- he still took the time to explain that he also didn't like I criticized right-wing YouTubers he was a fan of. - I thought Hbomber was a relatively decent video creator. I disagreed and didn't like some of the stuff he did, like when he went after Sargon of Akkad and some other YouTubers. HBOMB: This sat with me. Why was it so important for him to signal his allegiances like this? I think the point was to make his theft an act in a larger culture war. Even if he did rip me off, I'm the bad guy. I don't deserve to be treated properly, so if anything, it's good if he did. You don't steal from your friends. You steal from the guy who made fun of Daddy. - At this point I'm convinced the only thing Hbomberguy needs more than a testosterone shot and some estrogen blockers is a lesson in humility. HBOMB: Okay, where does-- and I mean this as a compliment-- the most fuckable twink I've ever seen in my life get off telling me how to manage my T-levels? Is he speaking from experience? The way Filip pivoted when caught to attacking his accusers feels all too familiar to me as someone who has received the same treatment from someone like him. There's this indignation to it. "I'm better than you. How dare you tell me not to steal?" What's emerging here is a social element to theft. Plagiarists seem to have this belief they are better than their targets. More important, more deserving of credit. Better politics. A better class of person. Your ideas are wasted on you. They'd be much better served in my videos. Other games people looked down on what Filip did with so much anger and people from IGN continued to be aggressive at him for years afterwards because they understand this instinctively. His actions essentially said out loud he thinks games writing is so worthless, it's okay for him to steal it. The IGN crew are especially entitled to be angry about Filip, though, because he did really damage their credibility When your company produces plagiarized stuff, it damages people's faith in your institution and its ability to not do that, and it's really hard to get that good will back. This leads us, as all things do, to the Angry Video Game Nerd. Part "E:" Cinemassacre. The Angry Video Game Nerd is a popular series in whi-- I don't need to explain this! AVGN made James Rolfe a household name the world over, in cool households. Under the umbrella of his mostly one-man production company Cinemassacre, James made other things, too. One of these--and my favorite-- was "Monster Madness," where every October James would release a video every single day about an old horror or monster movie. I used to rewatch these whenever I was hung over in university. It always made me feel way better. There's an infectious positivity to hearing someone share something they genuinely enjoy. Good stuff. As the years went on and he got busy with other projects and having children-- I mean, his wife had the children. You get it-- "Monster Madness" took a backseat. Some years he only made a few new ones. The guy was busy, or maybe he lost interest in a project he'd done for over a decade at that point, and that's fair enough, but then Screenwave got involved. For people with better things to do, Screenwave Media is a YouTube network- slash-influencer-agency thing who work with various YouTubers, helping them produce content by editing their videos for them, assisting with writing, and helping them find sponsors. They apparently work with a bunch of channels in various forms, but they work especially closely with Cinemassacre. The writing and editing of the AVGN videos became different and weird like someone else was doing those parts. The channel started making new types of video which were like James standing kind of awkwardly in the corner while Screenwave employees discussed a movie. There was a Cinemassacre podcast and James often just wasn't in it. The guy whose channel it was became an optional side character. Oh, and everything became packed with sponsorships. - If you don't know, Skillshare-- HBOMB: It got so bad, episode 200 of AVGN is split into three videos with separate sponsors purely because they sold too many brand deals. - Oh, we're gonna have to make the, uh, episode 200 three episodes because we sold too many brand deals and, uh, they didn't tell James. Under Screenwave, "Monster Madness" became a different beast. They streamlined production by eliminating the writing. It became James and a rotation of Screenwave employees you don't know and James didn't seem to know too well, either, discussing the film and trying to come up with something interesting on the spot for 15 minutes. Some of these guys were basically ordered to be on the show by their bosses and seem uncomfortable being there, which makes these being shot on a dungeon set fitting, and you're constantly reminded why this was made at all. JAMES: Available now, US only. both: Release the Kraken! HBOMB: The show certainly wasn't what anyone had been watching it for, and the creators appear to notice because in April 2021, it was announced "Monster Madness" was coming back for real with the old style of scripted videos featuring just James and his short and simple voice over. "Like the old days," but, you know, with Screenwave's help, so not really. Newt Wallen-- a Screenwave employee-- was enthusiastically tweeting about how he had written 20 of the 31 videos himself, with others writing the rest. The whole point was it was a guy passionately sharing his actual opinions, but that guy wasn't writing them. But some people were still excited. It was a pandemic year. We were all indoors. Not much else was going on. JAMES: Be sure to check out Cinemassacre's "Monster Madness: Around the World." 31 days, 31 countries. October rolled around, and so did the first new video, for the film "28 Days Later." It was weird, like James was reading something written for him, which he was, but what really stood out was what he was saying. A guy who famously avoids politics and serious real world events in his videos suddenly started talking about how the film reminded him of the horror of 9/11. JAMES: And when seeing the film today, and being put into that time period, you can't help but think of 9/11 and all those TV images of ground zero and Baghdad being devastated by war. HBOMB: It didn't take long for people to start Googling the words he was saying. A user named Z-B-123 posted a thread on reddit showing a huge portion of the video's script was taken directly from a review in "Film Comment--" a fairly well-known film criticism magazine-- by Dr. Cecilia Sayad, who is currently a senior film lecturer at the University of Kent. Let's compare and contrast, shall we? JAMES: Horror films are frequently interpreted as allegories of our realities. HBOMB: Okay, that was quick. JAMES: Their fantastic or supernatural elements often spawn from symptoms of social and political tensions in a specific era. "28 Days Later" is set in a post-apocalyptic Britain which has been devastated by an epidemic that within seconds can transform its victims into crazed cannibal killers. [speech played at rapid speed] Following a car accident, he wakes up from a 28-day coma. Finding the hospital abandoned, he walks out and wanders through the empty London streets. He finds that people have fled the country after the outbreak, but those who remain are either dead or become the infected. [speech played at increasingly unintelligibly rapid speed] [speech played at normal speed] You can't help but think of 9/11-- [speech played at increasingly unintelligibly rapid speed] [speech played at normal speed] Order is born from chaos, and then chaos is born from order. - It was as if Professor Sayad's review had been killed and brought back from the dead in a new tainted form. That's not how the zombies in "28 Days Later" work. Okay, it was like her review was the Patient Zero of "28 Days Later" review and it infected the... This is pretty straightforwardly plagiarism. The Angry video Game Nerd had just stolen a film professor's review of a movie. In true AVGN fashion, shit hit the fucking ceiling. What was going on? Initially, Justin Silverman-- the lead Screenwave guy-- claimed this was a result of a new person who was helping accidentally mixing some notes into a script, and this would be fixed soon and all the other episodes were fine. The "new person" thing isn't true. The guy who did it had worked with Justin for, like, a decade, but I can understand trying to protect someone's identity if you believed they had just made a small mistake. Justin updated the page the video was posted on to say it was being corrected to remove some accidental plagiarism, whatever that means. So whoever did it, they successfully convinced Justin this was an accident, but it wasn't. There's the telltale red flag of the awful writing you get when someone who can't write tries to rewrite something they copied. JAMES: The movie starts with the usual tropes: mankind's experiments go haywire resulting in destructive results. HBOMB: There's another way you can prove it wasn't accidental. You know, the other excuse we've heard before, how it just happened once and the rest of the videos were fine? They weren't fine. reddit user retired-fool went on the website the videos were being hosted on and found the second episode uploaded early. Most of it was from a review on ScreenageWasteland.com. JAMES: The movie opens with a shadowy figure with multiple hand attachments who calls in "The Boys." Four men from a government agency trying to deal with an alien invasion in a small New Zealand town. Peter Jackson plays dual roles of Derek and Robert, who interact through the use of creative camerawork and editing. So Jackson handled acting, writing, directing, cinematography, editing, and special effects for the film. Derek is perhaps the best character in the film. He's bloodthirsty, clumsy, funny, and a little too full of himself. He spends a good portion of the film on his own but Jackson manages it. He's got a good sense of physical comedy that comes in handy when Derek is dealing with a flap of his own skull that keeps allowing pieces of his brain to fall out. "Bad Taste" is a gloriously gory entry in the splatstick genre and a true cult classic. Watching it today, you can kinda see inklings of the kind of films Peter Jackson would prove capable of later on through the pacing, camerawork, and sheer inventive energy. HBOMB: So day two's video was also plagiarized. The return of "Monster Madness" isn't going so well. We know James didn't write this so who could it have been? Was it perhaps the man who was just bragging about writing most of them himself? Uh, yes, it was. The rest of the Screenwave guys looked at the scripts and many more examples were discovered. Justin confirmed several more were plagiarized and Kieran--a video editor who later quit-- claimed in a live stream that all of them were. - We went through all the scripts, plagiarized them all. They had multiple-- like, every single thing was plagiarized. They fuckin' plagiarized every single thing! HBOMB: This is a tremendous amount of blatant theft, if true, but soon it became clear almost everything Newt did and said was copied. While I was looking for other stuff Newt made, I saw he was one of the speakers at the Roast of the Angry video Game Nerd in 2013, and he was proud enough of this, he uploaded his bit separately to a channel he was involved with, and just watching it without doing any serious checking, several of the jokes from this jumped out at me immediately. - Justin--I heard Justin was nervous before the show. He couldn't figure out what he was gonna wear: either honey glazed or pineapple slices. [laughter] HBOMB: This joke is taken from a Gilbert Gottfried roast. - She couldn't decide between the honey glazed or pineapple slices. - Brett Vanderbrook is so deep in the closet, he's having adventures in Narnia. HBOMB: This is a well-known joke from a 2007 Jimmy Carr stand-up special. - Come on, you're so far in the closet, you're havin' adventures in Narnia. HBOMB: People have been ripping this off for years. Here it is posted in 2009 with many of the comments remarking that it's old and stolen even then, and this was almost half a decade before Newt stole it. Here's an in-character Tyrion Lannister Twitter account reusing it a few months before the roast in 2013. I haven't seen the show or read the books, so I'm just gonna assume they read Narnia there, too. Don't correct me. While I was researching this topic, I found a reddit post collecting all the places he stole from for this roast. Obviously, there were a bunch. When I found this I was worried people would think I just got this from here. I assure you I do my own research and don't just read reddit posts. As proof, they haven't found the source for the Narnia one, so don't I feel special? Unless Jimmy Carr got it from somewhere else, too. He's already stealing from the British tax payer, so I wouldn't be surprised. Newt had just been very sloppily taking shit for over a decade. The guy was fired and from the sounds of things, everyone's bitter about it, especially the guys who had to make new "Monster Madness" videos to an insanely short deadline. - And then we have to rewrite 20-something scripts and re-edit them in--in-- in a week. HBOMB: Even James Rolfe himself got involved. He quite famously avoids talking about controversial stuff like 9/11, but there was enough confusion, he saw fit to descend from his throne of gold and put up an unlisted video explaining what happened. - One of our writers had somehow added a portion that was taken from a preexisting article. That's unacceptable and all of us here apologize for letting that sneak in. HBOMB: He went with the story Justin did. Some new guy pasted something wrong and confused his notes into the script. - The short story is somebody fucked up. Somebody new. HBOMB: I'm not sure if this was recorded before this turned out to be a lie or if they just decided they didn't need to explain it to the public in detail, and that's understandable, but either way, it wasn't somebody new. It was somebody Newt. That's your joke for this video. Doing research, I found an interview with Newt about a low-budget horror film he wrote. However, the picture they used was Filip Miucin. I have no idea how this happened but it's very funny. For the creative people watching, there's a kind of positive lesson here. You might be mystified why someone would copy stuff for a review. Why is it so hard to just write your opinions on something? But it turns out writing a good review is really difficult. For example, I use the phrase "it turns out" more than once every video by accident because I'm bad at it. I'm not even joking. I've written "it turns out" in the next section without realizing it. That's how fuckin' bad I am. Being able to write a good review is a unique and difficult skill. Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real and practical like building a house or domming. But it turns... in... That this stuff actually is valuable. If it wasn't, people wouldn't be stealing it. Creativity doesn't feel super special or unique until you realize people have to plagiarize it. Oh, I accidentally bought this in size twink instead of bear. [groaning] "Oh, would you like some talcum powder with that, sir?" "No, no, it's fine." [groans] Ow, oh! Oh, I could ring--I could ring the sweat out from that and probably sell it. It's worth noting that even when the plagiarism was cleared up, the new videos are still weird. The entire appeal of "Monster Madness" was it was one guy passionately sharing his opinions. If someone else wrote those opinions, even if they're not stolen, what exactly is the point? James put this better himself a few years back before this all began. - I wanna make original films. Lots of people say, "Well, get somebody to help." Well, I can't get somebody else to write the review for me. It's an opinionated thing. Uh, imagine if it's somebody else's words and they say, "This movie's great," and then I think, "Oh, well, this movie sucks." So if I'm doing the review, obviously I have to see the movie and write the script. It's all me. HBOMB: This is probably why he made a statement about this. Most people watching would have assumed James wrote the words he was saying, especially since he'd been so vocal about this before. This is an insidious side effect of plagiarism in larger operations. It implicates the person reading the script, not just its writer, but here the plagiarism is just a symptom of the direction Cinemassacre's videos have taken. The unstolen ones are almost as strange as the stolen ones, in the ways James once predicted. You can only hand off so much of your work before it stops being yours. It feels weird to say this about videos where a guy calls a game from 1992 a fuck stick, but the magic is gone. These aren't videos anymore. They're products. Late-stage Cinemassacre is so low-effort, the scripts have obvious grammatical errors and James just reads them without even bothering to change them. JAMES: And it's with these survivors that Jim will struggle to stay alive with. HBOMB: These videos used to come from a place of interest and care, to entertain or share something. Now they're made by a production line for only one reason. - Expressvpn.com/cinemassacre. - Internet video as a business is at odds with internet video as a medium, dare I say an art form. Put the gun down. The increased industrialization of videos doesn't necessarily make the videos better. Just easier to make. But if you want to make as much money as possible in the short term, you cut those corners and you make as much product as possible. This gives me a chance to respond to the most common question about plagiarism on the internet which is, "Why should we care?" Does it really matter in the grand scheme if a review of "Octopath Traveler" or "28 Days Later" is stolen? If you think that, you should try extruding that logic a bit further until it reaches the pain receptors of your brain. Internet video isn't a silly playground where teens pretend to be scared of horror games anymore. It's a business. There is real money to be made in this space, or so the E-mails from the "World of Tanks" guys keep telling me. So it's definitely worth interrogating the fact people's work is being exploited in these money-making endeavors. This issue will become relevant later, and by later, I mean now. If you want to maximize your profits by making a video every other day, how do you write that much material? You don't! Part "E"... lluminaughtii. It's a pun. I--I don't need to impress you. In 2021 when I was working on the "Vaccines and Autism" video, I needed something to listen to in the background while I built an Argos bookshelf, so out of curiosity I put on other videos on the topic. One of them was by a channel called iilluminaughtii whose real name is Blair Zon. I hadn't heard of her before. She seems to do videos covering multi level marketing schemes, pyramid schemes, and failed businesses. Stuff like that, and she seems to make a lot of them really quickly. I wonder how! The video was fine. My phone was several meters away and I couldn't be bothered to reach out and get it and change the playlist so it just kept going through her anti-vax videos, and at one point, I did a double-take. BLAIR: There was a joint inventor on these products-- a man named Hugh Fudenberg, a former immunologist who has been long controversial. In 1989 he was caught up in a bizarre lawsuit with the Food and Drug Administration which told him he had to stop injecting his autistic patients with blood products. - I remember pausing, budget B&Q hammer in hand, and thinking, "Haven't I heard this exact sentence before?" - In 1989 he was caught up in a bizarre lawsuit involving the Food and Drug Administration which told him he had to stop inject his autistic child patients with blood products. - An interesting thing about the MMR scandal is literally all of its big discoveries can be attributed to the work of one man, Brian Deer, whose years of diligent journalism are basically why we know what we do about Andrew Wakefield. His 2004 documentary "MMR: What They Didn't Tell You" effectively "Berserk" Eclipsed Wakefield's career as a legitimate doctor. It's great and Brian uploaded it to his own YouTube channel for free in 2014 so anyone can go watch it. This version has the time code burned in at the bottom which is kind of cute, but if you wanted to make your own video about the subject and use that as source footage, that's kind of annoying to look at, so I spent, like, two full days of my life trying to find a version without the time code, and I finally found what I think is a copy of the original broadcast from 2004. Harrowing stories of child abuse do not pair well with teasers for the TV premiere of "Moulin Rouge." [lively music and cheering] [tense music] ♪ ♪ BRIAN: When Dr. Wakefield launched the MMR scare back in 1998-- - I used footage from Deer's documentary in my video, explained how important it was, thank Brian for all of his hard work, and even recommended his book on the subject that had just come out, and he actually E-mailed my producer Kat with metrics showing people actually did go out and buy the book after seeing my video, which is great. I love knowing that my audience actually reads books. Thank you so much. So, the reason the iilluminaughtii video sounded so familiar was because I had just rewatched that documentary. - Then in 1995 he was suspended from practicing medicine. BLAIR: Then in 1995 he was suspended from practicing medicine. - And made to pay a $10,000 fine for his misuse and misprescribing of controlled drugs. BLAIR: And made to pay a $10,000 fine for his misuse of prescribing controlled drugs. BRIAN: Professor Fudenberg has long been controversial. BLAIR: Hugh Fudenberg-- a former immunologist who has been long controversial. - Been long controversial? So this is weird. She wasn't quoting Deer. She was saying his words out loud as if she wrote them. So what's happening here? Well, after the bookcase seemed to stand up on its own despite all the pieces mysteriously left over, I watched the video properly and noticed she does acknowledge Brian Deer and the documentary pretty openly. BLAIR: In 2004 Brian Deer came out with a documentary entitled, "MMR: What They Didn't Tell You." - Blair watched a documentary and then downloaded it and used it to make her own. In the first 20 minutes she plays a chunk of the documentary or just quotes it 25 times. More than once a minute, you're hearing something Brian Deer said, from his mouth or hers. So this video is lazy. I'm personally insulted that she just used the version of the documentary from Deer's YouTube channel with the time code burned in. That's--that gets to me a little bit after the effort I put in, but that doesn't make it plagiarism. It's just not very good. And, hey, it's not like this is her one source. She quotes a lot of other places, too. Or does-- Here's some of the times she quotes someone else in the video. Wow, look at all this research she must have done. One thing, though. What's the source for these quotes? Okay, we need to talk about how to cite a source for a second. If you watch any non-iilluminaughtii video essay, You'll see these pretentious little commies put some text in the corner telling you where their quote comes from. This is so you know what they're quoting so you can check it or go find it and learn more if you want, and to give proper credit to the people whose ideas or knowledge they're borrowing. If you're using someone else's words in a video you intend to make money off, it's very important to give proper credit and attribution. Listing where the quote is from is important not just so it's easy for people to find and verify it but it's useful context which helps people interpret what they're seeing. If someone showed you a quote that made a person look bad you might feel a bit cheated if they didn't mention its source is a blog by someone you've never heard of that doesn't exist anymore. I have a little rule for quoting that other creators seem to use as well. If someone saw a clip of your video out of context, would it be possible for them to tell you're quoting someone and where it's from? Blair for some reason doesn't cite her sources. Here's a part where she quotes Andrew Wakefield. BLAIR: Wakefield also stated, "Mumps, measles, and rubella together might be too much for the immune system of some children to handle. HBOMB: I love there's a tiny Andy there for some reason. But not saying where he said this is pretty bad citation, but this isn't a mistake. Blair is hiding the source on purpose for a reason. You see, this quote is from the same documentary again. Brian Deer plays a clip of Wakefield saying it at a conference. - Measles, mumps, and rubella given together may be too much for the immune system of some children to handle. - Why didn't she just play the clip? She had it downloaded. Well, because she's already played so many clips from this documentary, it looks ridiculous. So she started quoting it and just not telling you she's quoting the one thing she watched. I wonder where all the other quotes come from. BLAIR: And more still, nurses were leaving saying they don't like what's being done. - Nurses were leaving and saying they didn't like what was being done to these children. BLAIR: It needed three people to hold these kids down... - ...in some cases just to have blood taken. both: I feel very sorry for the children who I feel were being abused. BLAIR: This study had in fact begun with a contract from a group of solicitors... - ...who were trying to sue MMR manufacturers BLAIR: Chadwick said he'd hoped the ordeal when it hit the news would die its own death. - ...Would die its own death. BRIAN: It includes injecting mice with measles virus-- BLAIR: He injected mice with measles. BRIAN: Extracting their white blood cells-- BLAIR: Extracted their white blood cells-- both: And injected the stuff into pregnant goats. - This is amazing! She just quotes people from this one documentary and pretends she did any work. Eventually she stops bothering to even make it look like a quote and just starts saying Brian Deer's words out loud, and that's how the stuff at the beginning happened. She got so lazy she stopped bothering to pretend she wasn't copying the documentary. both: In 1989 he was caught up in a bizarre lawsuit with the Food and Drug Administration which told him he had to stop injecting... - His autistic child patients... - His autistic patients... both: ...with blood products. Then in 1995 he was suspended from practicing medicine and made to pay a $10,000 fine for his misuse of prescribing controlled drugs. - "MMR: What They Didn't Tell You" has been chewed up and spat back into your mouth like you're a little baby bird. Mmm. [mimics rapidly chewing] My favorite part is when some of what she's saying appears in quotes for some reason, attributed to "Lawsuit with FDA." Like, no, Brian Deer said that. Blair: He established a scientific system that would satisfy Wakefield and Pounder for testing-- HBOMB: And Pounder? Wait a second. Who's Pounder? This Pounder guy never comes up again in the video. She brings him up here by mistake because she's paraphrasing another section of the documentary. BRIAN: He established a scientifically valid system that would satisfy Dr. Wakefield and his head of department Professor Roy Pounder. HBOMB: Roy Pounder is an important character in the story. Blair has cut him out completely to save time but she accidentally kept this one reference. This makes the copying kind of blatant. She's referencing a guy who exists in the documentary and not her video. Obviously stealing someone else's words is plagiarism but on a more zoomed out level, so is copying an entire documentary and trying to hide it. Like, obviously there's something wrong here. Here's a hint. If you're trying to trick people into thinking you're not quoting the thing you're quoting, you're probably doing plagiarism. But here's where it gets interesting. Blair knows people might notice this so she's come up with a defense mechanism. The video has a link in the description to a list of sources where stuff she quoted or showed in the video gets linked. This is normal. Lots of people do this, although usually they cite them when they use them in the actual video, but still. It's an unlabled collection of links that's difficult to sort through, but if you keep digging, eventually you find the link to Brian Deer's YouTube upload of the documentary. So now if anyone criticizes the fact she ripped it off, she can say, "No, I--I was using a source! I cited it! Check! It's in my list!" "Somewhere!" And she uses this flimsy excuse to basically steal anything she wants. Blair frequently plagiarizes people, never mentions they exist in the video or cites them anywhere, but she puts a link in a list no one will read. So that makes it okay, right? The video we've been talking about so far is the second in a series of three about Andrew Wakefield. Here's part of the first one where she talks about his early career. BLAIR: He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985 and a year later was awarded a Welcome Trust traveling fellowship to study small intestine transplantation in Toronto, Canada. - Let me ask you real quick. Is she quoting a source right now? I mean, no. It's just stock footage. So clearly she wrote this part, right? No, she's just reading an article from "The Telegraph." BLAIR: He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985 and... [speech played at rapid speed] ...a year later was awarded a Welcome Trust traveling fellowship to study small-intestine transplantation in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Wakefield returned to the UK in the late 1980s where he began to devote more time to research. HBOMB: Oh, no, there's more. [speech played at rapid speed] BLAIR: Joining the Royal Free Hospital in London he worked on the liver transplant program and in 1996 began researching bowel disorders, autism, and the MMR vaccine. HBOMB: The average person watching this is being led to believe Blair wrote the words she is saying here. This is called plagiarism. The audience has no way of knowing she's actually reading them the fucking newspaper. But the article she plagiarized is in the list of sources. So we already know what the excuse will be. It wasn't plagiarism. She was just quoting a source. Without telling you. I'm imagining an alternate universe where Filip and Newt's videos just had a little Pastebin link at the bottom which goes to all the stuff they stole. Like, as if that would make it okay. This is just plagiarism but with a shitty excuse in her back pocket to create plausible deniability. The intent behind this is pretty clear. iilluminaughtii videos are, like, 90% quotes by volume. The part where she plagiarizes "The Telegraph" is in a five-minute sequence mostly consisting of quotes from other places. BLAIR: More research groups with more sophisticated techniques failed to confirm Wakefield's findings. Wakefield was actually born into a family of doctors in 1957. His mother was-- ...This data led us to prostulate that there may be a role for measles infection and Crohn's disease even if... [voice over talking over each other] - Seriously, huge chunks of the video are just reading entire screenfuls of text from the BBC, various papers, "Slate," "The Telegraph", and Brian Deer. Yeah, she actually quotes Brian Deer in this one. Wow! But this makes the videos boring. She's just reading pages of quotes at you. So to break up the screens of text and make it feel more original, Sometimes she doesn't tell you she's reading someone else's words. She's doing plagiarism out of embarrassment to make the videos less boring. When I think a video is being lazy, I do a little test. I check what sources the video used-- thankfully Blair provided a list-- and I compare it with the sources you would get if you went to the Wikipedia page for the topic. All of the quotes in that five-minute sequence I mentioned, including the "Telegraph" article she plagiarized, are just linked on Wakefield's Wikipedia page. Oh, I know how this video was researched. This is a really common trick with lazy creators. Go on Wikipedia and quote all of their sources, and then it looks like you did a bunch of research and work. And to make it even better, she pretends she had to look for this stuff. BLAIR: Other studies have suggested there may be a link to Crohn's and Measles, just not Wakefield. I was able to find a different study from the National Library of Medicine that's more recent. - "I was able to find?" I mean, I guess I'm glad you were. One of the lights went off. Hold on a second. I'm not sure everyone is fully convinced that quoting a documentary for 30 minutes while pretending you're quoting someone else counts as plagiarism. "I mean, it's a bit weird, but she cited it as a source. So technically it's fine." I see you, you little pedant. You think you're so fucking clever, don't you? But the fact she's trying to pass off other documentaries' work as her own is obvious when you realize if you didn't know the source material, You would have no idea she was doing this. To test this theory, I decided to watch a video of hers on a subject I knew next to nothing about: the Fyre Festival, which I've really not looked into before. BLAIR: It was no isolated island, but an under-developed lot just north of a Sandals resort. - At first glance the video is surprisingly well-researched with plenty of backstory and explanations. According to Maryann Rolle-- a local that owns an Exuma Point Restaurant-- they had every living soul on the island of Exuma who could lift a towel working. HBOMB: Lots of it is just quotes, of course. She's still just quoting people mostly, but the fact there's so many quotes makes it feel well-researched and credible. BLAIR: One of these people was Keith Vanderlaan-- a pilot in charge of flying Billy around the Bahamas. According to Keith, "Billy's team really wanted to do--" [speech played at unintelligibly rapid speed] - And once or twice, Blair brings up one of the documentaries about the Fyre Festival and mentions something that happens in them. BLAIR: Later in a documentary around the event, Billy himself claims that they had rented 250 houses. - She makes it very clear what her source for that section is. This all seems very above board. And at the end Blair says those two documentaries were some of the sources she used for her video. BLAIR: I used both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries as sources for this episode as well as various articles. - I think it's fair to say an average person would think they were watching an original work with lots of research and sources which tastefully brings up two documentaries when necessary. And that's what I thought, too, and I thought that was fine. It was a pretty well put-together video. But then I watched "Fyre," the Netflix documentary about the Fyre Festival. - And what I realized was that they had rented an area north of Sandals Resort. BLAIR: It was no isolated island, but an underdeveloped lot just north of a Sandals resort. - And then effectively Photoshopped out the bottom portion of the map to make it look like they were on a deserted island. BLAIR: They were Photoshopping out the rest of the island to make it appear as if Fyre K was a deserted island dedicated to the event. According to Maryann Rolle-- a local that owns an Exuma Point Restaurant-- they had every living soul on the island of Exuma who could lift a towel working. MARYANN: They had every living soul on the island of Exuma who could lift a towel working. BLAIR: According to Keith, "Billy's team really wanted to do tents so what I did..." KEITH: Is I took my wife and we tried to sleep in a tent for one night and, uh, it was so terrible. - Her Fyre Festival video is mostly her reading words from the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix set to footage she got from the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix, with supplemental footage taken from the Fyre Festival documentary that's on Hulu. But don't worry. Her first source in her list is the Netflix documentary so that makes it okay, right? And then further down in the list is the Hulu one, although fucking hilariously, she doesn't link it on Hulu. She links it on 123films.cc, the piracy web site she watched it on. Now, this is journalism! Yee-haw! BLAIR: Calvin claims he then went to the Bahamas for himself to see what was going on and discovered that the luxury festival tents were nothing more than leftover emergency relief tents from Hurricane Matthew. HBOMB: Apparently this part is from Calvin Wells. Uh, no, it's from the same documentary she got everything else from. CALVIN: One of the things that really struck out to me was that they were erecting these dome tents that were pitched as luxury villas that I realized were leftover hurricane tents from Hurricane Matthew. HBOMB: The footage playing while she is saying this is the same footage the documentary's showing as Calvin says it. She's just replaced the documentary's voice over with herself quoting the documentary. It's ridiculous. Quoting documentaries you pirated for 30 minutes while pretending you're just quoting specific individuals is plagiarism. To give an example of how to do these quotes correctly, here's a "New Republic article that quotes one of the things Blair did. "As one caterer put it in Netflix's 'Fyre.'" It's clear and to the point. The article isn't trying to look like it found this quote. Blair could have said, "In the Netflix documentary, this person says this." But she'd have to say that 50 fucking times, and it would make it obvious she's just remembering Netflix at you, so she deliberately obscures the actual source of her quotes. This is to convince a casual audience she found these herself by doing actual research and reading articles and interviews with these people, which she didn't. This is passing off the work that went into making the documentary as her own. When she brings up the other documentaries as if she's only just talking about them. This is a lie to make you think she hasn't been doing it the whole time. BLAIR: According to Marc Weinstein, a festival consultant-- HBOMB: A metric shit ton-- actually, slightly more-- an imperial shit ton of this video is just footage from the Netflix documentary. Seriously, you can't even fucking take your own screenshot of these articles? What the fuck? This isn't even plagiarism. This is genuinely just copyright infringement. Like, the copyright holder could get this video taken down easily, and maybe even take her to court for the ad revenue she got from their footage. You know YouTube's copyright system where if you use five seconds of the wrong TV show your video is demonetized? You're probably wondering why that didn't happen here. This is what the content ID system actually exists to stop, after all. Well, this is why the video has all these ugly filters. What Blair is doing is so obviously stealing that YouTube would notice so she had to put bisexual lighting over all the footage she got from the documentary. Whoever's making these videos is fully aware what they're doing is unacceptable and is purposefully working around the systems designed to stop them doing it. Blair doesn't just reuse other people's footage without credit, though. The video has also been edited to hide the credit that was there. The Fyre documentary itself used videos posted on Instagram and Twitter by people who attended the event, and guess what? It credits them. Their social media's in the corner. Blair's video steals this footage from the documentary, too, and puts a filter over it but also blurs out the social media. She uses a few clips from a Vice video as well and the Vice logo gets blurred out so you can't tell where it's from. Since Blair's making a documentary out of other people's documentaries without permission for money, she's trying to hide the evidence of whose footage she's using so they don't notice and serve her a fucking cease and desist. Incidentally, when the Vice video uses footage from the documentary, it tells you, because this is how this shit is supposed to work. At one point she uses a clip of a news piece about the festival which used footage from the documentary and you'll notice they also correctly credit the footage, too. Blair's sources are full of examples of how to credit the source. But if she'd done the same thing, the word Netflix would just be in the corner for 30 minutes. The video's opening features this fan art depicting her bro fisting with a person I believe she recently sent a cease and desist to. Put this on r/agedlikemilk. This piece of fan art is better attributed than the documentary she stole this video from! The 25 minutes of clips and quotes from Netflix don't get this treatment. She just says, "Oh, I used these documentaries as research," at the end. And I guess she's not lying. She definitely did. I wish there was room in the video to show you just how much she quotes the documentary without telling you while reusing greased-up footage from it, but it's most of the video. There's just too much to show. I also wanted to go more into the ways making sloppy, poorly researched videos means the videos are full of obvious mistakes but this video's looking kinda long so I shouldn't. However, before I realized I shouldn't, I'd already made all of it, so, uh, check out the new video on my hot new second channel. I have a second channel now. It's not a live stream channel I hastily rebranded. Check it out if you wanna see me complain about Blair getting the Stanford Prison Experiment wrong and also "Silent Hill" lore. Why would you want to watch that? I dunno. This is a horrible pitch. As a creator my question is, why make three bad videos a week when you could make one half decent video every two weeks, or one pretty good video every year? Videos like this aren't made for the reasons normal people make videos like to inform or entertain or for the joy of making something. They're made for the purpose of putting out more content. [tense music] ♪ ♪ The phrase "content mill" refers to organizations which produce huge amounts of material very quickly, designed to get attention with no interesting quality. If you've ever seen an article in a search with a compelling title but which says nothing for several hundred words and only tells you the thing you wanted at the end while showing you seven million ads, you've had the content mill experience, my friend. Some of these are just a link to a video someone else made but they got to show you ads. There's a ton of channels out there whose objective is to make as much stuff as possible as fast and as easily as possible. We just watched Cinemassacre become one of these, making easier, lower-effort, worse videos, and for the ones that were supposed to be good, outsourcing the editing to a guy underpaid so badly he later quit, and the writing to a guy who turned out to be stealing shit. The quality suffers, yeah, but if you don't care about quality, you save yourself a lot of time and effort. The people who are in this for the money are engaged in a constant race to the bottom to find the easiest possible content to make and still get paid for it. If you're a nerd-- and look at you-- you've been recommended a YouTube short where a robot explains what happens in a comic. - The sad story of Rocket Raccoon. The drunk who knew Batman's identity. After Homelander lost his mind-- - These float to the top because there's catchy names and there's hundreds of them, so they get recommended to everyone even though nobody likes them. My favorite insane content farm stuff is when an AI explains the plot of a movie to you but the title is, "A woman wakes up covered in bees," or something. - Welcome back to Movie Recaps. Today I will show you a drama-fantasy film from 2018 titled, "Be With You." Spoilers ahead. - These are so perplexing, they wrap back around to being performance art. "He has only three organs left but the scientists turn him into a super soldier." It's "RoboCop!" An AI voice explain the plot of "RoboCop" to you! Incredible! But if something becomes successful, even if it's something this weird, people are gonna try and do the same thing, especially if it's easy to crank out like an AI recapping a film. - The opening scene features a guy who finds himself confined within a large cube. - The opening sequence introduces a prologue. After this, the chaos caused by the Egyptians is depicted. - Today I'm going to explain a film based on the real life story of the youngest warrior of World War II called "Soldier Boy." Today I'm going to explain to you horror zombie film titled "Warm Bodies." - ...and walked over to the man. When the man saw it, he was still cursing at his wife. - The dog king has gathered hundreds of stray dogs. He is leading his entire army to attack the city. - Hi, JAKE RECAPS here. Today I am going to explain a movie called "Allerleirauh." - So you can see how content mill shit dovetails very nicely with ripping people off, if not outright plagiarism. And right in the middle of this ecosystem are reaction videos where people just upload themselves reacting to other people's videos. The money almost makes itself. Reaction videos are a key piece of the iilluminaughtii puzzle here, because that was Blair's previous content mill. A few years back reacting to reddit posts was a popular format, and it was easy to make so hacks jumped on it. She used to make videos reacting to popular reddit posts and she'd try to add to the jokes and, you know, not manage it. BLAIR: "After all, if I can't trust "the President of the United States, who can I trust?" And that's, uh-- [chuckles] Tricky Dick. Very cool man. The Watergate scandal man himself. HBOMB: Extremely boringly reading out reddit posts wasn't good content, but it was content. She saw moderate success doing this for a few years, briefly forming a communal channel where she and several friends reacted to reddit posts together called Sad Milk, a channel which has since been completely obliterated and she's currently sending cease and desists to the other members to stop them talking about why, so that's fun. But this kind of explains a lot. In a way, Blair has always just been reading other people's stuff at you. She spent over half a decade trying to become a popular YouTuber by any means necessary. Before these she used to do story time videos back when they were really popular, which led to a notorious video where she talked about clogging a toilet by literally filling it with shit. - I didn't even see the hole so I knew the poop wouldn't go. - When video essays started being a popular format, she pivoted again and started making what she makes now. None of this has ever been about actually making something she cares about. It's always been about making something popular. When these finally caused her to really take off as a creator, she basically immediately deleted all of her previous cringe attempts to cash in on other trends. Remember when nearly a million views disappearing from Filip's channel was a bit weird? Try 40 million. Sounds like those videos aged like milk. Sad Milk, that is! [laughs] [coughs] The iilluminaughtii channel is a video essay content mill. She has a team of editors helping to put out videos every other day and she doesn't need a writer. Wikipedia's got her covered, and if there happens to be a documentary on the topic, she can just quote that 40 fucking times. The video happens overnight because she didn't have to do any work. There's a part in the vaccines video where she talks about all the documentaries she's watched as part of her research process and I don't think she realizes she's telling on herself here. BLAIR: And I've got to tell you that I've seen a lot of documentaries doing research for these deep dives. The Netflix "Betting On Zero" for Herbalife, "The Dark Side of Chocolate" for Nestle, documentary series' on the hikikomori, and all the "Goop" episodes on Netflix, "Blackfish" for SeaWorld-- there's a lot. - This is just a confession. Referencing the big documentaries on a topic you're covering is fine. Quoting them or using some footage from them makes a lot of sense, I think. But at a certain point, you're just repackaging other people's work and selling it off as your own. And speaking of selling... Why would someone do this? Well, when I sat down to watch the Fyre Festival video I got served two advertisements before I could hit play and then immediately got hit by a commercial for Blair's plushie. BLAIR: Make sure to snag one before it's gone because these are not coming back once this runs out. - Then 11 minutes in I got a message from today's sponsor, Mint Mobile, where I could get squixteen dingles of my bext burger. BLAIR: And we will begin to unravel what happened at the Fyre Festival right after this ad break. Make sure you go to mintmobile.com/mlm. That's mintmobile.com/mlm. - And then within seconds of that sponsorship ending, I got a second sponsorship! She has two right next to each other! Go to blueland.com/iilluminaugh-- BLAIR: ...to blueland.com/mlm. That's 15% off your first order of any products of Blueland orders at blueland.com/mlm. - Now, I don't want to speculate how much money Blair made from this sloppy shit that was made in about a day, uh, but I do know how much a video with that many views makes in ad revenue and I know what the overhead is on those plushies, and I've been offered similar sponsorships, so I'm pretty comfortable in saying she made a fuck ton of money from stealing someone else's documentary. It turns out it's the same twist it always is. Why did this stupid shit happen? Oh, it's money! This is a really good racket. I'm almost jealous. With a small team of editors, you can knock one of these out every few days, and she does. I mean, she doesn't need a writer. Now, maybe this technically isn't plagiarism. Maybe you give them a pass because having a link somewhere in a description makes it okay to have done this, but I think we can all agree that even if it isn't plagiarism it is at the very least shit. When we're talking about creative works, questions like this aren't really about rigid definitions. It's about whether or not something passes the vibe check, as adults pretending to be children might say. A lot of this is about how something feels. Case in point, when Blair accused someone else of stealing from her! Plot twist, baby! Party time: The Legal Eagle Debacle. This is Devin Stone, law YouTuber and actual lawyer whose channel name is LegalEagle. He's pictured here interviewing me in my pajamas in the final year I had hair. I used this clip so I could savor it for a second. On April 20th of this year, Blair accused one of Devin's editors of taking her video's style. They were trying to replicate her videos. Her evidence: one of his editors E-mailed asking how her editors achieved a specific effect in an old video, and then later asked on Discord if he could ask them there. I know, right? And if that's not enough, she posted some comparison shots showing, uh, they both have used torn paper effects when showing quotes and, uh, they both highlight, uh, text when they show documents. - LegalEagle is no longer the one good lib. - It's cut and dry, really. There's just one small question left, and that is, "What the hell are you talking about?" This is one of the most common things you see in all videos. No one owns the concept of highlighting text. Tons of people use torn paper in their visuals when they're quoting books or newspapers. It's basic skeuomorphism-- when the thing looks like the thing that it is. I do the same thing when I'm trying to look professional. LegalEagle has used these visuals for years. Before iilluminaughtii has used them, even. Who's ripping off who, again? But in any case, it's normal for editors to ask each other how they do things. That's how information spreads. You know those transitions that I do occasionally and Filip did literally all the time? I found out how to do those by asking another YouTuber named bobvids how he made his transitions so smooth in his videos in, like, 2016, and he told me what plugin he used. Almost everyone finds out about it by asking someone else whose videos they like how they did that thing. This is a communal craft where people learn and share things. That's why there's 12 million tutorials for how to do a chromatic aberration effect without having to pay for one of the professional ones. Editing is for the people. More like comradeic aberra-- no. The accusation wasn't just false. It illuminates--ha, ha-- how Blair sees the world. She doesn't really understand the concept of sharing amongst creatives, because she's never actually created anything. Ripping people off is her entire business model. So she assumes that's how the rest of the industry works. Just people competing to exploit each other's ideas. To this sort of person, the fundamental act of asking questions and talking shop become devious tricks to get you to give away your precious secrets about how you highlight text. Basically, this is a completely ridiculous accusation. This particular thing really annoyed me, not just as a video editor but because I had a personal history with her videos. Here was someone whose career is built on remaking other people's hard work three times a week getting extremely aggressive that someone asked someone else how they did something. I'd found the Brian Deer stuff years ago and kept it to myself because--I know this might be hard to believe-- I don't like randomly starting fights with strangers. But since Blair seems okay with doing that-- and it was on my mind anyway since I was already working on this video-- I posted a video with some examples of her ripping off Deer in a quote tweet. A lot of the reactions to my tweet seemed to show that this made people rethink how they felt about the work of someone they previously respected. And this for me confirms my hypothesis, that whatever you call this, there's something wrong about it. Realizing how heavily regurgitated someone's work is changes how it feels to watch. Even if you like something about it, .now in the back of your mind, you're wondering if its them you like and not the person they got it from. Plagiarism stains a person's work and makes it tough to appreciate even the original parts, because you'll never really know for sure again if they're original. And being the one getting ripped off feels pretty bad, too, which I'm sure Blair understands. That's why she posted all of these tweets. Now imagine how those journalists and documentarians might feel. Imagine spending your life doing painstaking research, actual investigation, going out there and interviewing people, and physically finding things, not just Googling it and copying what's already there. And then imagine someone reading your words out loud in between sponsorships for dish soap, getting half of the words wrong, and not even making it clear how heavily she's relying on you to make her video. Brian Deer has had a lot of trouble with plagiarism. During the scare Deer got sued and went to court to defend his findings. He could have lost his home in the fight to get the truth heard, so when people steal his work without crediting him properly, it's messed up. Some entire documentaries have come out which don't credit him. Channel 4 did another documentary about Wakefield recently and they don't acknowledge that it was his work they were using. They pretend Channel 4 itself made those discoveries. They try really hard to cut Deer out of the story and it doesn't even work. Articles he wrote and his book keep popping up in the background. Deer have been battling to have his work properly recognized for years while other people pretend they discovered it. Deer actually put it best himself when he saw my tweet and replied to it. Sorry to drag you into this, Brian. While copying and pasting text from other people's stuff is a kind of plagiarism, it's not the only kind, and focusing on that as the only way would be a mistake that falls short of understanding the problem. Even when Blair isn't just reading other people's words, she's still gutting other people's work and selling it, and I hope I've explored that properly. I wish the story ended there so we could move on already. I had other examples I wanted to get to, I swear. But on the 28th of April, Blair released a video entitled, "iilluminaughtii exposed" which contains an apology to LegalEagle, a response to Hbbomerguy's plagiarism claims, and I guess a response to the five other things she's currently being accused of. She seems great. And in the section intended for me, she responded to my tweet. So in the interest of fairness, let's see what she has to say. BLAIR: Before I get into the accusation itself, I want to address the topic of plagiarism, and that word has been tossed around a ton and it's not something to be taken lightly, and I just want to take a minute to define this word. - She begins by sighting the many dictionary definitions of plagiarism, which is very funny. BLAIR: On screen are definitions for the word "plagiarism" as defined by Merriam-Webster, dictionary.com, and the University of Oxford. - But then she disregards all of them anyway and invents her own special definition with a loophole in it. BLAIR: I'm showing multiple sources defining plagiarism but the overall definition is gonna boil down to this: plagiarism is to take someone else's idea as their own or to not credit the source. - The actual definition-- you know, the thing that is wrong-- passing off other people's work or ideas as your own has had this new thing grafted onto it to do with crediting of sources. The other definitions do bring up not crediting people as part of it but Blair has made it central to her definition. Remember what I said about plausible deniability? This is Blair trying to cash that in. She objectively has passed off the work of Brian Deer, the Fyre Festival documentarians, and countless others as her own, up to and including reading out entire paragraphs from articles without even telling you she was quoting anything, but in this new definition, as long as you hide or link in a document no one will read or mention once you used it as a source, it magically becomes not plagiarism anymore. She then gives the defense that she did cite Deer in that Pastebin of hers, but her video demonstrating this actually shows why this is a cheap trick BLAIR: When you go to my sourcing page for this particular episode, you can also see that the documentary is listed as a source. HBOMB: iilluminaughtii's Pastebin full of disorganized links is embarrassing to watch her scroll through. I assume she was trying to show how easy it is to find the documentary in her list but then she couldn't find it. She cited it as a contextless YouTube link, so she has to have text appear on the screen saying which of these sources was the documentary. What really surprises me about the response is how deliberately manipulative it is. She makes a big show of how thorough she's being in her response. BLAIR: With that definition being clearly identified, let's go ahead and take a look at what Harris brought to the Twitter table. - She shows my tweets about the situation, obviously, and she reads them all out which makes sense. She's used to reading people's words for a long time. But she doesn't show the video she's actually responding to. BLAIR: Harris posted this video saying, and I quote: "Personally, @iilluminaughtii, I would define plagiarism as something a bit more specific. For example, copying someone else's documentary directly into your script," end quote. - After slowly and painfully reading out the entire surrounding context, why doesn't she show any of the video? Well, because it would make her look really fucking bad. If she showed the video directly comparing her with Deer, she wouldn't be able to defend herself at all. It's obvious what she did was wrong. Instead, she shows this one screenshot which just happens to be the part where she's technically quoting something on the screen, and then she gives the defense that, "Look, you can see I was quoting it!" BLAIR: However, in his own video, he shows where I'm audibly quoting a direct line from the documentary and even visually you can see it on the screen with the quotation marks. HBOMB: A direct line from the documentary? The video says it's from a lawsuit with the FDA. I have to admit, this is some pretty clever sleight of hand. She's showing specifically the one section where she technically is quoting something. BLAIR: At the time of recording, it was really obvious to me that it was a citation of the documentary. - You know she's pretending to quote a lawsuit while actually reading someone else's words, but the audience watching doesn't. Her official response on YouTube has way more views than the Twitter video she's responding to here. More people have seen a manipulatively-framed single image from the video than the video itself. I got some replies from people who had clearly just seen her video and not seen mine trying to defend her on the basis that she did put it in quotes. She just didn't cite the source correctly, and you can find it in the description. Some poor iilluminaughtii fans out there think I'm mad at her for quoting some words slightly wrong because they assume in good faith that the YouTuber they like wouldn't tell them an obvious lie. Sadly, iilluminaughtii isn't a unique story. She's just the most prominent tip of the iceberg of content mill video essay garbage. If you want to see these extremely poor practices in action, you need only watch the videos about iilluminaughtii. You know, drama YouTube. The worst part of YouTube. BOWBLAX: Koba says, "point of view," showing a picture of a man with a hatchet who I assume is Hbomberguy but I'm not too sure, to be honest. Drama YouTube is its own sub-ecosystem of content mills, grinding out infinite buckets of slop about whatever's happening in that moment. CB2: So I'm not gonna milk this any more after this video, okay? - These people are so busy making the videos, they don't even have time to find out what Blair did. They're finding the most popular tweets on the topic and hitting the record button. BOWBLAX: "Not enough that they steal ideas, "they have to go out of their way "to slander others' work for having the most banal similarities." HBOMB: Yeah, that's ri-- wait, "bay-nal?" And in their most evolved form, they're not even doing that. They're watching other drama videos and making their own version. I've seen the compilation I made of Blair copying Deer in, like, 40 different places at this point, but what's really amazing about it is that it's now crossed the drama mill event horizon. So instead of being credited to me, it's credited to the other drama YouTubers the current drama YouTuber got it from. In this instance the previous drama YouTuber's name isn't even spelled right. That's the level of research we're dealing with here. I don't really care about getting credit for a video I made in five seconds. The point I was trying to make was that Deer is the guy who deserves the credit, but there's still an irony to it. I was trying to make a point about the importance of crediting people correctly and now my Twitter video has "Human Centipeded" its way out of the anals of drama YouTubers into the mouths of second order drama YouTubers who don't even know where it's from, but are ready to reheat and serve it. This is the lowest effort shit you can imagine. They can't even spell plagiarist right. Information itself deteriorates in the process of producing industrial quantities of content. The mask has fallen and the gears of the mill spin naked before us as they wheel and crunch all meaning to dust and "Raid: Shadow Legend" sponsorships. Go to audible.com/repentharlequin to enter a coma and escape this madness. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply, Blair. I disagree. I don't think your new, special definition of plagiarism with a loophole in it is plagiarism. I think plagiarism is plagiarism and you are a plagiarist, but thank you for taking the time to respond, and good luck with all that other stuff. We should probably move on. Let's talk about some good videos. Remember my video about the "Roblox" oof? That one did pretty well, didn't it? There's a bunch of stuff I needed to do for a follow-up video but then I got distracted by this, but I'll do that eventually. But I'm really happy with the reaction to it. A lot of people I deeply respect seemed to enjoy it, and it was even jacksfilms third favorite video of 2022, which for me is an incredibly high honor. Far higher than all the real awards I didn't win. His second favorite video was "Man in Cave" by someone called Internet Historian and that thing got, like, ten million views, so I'm not surprised. Personally, I'm not a big Internet Historian fan. Years ago I saw a video of his about Dashcon-- a failed tumblr convention-- and it was really just a bunch of jokes about SJWs and how bad tumblr is, and it was really disappointing. You know, he had the opportunity to talk about a really interesting moment in history and he just used it to post cringe. But that video was eons ago and I don't like to judge people by super old stuff they made, and a lot of people I really respect seem to like him so I'm sure he's way better now. Anyway, let's finally watch "Man in Cave" and see what the hype is all about. No, I mean it. Pull up your phone, open up "Man in Cave," and let's watch it together. No, just--just type "Man in Cave." I--It's the top one. It's got ten million vie-- Oh, you can't find it? It's not there? As of present recording, "Man in Cave" mysteriously disappeared months ago and has yet to reappear. What happened to "Man in Cave?" [cackling] [ominous music] "Man in Cave" is about Floyd Collins, a cave explorer who in 1925 got trapped in a cave. Nice one, Floyd. The video is an hour and ten minutes long and pretty detailed, covering the events hour by hour as they happened. What a unique way of telling the story. The video implies a deep level of research and understanding, and that animation's pretty cool, too. The video was uploaded on September 29th, 2022 and was extremely successful, garnering, like, 10 million views in the few months since it went online. It was deemed so entertaining it became the thing every Twitch streamer put on while they went and did something else to keep their audience busy. Ooh, that's a good chunk of change right there. But then in March of this year, the video disappeared. Any links to the video took you to a blank page saying it was unavailable because of a copyright claim. Usually with really popular videos, though, YouTube resolves this quickly to avoid negative attention, but this was down for a while and then it stayed down. What's going on here? Let's look into this a bit. "This video is no longer available due "to a claim by Pro Sportority Ltd. doing business as Minute Media." That's what dba means, by the way. Aren't I clever? Minute Media is a publisher of digital content. One of their brands is Mental Floss, a digital news and entertainment site, which also has a YouTube channel. So did he use some of their copyrighted images or the YouTube channel's footage? Well, it doesn't look like the channel has ever covered Floyd Collins. The Mental Floss web site, however, has. In 2018 Lucas Reilly wrote a story about the 1925 cave rescue that captivated the nation. Uh-oh. This article is an extremely detailed summary of the story of Floyd Collins. Uh-oh! In fact, it makes the unique choice of covering the events hour by hour. Oh, he didn't. He did not just-- - Floyd tried to breathe calmly. His left arm was pinned underneath his torso, his right wedged by the rock ceiling above. Beneath him, sharp crystal shards dug into his skin. When he did attempt to shuffle, more gravel and rocks would tumble from above and plow onto his feet. "He should try untying his shoes," said one. "Ah, no, we should send him down with a contortionist who's got a mallet and a chisel." "Hey, how about using dynamite?" One clique formed insisting that it was a great idea. Well, they started arguing about gas torches, but by far the most common suggestion, of course, was amputation. So he removes his suit, drapes himself in coveralls, and grabs a lamp. [clapping] - Whoa! - But Floyd didn't really answer any of his questions. In fact, he was incoherent. So Miller took a few mental notes and he left. Somehow Homer mustered the strength to altogether wrench the cord from the other men's hands. The rope went slack. Homer, Floyd, and the rope lay limp on the cave floor. No progress had been made. HBOMB: For the first time in YouTube history, a copyright claim is real. Internet Historian stole Lucas Reilly's article, used it as a script for a 70-minute video, gave him no credit, and uploaded it for money. But let's consider an alternative explanation, just to be fair. This was a real historical event. They're both telling the same true story so of course they're going to be similar. That's a good point. You're very smart. But there's a difference between using the same sources or recounting the same history and telling the exact same story in the same way using the same words, and if going hour by hour didn't make it obvious, the fact he copies the rest of the structure makes it blatant. The opening which covers Floyd entering the cave even uses the same image used at that point in the article. Soon after when Floyd first becomes trapped, the article flashes back to Floyd's childhood. The video copies this narrative framing and does the same thing, flashing back after he's trapped, and even tells the same anecdotes about his past. - Floyd has been exploring the caves of Kentucky since he was merely six years old, and as he grew up, he gained a reputation for being a very daring caver. He would dive into some hole on one side of town and emerge miles away on someone else's property. HBOMB: This one's interesting because the words are quite a bit different. Instead it's copying the article visually by having him literally pop his head out like a gopher. You know how in the previous segments I've been showing all the really obvious examples to get the point across? "Man in Cave" is over an hour long. If I showed the funniest examples, we'd be here all day. - Gerald knew more about cave rescues than most. In fact, just that summer prior, he had helped untangle Floyd from a different snag. - Whoa! - Everybody was shaken by the experience. Burdon fainted as he crawled towards the exit. Most of the other men had to be carried away. "World of Tanks" is not only the best game I have ever played-- HBOMB: Okay, that one was a joke. Sorry, I couldn't resist. There are some differences between the two, though. Internet Historian's video has mistakes. He gets the weight of the rock pinning Collins' leg down wrong. He says it's 33 pounds while the article lists 27. Every credible source I can find has it listed as around 27 pounds, give or take, and the Wikipedia page lists 26. The rock weighs about 26 ½ pounds. How do I know this? We still have it. We've weighed it. It's 26 ½ pounds. How did he make this mistake when all his sources-- including the one he was plagiarizing-- say otherwise? It's almost like when he was loosely rewriting the script to seem more original, he accidentally changed some of the facts of the story. Or maybe it was on purpose. It's slightly harder to say it was plagiarized now. I mean, how could he be ripping anyone off if he got the facts wrong? "Man in Cave" is also a little confused about the fucking cave? In 1917 Collins discovered a beautiful cave full of stalagmites on his family's land which he named Crystal Cave. They tried to turn it into a tourist attraction but this didn't pan out. He then tried looking for a new cave on his neighbor's property and this is the cave he got trapped in while clearing out, which was later named Sand Cave once he became trapped. This is covered in the article as well as being common knowledge about this story. Internet Historian treats them like the same one cave and calls it Sand Cave. So now the story has insane shit, like Floyd advertising Sand Cave to tourists which literally never happened because he died in it before it could open for business. That's what the story is about! This isn't nitpicking. Okay, it is, but this is the cave in "Man in Cave." It would be nice if he got the cave right. This is the place most people my age are going to learn about Floyd Collins and it's a shame they're learning history that's not true. Here's a funny thing I noticed because I'm one of those weird cave people. Uh, we prefer the term "amateur speleologists." But he keeps using this picture to represent the grotto Floyd is trying to reach. - On the other side is this. Until he found this hollow. HBOMB: This isn't a picture of that hollow. There are no pictures. No one's even seen it, apart from Floyd, and because I'm insane, I recognize this picture. It's from the web site of Crystal Onyx cave in Kentucky which is about 12 miles away from the Mammoth Cave system the video is talking about. This cave is often confused with other nearby caves because the names are similar and they're so close by, so it's an understandable mistake to use this image instead of one from the right cave system, but I do find it really funny a picture being used to represent part of Mammoth is from a site whose title reads, "We're not mammoth." Like, they tried to warn you, buddy. And I saw people congratulate this video for the effort that went into it. I assume they're talking about the animation which is pretty decent. Internet Historian's team did a good job with this, especially considering its length, a compliment I've received myself many times. That's one reason this is all so disappointing. This could have been good and not been stolen. We can do both. Reilly is a really talented writer and researcher. He was the articles editor for Mental Floss back when it had a physical magazine with folks who worked on it calling him its beating heart. Reilly is a very well-regarded, award-winning writer with a skill for telling gripping stories, and I can tell Internet Historian agrees with me, so it's a shame he gave him no credit for his work, even as it contributed to what must have been a huge amount of income for him, doubtless more than Reilly ever made for writing it in the first place. Internet Historian sometimes cites his sources when they come up. He'll have text saying where it's from, and that's a good practice, but this makes his choice to never cite or mention Reilly obvious. He's trying to hide it. Sometimes the way he tries to look like he's done research and wrote this video himself is very funny. There's a bit where he's reading the article out loud as usual, then pauses and acts like he's about to read something else and just keeps reading the fucking article. - Near the final squeeze, large cracks had formed. The ceiling was beginning to droop. All right, so the following is a recounting of events from one of Carmichael's men, Casey Jones. Casey and another worker spend about an hour in the cave but he heard Collins moaning ahead, so he pushed himself on. He managed to make it through the squeeze and he arrived at the ten-foot pit. Seeing Floyd trapped, he tried to ignore the pebbles that were tumbling behind him. - Internet Historian wants you to think he's telling you a story he made after doing a lot of research. He doesn't want to read you a good story he found. He wants to pretend he wrote it. But this--the obvious fact it's plagiarism and it's wrong-- that's the easy stuff. What's interesting is what happened next. I've been standing on my feet for agest. I'm gonna have a sit down. Ah, that's better. This is my living room where I keep all the books I pretend to have read and also my board games. Yes, I'm one of those people. I even have a board game about caving. Uh, this is quite hard to find nowadays so I had to get it from Germany. They love board games there because they're not afraid to look one another in the eye. I can't wait to spiel this cave game. For my money, that's the best joke I've ever written. Hold on. We're doing a video about plagiarism. Let's, uh-- let's get this set up properly. Uh--ah-hah! But then... [light switch clicks] Ah! This is a whole style of video now, and by style I mean one person did it first and then a bunch of boring people ripped her off. Stealing from lots of places is inspiration, but stealing from one place is plagiarism unless you call it the BreadTube Style, and then it's fine. I don't even know what a BreadTube is. I just woke up one day and was told that I was in it and that people hated me for being in it. I don't even know what it is. Anyway, when someone from Mental Floss noticed the plagiarism and filed a copyright claim, Internet Historian tweeted about the video's disappearance but in a kinda suspicious way. He obviously knew why it got claimed but he chose not to say why so his audience could freely speculate amongst themselves for hundreds of posts about all the ridiculous reasons YouTube takes things down. Some of them noticed Pro Sportority is based out of Israel and got anti-Semetic about it. But ironically, so it's fine. What an interesting audience he's built. All this needless speculation has helped to create a smokescreen. People assumed the video was taken down for a bullshit reason and there is no clear explanation, when there is one and he didn't give it to them on purpose. Internet Historian has taken videos down before. A lot of them, in fact. Like, dozens. None of these seem to be because of plagiarism. He says he just doesn't think they're very good anymore. I think he got a bit of, uh, what we in the business call "Troll's Remorse." Oh, maybe this video was inappropriate and normal people would judge me for it. And he got rid of that video that's just a bunch of Tucker Carlson clips, and reading a hentai in an extremely racist Japanese man impression. That's not advertiser-friendly. And we want those "World of Tanks" bucks, don't we? But since his fans are, you know, normal cool people, they saved all those old videos and there are several channels dedicated purely to reuploading all his old, inconvenient stuff, and some of them tried to reupload "Man in Cave" and instantly got hit with a copyright claim as well, because the video is in YouTube's system now. Here's a screenshot that was posted of one of these claims. "The infringing video blatantly "and unlawfully plagiarized verbatim text from our article "and the placement, pacing, and presentation of content is almost identical to the article." Speaking from experience, normally claims aren't anywhere near this detailed. The article's owners are not messing around. This is how we found out about the plagiarism. Kat was browsing her drama reddits as she does a lot and she saw a post with this smoking gun in it. It's amazing how easy it is for a story like this to not get spread to a wider audience, even when it's for a video this popular. The furthest the story has got so far is the thread proving it just sitting in a random subreddit with, like, 90 upvotes. If Kat hadn't seen this I wouldn't be talking about it and you wouldn't know it happened, either. So, thanks, Kat. You're so cool. I love you. Most YouTubers in this situation would fight a copyright claim publicly, arguing their case where everyone could see it, which would force YouTube to take notice and do something about it. People @ YouTube on Twitter all the time and get responses and see things fixed. I once tweeted randomly about an old test video I deleted getting copyright claimed somehow. I didn't even @ YouTube about it, and they still found it and asked me for more information. They're pretty diligent about responding to people messaging them on social media with problems. Internet Historian can't start a public case about this because he's in the wrong. He stole an article for money, and bringing attention to it would just broadcast to his audience he did 70 minutes of plagiarism. Right now not many people know about this although some of his viewers have noticed how strange it is he's avoiding talking about it. Why isn't he telling his audience who to get mad at and go after? Why isn't he giving his completely normal fans marching orders? Uh, because he ripped someone off and he doesn't want you to find out. That's why. In May, two months after the video disappeared, a new version was uploaded, claiming to be a reupload of the previous one. But then two days later, it went private. On the Internet Historian reddit post about the reupload, the big guy himself wrote about there being some complications, again being vague about what's going on. This new version would remain private for about two months. It's not clear why. In July while I was making this video, it finally came back up, but only unlisted. You can watch it but it doesn't show up in a search or your recommendations. You can't watch this video now unless you know it exists and go looking for it and get the link from somewhere else. This new version has quite a few changes. It opens with this new clip explaining what happened but in the vaguest way possible. - Sorry for the reupload, fellas. The original got copy-struck. HBOMB: Again, we have a comment about it being copy-struck but no explanation why. He's still hiding what happened, in a pretty sneaky way this time. You see, this graphic of the copy strike has been edited. The notice on the video actually looks like this. It shows who made the copyright claim, but obviously he doesn't want people looking up the company behind it because then people will find out why the video is unavailable. So now he's editing screenshots to try to hide what he did. The reupload uses mostly the same animation and tells the same story but lots of the voice over has been rewritten to try to sound less like the article. Here's a section I showed you earlier. - His left arm was pinned underneath his torso, his right wedged by the rock ceiling above. HBOMB: Now here's the HD remaster. - His right arm is wedged against the roof of the cave and his left is stuck in place underneath his torso. HBOMB: He flipped the order he talked about the arms and reworded how he talked about them. He hasn't really solved the overall plagiarism. He just changed the words more than last time. - Beneath him, sharp crystal shards dug into his skin. He can feel the sharp crystals on the ground poking into his back. Floyd tried to breathe calmly in the concentrated dark. Floyd took slow, steady breaths. So he removes his suit, drapes himself in coveralls, and grabs a lamp. Miller thinks for a moment... Then says, "Yeah, all right." He grabs a lantern-- all: Whoa! [booming] HBOMB: In the past we've seen people reword stuff they stole and hope they don't get caught, but now we're getting a special treat. We get to watch someone go back and try to change it even more. Like, no, we already know you stole this now. You can't take it back and pretend you didn't. - But Floyd didn't really answer any of his questions. In fact, he was incoherent. So Miller took a few mental notes and he left. But Floyd didn't really answer any of his questions. There's nothing Miller can do. So he hurriedly turns around. Homer, Floyd, and the rope lay limp on the cave floor. Floyd fell back down. Homer, Miller, Burdon, and the other three men were flat on their backs. HBOMB: I wanna get across how much worse written this version is. Reilly's article has a chilling section about Floyd spending an entire day trapped, screaming for help. "He began a tormenting routine: "Sleep, wake, scream; sleep, wake scream; "sleep, wake, scream. "Minutes melted into hours. His voice disappeared. His arms tingled numb. Pain radiated up his ankle." This is vivid storytelling. I can feel myself going insane even imagining being trapped there for 25 hours. It's a really good passage. Internet Historian liked it, too, so he stole it. - He's at the start of a very tiring loop. Sleep, wake, yell. - [yelling] - Sleep, wake, yell. - Hello? Hours passed. His voice gave in. Arms tingled number, pain radiating up his ankle. Here he remained in the dark for the next 23 hours. HBOMB: Now, in the remake, he has to tell the same story but with completely new words. So we get this. - So there's Floyd in the dark yelling out for help. Yelling into the pitch black. After a while his voice would give out and he would have to sleep to recuperate. He would then wake sometime later, remember where he is, and begin yelling again for help. Here he remained in the dark for the next 23 hours. HBOMB: It's just not as effective. The feeling of being stuck in that cycle for dozens of hours is gone. It's quite difficult to take a story you got from an article and tell it again without using any of the words you liked. - Floyd has been exploring the caves of Kentucky since he was merely six years old. HBOMB: Oh, I guess I can't mention Kentucky now. That makes it obvious. Better re-record. - Floyd started his caving career at the tender age of six. HBOMB: Some of the changes give away how uncreative he was-- just how much he relied on Reilly's work even with the most basic shit. He used his words about someone's hands being bruised and purple. - Parts were harder to navigate than before, especially now with their bruised and purple hands. HBOMB: So in the new version, this had to be changed. - Parts were harder to navigate than before, doubly so with their bruised and rock-shredded hands. HBOMB Why would you not just write a new description of some hands in the first place? This is so lazy. What is wrong with this guy? And despite all these changes, the factual errors about the cave and the rock are still the same. It's like this version was made to annoy me. It's especially hard to make major changes when you already made the animations. It's almost impossible to remove Lucas' influence without doing so much work, it's not even worth it. For example, the gopher section has been completely removed since it was directly copying an anecdote from the article. He's replaced it with a new segment which is just C-tier reference humor. - He would go off on his own, disappearing into the caves for many hours at a time. Have you seen that movie, "The Descent?" It was a lot like that. HBOMB: Holy crap, Lois. This is just like that movie. Some of Reilly's article was too short and simple to meaningfully change so those parts have just been taken out. - And all they could do was leave for now and reassess. Everybody was shaken by the experience. Burdon fainted as he crawled towards the exit. Most of the other men had to be carried away. And all they could do was leave for now and rest. [record hissing and popping] HBOMB: Since it can't use any of the clever words it stole anymore, the whole thing's been dumbed down. - Now, Floyd was trapped in a supine position. So Floyd is trapped laying down like this. HBOMB: Imagine sitting down to watch a favorite show and the streaming services replaced it with a different cut where all the characters talk like idiots now. - You made me look bad and that's not good. HBOMB: I feel bad for the people who enjoyed the original. People in the comments and on the reddit page are asking why he changed it and why all their favorite lines are missing. They don't know why because he didn't tell them. Why is the new version of the video unlisted and not public? Well, it could be because it's a lot worse, but mainly by being so much worse it kind of gives away what he did. This video's fans obviously want it back up but if it goes back up and it's obviously much worse written now, the ten-plus million people who saw it the first time-- potentially even more than once-- will wonder why it's different and look into why and maybe find out. But if it stays down people will wonder why it's down and look into why and find out. It's like he's trying to delay the inevitable wider discovery of what he did by letting the video exist but as quietly as possible, so no one wonders where the video went but not too many people see it and notice the differences. It's a precarious situation and I don't envy him. But he does deserve it. Right now he looks like a plagiarist and a liar and a coward who's willing to ruin his own video and let it gather dust unlisted in the corner to try and hide what he did. To be fair, the new version now actually cites Reilly's article. Whenever a section was too difficult to change but too significant to remove, he keeps it in and cites the article at the bottom. In the original there were several places where he quoted the same sources Reilly quoted and in this version just to be safe he also cites the article to make it clear that's where he got it. The description of this version also acknowledges the talented Mr. Reilly and links to his work. This would have been cool if he'd done all this the first time and not tried to hide it, but this is like if Filip reuploaded a very slightly changed version of the plagiarized videos and just put, "Thanks to Boomstick Gaming," in the description. It's too late to hide what he's done, though that hasn't stopped him from trying. Oh, late-breaking update. A couple weeks ago the "Man in Cave" reupload became public again. I wondered how he would stop people noticing its weird changes. Then days later, he uploaded this year's new video so people's attention is onto the next thing now. The only people who really noticed the video coming back are the, uh, hardcore fans. This was a real clever boy move. If I wanted to sneak my weirdly changed reupload back out without too many people noticing, this is how I'd do it, and all I'd have to do next was hope no one ever makes the video I'm making right now. Oops. Right. My eyes have gone fuzzy so it's time to get back up. Ah, my knees really hurt, too. Okay, I threw out an IKEA POANG to make room for this beanbag chair and it's rubbish. I love sacks full of balls but not this much. Don't get a beanbag chair. Oh, God! Jesus! [microphone rustling] Hey, the mic's still out of frame! That's nice. That never happens. I dunno, a proper apology would be nice, and maybe an explanation for why it happened. As far as I can tell this is the only video where he's just ripped something off like this, I hope. You know, why did he do it for this one? Really, I just wanna know where he got 33 pounds. I'm a simple man with simple needs. Yorkshire puddings with a little bit of gravy on top and explanations for discrepancies in numbers. My parents never took me to see a psychologist so I assume that's normal. In the meantime, I'm very happy to accept the award for jacksfilm's second best video of 2022. The version from 2022 is gone. Get it off the list, Jack. Bump me up! Now, what's the first place one? And how do I destroy it? Oh, it's the Steamed Hams one where an animator did, like, a million different styles. That one's really good. And it even tells you which styles it's doing and when in the description. This cartoon cites its sources better than half the stuff I covered in this video. Well, I guess I'll settle for second place. This time. So, there we have it. A bunch of examples of plagiarism, why it happens, why it's wrong, and all the ways it can result in destructive results. With these four examples, I think I'm ready to reach some kind of conclusion. Just don't touch the screen or move the mouse a-- [exhales sharply] There's no way you haven't seen the run time. You've probably guessed what's coming. "Where's the part where he turns out "to be on a green screen and the video's about someone else?" Congratulations. You figured it out. You know all my tricks. The student becomes the master. Master of shit. It was real the whole time! [screams] Last time I wanted to research one thing and tripped and learned too much. This time I had the breakdown and worked backwards. We understand why this shit is wrong now and the damage it can do. The piles of money people make from stealing other people's words and ideas and work. But there's one group more important than historians or journalists or anyone else with a real job, and that's gay people. You know what's worse than stealing from established journalists who in the end are doing okay? Stealing from small queer writers or creators from marginalized groups who weren't even paid for their work in the first place. Stealing from the writings of dead people who passed away doing the activism you pretend to do. Stealing from the very people who fund your videos. The people you claim to be defending. This video is about James Somerton. [orchestrated horror music sting] ♪ ♪ James Somerton is a gay YouTuber with a degree in business administration who frequently refers to himself as a marketing expert. - I'm a YouTuber, marketing expert, and film school grad. I'm also gay. HBOMB: Cool. In 2014 he briefly made videos about geek stuff reviewing Marvel movies and so on. Several years later when video essays became a popular format, he started making those, with a focus on queer characters in media and LGBT film history, and occasionally anime, such as this really successful video about the fascism of "Attack on Titan" which has mysteriously disappeared. Where did it go? I wonder what happened there. Somerton is doing great by the standards of queer YouTube in terms of views, ad revenue, sponsorships, Patreon income, and donations on his live streams. The man is doing extremely well financially in a field where people generally struggle to do this full time. In many ways James Somerton is a success story our entire community should be proud of. Not to rain on this pride parade, but whenever I saw a video by James in my recommendations, I would have to stop watching because it quickly became clear to me he didn't know what he was talking about. The first video of his I ever saw was about Disney's relationship with the queer community and in it he claims Disney set up an event called Gay Night and claimed to give the profits to charity but actually kept the money. - During the 1990s Disney's parks also tried profiting from their LGBT fans by creating Gay Night-- a one-night-a-year event for the parks where LGBT folk would be the main guests. It was a big hit. Initially the revenue was all to be donated to the Aid for AIDS Foundation but by 1995 donations to the charity had dried up. Disney was keeping all of the profits for themselves. He's misremembering a really well-known event. Uh, Gay Not was not set up by Disney. They didn't sanction it. A travel agency rented the park out for the night and they kept the money they were supposed to have donated. This is a bit sloppy but then he claims the more progressive CEO Bob Iger expanded Gay Nights into full Gay Day events. - Under his stewardship Disney switched from the once-a-year Gay Night at Disney parks to the full Gay Days event, rebranding the occasion to a more family friendly affair. Now, obviously Iger couldn't rebrand something Disney wasn't doing and had no control over. Gay Days is actually a completely separate event which is also unofficial and unsanctioned by Disney. Also it started before Gay Night and 15 years before Iger became CEO. It's kind of impressive how wrong this was. He's giving fucking Disney credit for the actions of independent queer people. It really downplays the work that people put into organizing stuff like Gay Days. It's super disappointing, honestly. The first official Disney pride night happened this year, three years after he made this video. That's how far off the mark he was on this. Whenever I saw another Somerton video in the wild, I'd give it another shot and quickly have to give up again. In his "Yuri on Ice" video he claimed the show never went into explicitly gay territory because it aired early in the evening on Japanese television and there's a law on the books preventing showing homosexuality that early. - Japan has certain laws such as what time of night a queer-centric show can actually be aired on TV. This show was slated for an earlier time slot in the night because it's first and foremost a sports anime. In order for the quiet part to be as loud as the creator wanted, it would have to have had a much later time slot than the network wanted. - This is a common myth made up by western fans of the show to explain why it wasn't gayer. "They wanted to, but it was illegal." How convenient. But that law doesn't work that way and even if it did, "Yuri on Ice" aired at 2:30 a.m. in the morning, the gay witching hour. They could do whatever they wanted. But now I see people continuing to spread this lie, linking Somerton's video as proof it's true. James is helping to reinforce misinformation by not checking whatever he hears on Twitter before he spreads it, which is a bit concerning. Basically, I can't really watch James's videos because I care a lot about the stuff he talks about and I can tell he's not really checked what he's saying. And that really gets to me. Normally in this situation I would just not watch his videos and live my life but over the last couple of years Somerton has been repeatedly accused of plagiarism. In response Somerton has claimed he never ripped off anyone and the times he did weren't even that bad anyway. .I--If I have been plagiarizing videos... I wouldn't have a channel. I would be called out all the time by people saying, "He stole my shit." But I don't plagiarize. The one time that there actually was plagiarism, it was by mistake and I fixed it immediately, and it is no longer in my video. And the other two accusations, one was silly-- - That's an interesting way of saying you didn't do it. - Uh, "When three or four separate videos have three or four separate plagiarism controversies attached-- There's not three or four. - Somerton is telling the truth here. There are not three or four accusations. Whenever these allegations are brought up, however, A fan of his will normally pop up to accuse them of harassing a gay man and claim this is all part of a deliberate homophobic campaign against a queer creator. And as an open bisexual who knows what the internet is like, I'm vigilant to the possibility the 'phobes are making a fuss about nothing again to take down a fellow gay boy. It does happen. So keeping this possibility in mind, I looked at what he'd been accused of for myself, weighed up all the evidence as objectively as I could, and it quickly became clear he did do it. He's a massive plagiarist. In fact there's a bunch of stuff no one else has found yet. He's just convinced his audience to attack people when they notice. And the worst part is they do it in the name of defending a gay creator when many of the people he has financially benefited from stealing from are queer themselves. I've never seen anyone try to put together a full explanation of what exactly happened here because his fans will threaten you into silence for trying which means there is no solid body of evidence to point to so James can freely lie about what happened without anyone to contradict him. I'd like to take the opportunity to go through what happened here so people can see what happened without it being filtered through James and make up their own minds. So let's clear all this up once and for all, shall we? [Masakazu Sugimori's "It Can't End Here"] In July 2020 Somerton uploaded "Evil Queens: A Queer Look at Disney History--" a one-hour and eight-minute video about Disney's relationship with the queer community. This original upload of the video has since been deleted for reasons which will become clear As the video reached its audience, some viewers began noticing similarities between the video and the book, "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens" by Sean P. Griffin. James opens with a present-day example of Disney being bad about gay content on their platforms and then says, "We need to explore Disney's history of doing this." The next 45 minutes are almost word-for-word taken from Griffin's book. - Fantasy is often described as a method of escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday reality. Living in a society that has outlawed homosexual desire, categorized it as a medical dis-- Smee is constantly at Hook's side and although Hook is the manacle master of the relationship, Smee is obviously-- His prospect brighten, though, when he overhears of a young man cub who's wandering alone in the jungle. He whispers to himself... - How delightful. - And vows to arrange a rendezvous with the boy. HBOMB: Most of this video is just James reading a book into the camera. - In the number, Ursula uses various methods to convince Ariel to sell her soul, from looking sorry and saintlike to shimmying madly in excitement. HBOMB: Throughout this video James uses parts of the book where Griffin quotes someone else, like here. This is from an essay by Cynthia Erb. James just keeps reading and doesn't tell you he's quoting anyone, and even changes it slightly. Almost like he knows it's wrong and is trying to get away with it. - In its use of vocalist Pat Carroll's ability to slide up and down the musical register, from shrieks to baritones, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is an unmistakable send-up of the campy female impersonation numbers of underground queer films in the early days of Hollywood. HBOMB: When he rips off Griffin quoting more well-known writers like Susan Sontag, he reads them out and puts the quote on the screen. It looks like when he thinks he can get away with it, he passes obscure writers' words off as his own. He's already stealing from Griffin. Why stop there? Somerton reuses a section of the book where Griffin quotes gay journalist and activist Jack Babuscio who passed away of AIDS in 1990. Griffin explains who he is and discusses his quote, mentioning by name repeatedly. You know, the way you quote someone and discuss what they said. Somerton removes all mention and discussion of Babuscio but he still steals everything he says. - And amping up that depiction to an 11. Camp by focusing on the outward appearance of a role implies that roles and in particular gender roles are superficial-- a matter of style. HBOMB: He then skips a few paragraphs since the book discusses what Babuscio meant by this and that would give away James didn't write it. I didn't even think it was possible but somehow James managed to steal two queer authors' words at once. He copied a book word-for-word and even removed mention of the people being quoted so it sounded like he was saying their words, too. That's not something you do by mistake. That's something you do when you want to take the credit, which he does. In future videos, James talks about "Evil Queens" as if it was all his ideas. - But other movies require a bit more digging. In "Evil Queens" I talked about the queerness of the '90s renaissance Disney movies, especially "Aladdin" and "The Lion King." When I first mentioned this to people, they thought I was crazy. Then I explained it to them and they came around to seeing it my way. HBOMB: And everyone clapped. James claims this video is his work and a weird, bold new approach to media when it's word-for-word from a 20-year-old book. It's ridiculous. He appears to have find-and-replaced words like "gay" and "homosexual" to "queer" or "LGBT." - Another narrative strand in Disney's films that would have a great appeal to the queer community is the tale of the outsider-- --Labeled it as a sin against God and allowed and often encouraged violent acts against LGBT people, queer culture has unsurprisingly embraced-- Queer culture-- particularly gay male culture-- has long held a fascination with fantasy. The close association of gay men to the world of fantasy has attributed to some of the most common insults for gay men in western culture. HBOMB: Somerton never mentioned the book or its author anywhere. There was nothing in the credits, the description, no citations, no mention of his name-- nothing. When YouTubers use a book as a major source of research, usually they mention it or put it in the background on their set. He did film himself next to a book but it's not "Tinker Bells." It's "Disney War--" a commonly-cited source in videos covering Disney stuff. He's trying to look like he did research without giving away where he got all the words he's saying. Eventually a twitter user who noticed the similarities started comparing the works closely and wrote a thread showcasing hundreds and hundreds of words-worth of examples of the video directly copying Griffin's book. She eventually asked him why he didn't credit it and he responded that he hadn't started crediting source materials yet when he made the video. He then finally added a reference to the book to the description almost two months after it had been uploaded. He'd gone with the Internet Historian method. Put an acknowledgment of your theft in the description later and pretend that makes stealing okay. The thread's author thanked him for admitting it but pointed out adding a line of text near the bottom of the description is deceptive, considering the sheer amount of writing he copied. It looked like he was trying to get away with it by hiding some text somewhere no one would see. In response he did the professional adult thing and blocked her and started tweeting vaguely about being wrongly accused of plagiarism, even though he always credits authors in the video description, which is a very funny thing to say when he didn't do that until the person he's currently complaining about pointed out he didn't. In just over a day James went from saying, "Whoops, "I'll put his name in the description. Learning as I go," smiley face, to, "I always credit authors in video descriptions." "Fuck off with your accusations." He also made a YouTube community post with the same text as the tweets. However, this turned out to be a Streisandian bargain because people started asking what he was being criticized for. Here's where it gets really interesting. James responded to one of them with a new example. Something like this had already happened before. James had made a video called "Unrequited: The History of Queer-Baiting" and this video had also been accused of stealing from a documentary called "The Celluloid Closet." So this wasn't even the first time he'd been caught doing something like this. The author of the thread noticed this comment and looked at the description of the "Unrequited" video and there was a note hidden towards the bottom thanking "The Celluloid Closet" in a familiarly vague way. Somerton had been caught stealing something before and he tried to get away with it the same way, by hiding something in the description. The comments section was full of people saying thanking the documentary in the description wasn't good enough since he copied a shit ton of it. She then tweeted she was considering comparing "The Celluloid Closet" and "Unrequited" side-by-side like she'd done with "Evil Queens." It looks like James saw this tweet and realized someone was about to prove he'd done plagiarism in multiple videos because suddenly he set both "Unrequited" and "Evil Queens" to private so no one could watch them and made a post announcing this. The thread's author mentioned this happened and included these screenshots of the announcement. Let's put this on a timeline. This tweet came almost exactly 12 hours after saying she was thinking of checking the other video. In her screenshot the announcement was only 11 hours old. James hid "Unrequited" within an hour of someone saying they were thinking of checking it for plagiarism. That's not suspect at all. In his post he explained he was the victim of a targeted harassment campaign, had received death threats, and he hid these videos because he didn't want people who want him dead seeing them. In the comments section he also claimed the thread's author had had been harassing and attacking him for the last 48 hours on Twitter and her followers had been hunting down his home and work addresses. Any harassment or threats Somerton may have received are unconscionable and wrong. I want to clarify right now that if anyone harasses Somerton on my behalf, they are worse than him and will not see the light of Heaven. I must underscore, however, the original author was not unnecessarily rude in her criticisms, was straightforward and polite when speaking to James directly, and when he talked about harassment, she was very clear where she stood on that as well. Somerton accused her of personally stalking him anyway and starting a harassment campaign against him, threatening his life, and trying to track down his address with her obscure thread of tweets. The author's account was very small at the time with less than 150 followers and barely anyone had seen the thread until Somerton accused it of trying to kill him. Instead of addressing his mistake head on and holding himself accountable, Somerton span a narrative about how the most polite critic he could have possibly gotten was the head of a targeted campaign against him, while trying to hide the evidence. On the other hand, the author of this thread has received a lot of harassment from Somerton's fans over the years to the point they eventually changed their username and locked their account. You literally can't see these tweets anymore. When I managed to contact her with questions, she asked me to reference her as little as possible because she's afraid of it starting again. Somerton's fans believed they were defending him from someone threatening his life, remember, so they were pretty fucking vicious about it, and that is what he was telling them. When he made a video addressing the plagiarism, he titled it, "About Those Death Threats." - Somebody watched my "Evil Queens" video-- my video about Disney-- and realized that there are quotes in the video that are directly taken from the book "Tinker Bells and Evil Queens." They went ahead and started accusing me of plagiarism. Somebody read their thread and decided to message me some death threats as you do on the internet. I think she has something like 154 Twitter followers, something like that, and... Some of the people of that 154 decided, "Hey, let's threaten to kill him." But, yeah, that's the situation. That's why I was-- that's why I-- someone doxxed me and threatened to kill me. HBOMB: He claimed he simply forgot to credit the book which made up the vast majority of his script. - I'm kind of flighty when a video is done on putting the credits together so I don't always remember to, uh, put everything in the credits. That's kind of been a problem with me in the past. That has happened before. HBOMB: He then compared his video to serious documentaries and how they're often based on books. - You know, like a lot of documentaries, they're based on books that come out and so, yes, going forward I just want you to know my videos may well be based off of books. HBOMB: Um, normally you get permission to adapt people's books into documentaries before you make them and release them to the public for money. It's really hard not to see this for what it is-- a guy making up a series of bad excuses after being caught plagiarizing. Let's just think about this for a second. If James was honestly adapting a book, why would he film himself on his set for an hour sitting next to a different book and not even think to mention the book he's adapting even exists? Somerton went out of his way not to mention his primary source so people wouldn't read it and realize he copied it. - So, yeah, I guess what I'm just trying to say is that, yes, there are quotes in the video and sections of the video that are taken from the book. It's not entirely based off of it. There's, mm, you know-- most of what's in the video is my own original content. How does he explain what he did to the quote from Babuscio? He doesn't even try. - And if you don't want to support me anymore because... Not everything is... Entirely my original thoughts, then... That's fine. I never have had the time to do that amount of research for a YouTube video. HBOMB: This video and all his YouTube posts about the plagiarism accusations were deleted soon after. I think Somerton realized there was no decent explanation for what he had done so trying to explain it made him look worse. Instead he started tweeting that he'd sent the video to the author to ask for permission to put the video up again. He was finally asking permission to do what he already did months ago. I'm curious how he explained all of this to Griffin. It sounds like Griffin asked to be credited properly because the old version of "Evil Queens" never came back up. Instead, a new one was uploaded. This version is exactly the same as the old one except it has "Based on the book by Sean Griffin" hastily added to the opening credits. In the span of a few days, the video graduated from not acknowledging the book anywhere to using it as a major source of "research," to finally being based on it. In the years since this happened, Somerton has come up with new lies about it to try to make himself look better. On a recent live stream someone brought up the old allegations and his version of the story is that he always had permission from Griffin before he even made the video. - For the "Evil Queens" one, like I said, that was based directly on the book. That was word-for-word from the book. And that's why before doing the video I got permission from the author to do it. And--but I did have full permission from him before making the video. HBOMB: The tweet about how he literally had to take the video down and ask permission afterwards is still up. Anyone can fact check this. I want to observe that if this was an honest mistake, James had the opportunity to be honest about it and chose to lie. Looks a bit like a dishonest mistake to me. He also pretends he credited Griffin in the description in the first place and the person who criticized him simply didn't notice. - In the original version of "Evil Queens," the citation was in the description of the video and not in the video itself, and that was the issue. They didn't read the description. Um, and so I took down the video and I put it back up. And somebody didn't see... Didn't acknowledge the "based on the book by" in the comments so I took the video down and put it back up with the author in the opening titles. HBOMB: Again, his reply to her where he acknowledged he hadn't and was going to is still up. For reasons I don't understand, James likes to tell obvious lies that make him look worse. This is why I felt it was important to make this video documenting the evidence. Currently the only version of events people are likely to hear is his. Even if it's easily disproven, who's disproving it? The person who noticed the plagiarism in the first place was threatened into non-existence by his fans, leaving his lies as the last story standing. There's also another reason why I'm not buying the, "It was based on a book," excuse. - And then there was a video I made about Disney that was based directly on a book that I got the permission from the author to make the video. - Let's take that at face value. Okay, so this video is based on this book. Based on it, word-for-word. - That was word-for-word from the book. HBOMB: This is a lie, of course. He changed quotes so it sounds like he's saying them, and altered a bunch of other words to try to make it sound different, but let's pretend it was for a second. Is it possible he really was just trying to adapt the book? James insists this is the case. But at this point, I'm not sure I can trust him when he says things. The author of the thread was just comparing the video to the one book she noticed and mentions around the 53-minute mark he moves on to stuff not covered widely by the book, like Mulan. - Disney's "Mulan" is-- however unintentionally-- a queer narrative. - First of all it's a little bit weird that his video word-for-word adapting the book stops adapting it and starts winging it part way through. But let me ask you this. Wouldn't it be really fucking bad for him if it turned out he also stole the new stuff from somewhere else? Yeah, it is bad! Because he did! - Disney's "Mulan" is-- however unintentionally-- a queer narrative that explores both gender identity and sexual orientation. It is not--as it is often simplistically described-- a story about a disempowered woman who becomes empowered by masculinity. - It's almost impressive how hard he leaned into something he knew was a lie people could check. James, what were you thinking? What was your plan here? The section on "Mulan" is taken from an article at Shondaland by Asian-American trans person Jes Tom about how the film speaks to their experience with gender. This section is almost word-for-word stolen from this article. - Mulan as Ping progressively works their way toward achieving manhood which is defined by catching fish, carrying heavy things, and of course wielding a big stick. HBOMB: He makes a few changes. Since this article is one specific queer trans person writing about how they related to the film, Somerton removes their personal experiences and moves onto the next sentence. - First in "Honor to Us All," the village women attempt to sculpt Mulan into an ideal woman and more specifically, an ideal wife. Mulan fails the test of womanhood when her meeting with the Matchmaker goes horribly awry. HBOMB: Sometimes, though, he keeps the stories in and makes a slight change. - Mulan's gender journey over the course of the movie feels very familiar to many trans and non-binary people. HBOMB: Jesus, is he really doing this instead of just crediting the person he got all this from? Well, yeah, he does this repeatedly. - Many trans men in particular feel a kinship with Mulan as the character prepares to convince everyone they're a man-- practicing they're swagger, affecting their voice to a lower register, and scrambling to settle on a boy name. HBOMB: Somerton doesn't just steal another article when he's done stealing from a book. He deliberately changes it to avoid acknowledging the original author and their experiences so he can pretend he wrote it. Just for the record, I found an article on another web site that quotes this article by Tom. Here's how quoting works, James. It's clear who wrote this, and even links to it as well for the reader's convenience. Meanwhile, James just pasted these words into his script and read it out loud like he came up with it. - As Mulan acknowledges this failure in "Reflection," she poses a question that most trans people know intimately. "When will my reflection show who I am inside?" HBOMB: It goes without saying, you shouldn't just take stuff and reuse it without crediting them. Write your own videos, man! Well, maybe he shouldn't do that, either, because if you've been paying attention-- which you have--you notice this is the video where James said Gay Night was Lord Disney's brilliant idea because he loves gays so much. Is this part stolen? Well, kind of, yeah. Griffin's book correctly explains the Gay Night situation. The part where James talks about this is in a brief section that appears to be written by him, connecting the parts written by Griffin and Jes Tom. We're graced with a whole minute and 30 seconds actually written by James. How nice of them. It seems like when writing his own new section to connect the two writers he stole, he wrote a half-remembered story about Gay Nights he got from the same book. So the part of the video that was technically his was full of obvious mistakes. This is-- well, it's not a good sign. There's a bit of a theme developing. These guys don't know their history. They're copying it without really learning it. So when they try to be unique, they have nothing to say and none of what they say is accurate. HBOMB: Around the time he reuploaded "Evil Queens," acknowledging one of the people he plagiarized, Somerton also unprivated the Queer Baiting video with what seemed to be no changes except an acknowledgment at the top saying the stolen portion is based on "The Celluloid Closet" and its documentary counterpart. Before the video went down the description didn't look like this. It just had a special thanks hidden at the bottom, so while it was down he'd changed it. Looks like he settled on using "based on" as an excuse for stealing things when he's caught. I guess we should take a look at exactly how "based on" it is. [Masakazu Sugimori's "It Can't End Here"] "The Celluloid Closet" is a documentary about the portrayal of homosexuality across the history of Hollywood with plenty of interviews with film historians, writers, directors, and actors. The structure and narrative is based on the book of the same name by Vito Russo who passed away from complications of AIDS before the documentary could be made. The first 30 minutes of "Unrequited" is just "The Celluloid Closet." James iilluminaughtii'd it. He downloaded a copy of the documentary, loosely paraphrased it, and as footage for the video he uses the same clips the documentary used of the movies it talked about. He also reuses the more pivotal interviews, adding his own titles so it looks like he got them from somewhere else. James wants to pretend to be a scholar of film history when in fact he watched a documentary and is now pretending it's his. He never credits the documentary as a source when he's doing this. He even pulls my favorite trick which I've come to call the Blair Classic. He quotes film historian Richard Dyer. [speech played at rapid speed] HBOMB: Um, it's actually Richard Dyer. Would you like to know how I know that? - Your ideas about who you are don't just come from inside you. They come from the culture. And in this culture they come especially from the movies. HBOMB: He has his own special spin on this trick, too. - The lesbian experience isn't really expressed in the film at all and even Shirley MacLaine has gone on record in 1996 saying William Wyler-- the director-- never even spoke to her about the lesbian elements. HBOMB: What he's neglecting to mention is the place MacLaine "went on record in 1996" is "The Celluloid Closet." SHIRLEY: At the time that we made the picture, there were not real discussions about homosexuality. None of us were really aware. - James is dimly aware what he's doing is shit so he's taking baby steps to avoid it without solving the actual problem. He's remaking a documentary using their ideas and footage. JAMES: Gore Vidal-- screenwriter on the film-- said this in 1996-- GORE: Let's say these two guys when they were 15, 16 when they last saw each other, they had been lovers and now they're meeting again and the Roman wants to start it up-- HBOMB: He's flipped the footage and added weird filters to try to avoid triggering the YouTube bots, which correctly would flag this video as just large chunks of a copyrighted documentary. I doubt he's even seen many of the films he's talking about here. He's just showing clips from the documentary, quoting the documentary, or straight up repeating what it said himself. JAMES: Homosexuality is a thing, it does exist, but it's not something good moral people should talk about. - Homosexuality was finally being talked about on the screen. But only as something nice people didn't talk about. HBOMB: I know a lot of documentaries are based on books but not a lot of them are based on other documentaries someone already made, James. "Celluloid Closet" ends with a heartfelt acknowledgment of Vito Russo-- the book's late author. James' video--which takes pains to tell you was written, filmed, and edited by James Somerton-- also ends by saying it is in memory of Vito Russo. This one line of text is the only acknowledgment of Russo or the documentary in this entire fucking video. For those keeping track, this is the second gay writer and activist who tragically passed away of AIDS in 1990 whose words James has passed off as his own. There were obviously comments on the video pointing out he's just remade a documentary for 30 minutes and James' reply was to insist it was impossible not to plagiarize "The Celluloid Closet" because it's such a good history lesson. This is his main defense when this comes up. Of course it's derivative. It's the only place I could get information on the topic, which implies James has not engaged with the last 65 years of writing about gay people in the film industry. He also claims he hasn't simply posted it as his own even though he never acknowledged the documentary until someone caught him and then had to sneak one into the description. If he wanted to pay respect to his main source he could have said, "in this documentary," instead of "in 1996," but I won't say where! In this reply he says something very funny. He insists he expanded on some of the ideas in this section, implying he did some of his own work. One thing did stick out to me as new. The documentary covers "Rebel Without A Cause" but not for very long. When James talks about it, he goes on for longer in ways that aren't paraphrasing the documentary for once. So this must be the new section. All that original work that proves he didn't just rip off a documentary. Wouldn't it be really fucking funny if it turned out he stole this part, too? Oh, you bet your ass he did! JAMES: Dean's character Jim is a teenager kicking against authority and parental neglect who becomes both friend and fascination to Mineo's Plato-- a lonely younger kid. HBOMB: Despite being "based on" an existing documentary, Somerton takes a break in the middle to steal from someone else. He stole Peter Howell's article on "Rebel" word-for-word, not even trying to cover it up with find-and-replacing text this time. JAMES: If you don't pick up on that from the photo of hunky Alan Ladd that Plato has taped inside of his locker or the looks of adoration he gives Jim, it becomes abundantly clear when he makes a coded declaration of love to Jim late in the film. HBOMB: "It's not like I lifted it and posted it as my own," my foot. He changes one thing-- the current date. JAMES: Plato is obviously gay although it's easier to say that in 2020 than it was in 1955. - Peter Howell-- whose shit he jacked-- is not acknowledged in the video or the description or anywhere else and never has been. Like with Jes Tom, this section was never caught until now so he hasn't had the chance to go back and pretend it's "based on" it. It starts to feel like Somerton is just an extremely cynical loser with a business degree who-- like Blair-- and around the same time, even-- saw the success of video essays and decided to half ass his way into them by stealing shit. This is on the whole how business people see creativity. They don't respect it. It doesn't matter. It's beneath them. So they can take it and say it's theirs if they want. But at this point my interest was fully peak weed (piqued). I was just looking at the original allegations to see if they were true to check for myself, but even in just looking at those two, I found two more places he stole from that other people hadn't even found yet. And if it was that easy to find more, how deep does this rabbit hole go? These videos were made over two years ago. Did James learn his lesson from being repeatedly caught plagiarizing and at least stop? Well, his next video-- "Society and Queer Horror--" has a script supervisor in the opening credits, and this person would go on to be his co-writer for many future videos. That doesn't necessarily mean the videos are better, though. I mean, first of all, that's not how you spell supervisor. So write that down, but he even has another writer now so surely-- surely he started making his own original videos and things got better. Well, things got much, much worse. [Masakazu Sugimori's "It Can't End Here" plays terribly warped] "Society and Queer Horror--" or as the video calls itself, "Deep Cuts: Society and Queer Horror--" steals so many words from so many writers, it genuinely makes me think I've traveled to an alternate dimension where plagiarism is fine! JAMES: More girls end up in the same school and find each other essentially by cruising the hallways. Given Carrie's simultaneous status as horror film victim and monster alongside the narrative concerning her burgeoning sexuality and attraction to boys-- or when Ripley asserts authority in the team after Dallas is caught by the alien, Ash the male robot feels threatened and attempts to dominate Ripley, regaining his masculinity. It's fun, messy, mean, sad, campy, and self-aware. That's the key variable that makes "Hellraiser" so special. HBOMB: I can't show you how messed up this is without ruining this video's run time even more than I already have, so let's use visuals. Here's a transcript of all the words James says in this hour and 25-minute long video, and here's all the parts that are plagiarized. Each author's name is in a different color for convenience. This video steals roughly 10,000 words from 18 different places, and this is just the stuff I found. There could be more! A truly staggering portion of this video is James staring into his prompter, reading words he got by Googling "movie name" "gay." I wish I could show you everything he copied but we'd be here forever. This is just one video and he makes so many of these! And now we know how! But Somerton thinks he's figured out a loophole. It's a familiar spin on an old classic. .It opens with a horror-themed credit sequence, claims the video is based on the works of, and briefly shows a bunch of names. These are some of the people he plagiarized. So if any of his plagiarism is noticed, he can say, "No, I name dropped them in the opening for literally one second so it's fine! This is the stupidest thing I've ever-- anyone watching this video would assume this is Somerton showing his sources or people whose work he read while writing the video, not people whose writing is the video. Based on the works of Colin Arason. What does this mean? There's no way of knowing what Colin's contribution to the video was. Does this mean he inspired a section? That he gets quoted? That James read him and used some of those ideas? This mention means 21 minutes into the video, the next five full minutes are word-for-word copied from an essay he wrote. JAMES: Benshoff recognizes "Hellraiser" for some of its visual characteristics but comes to the conclusion that too often the representation of Barker's monster queers seems similar to those produced by right-wing ideologues. HBOMB: I don't think I need to tell you, this is just plagiarism with an even stranger excuse than normal. Somerton never tells you when he's just reading other people's word because then people would know he didn't write anything. He's hidden their name at the beginning and in the end credits at the very bottom after a long list of patrons, so he can make a video out of other people's words without ever saying when he's actually doing it. Four minutes is just Andrew Park's article about the film, "The Craft" with slight changes to try to hide it and his usual LGBT/queer word-swapping. JAMES: The film follows the story of four teenage girls who each grow up feeling different in one way or another. Special and above the fray of their peers or rejected by them entirely. As so many queer teens have experienced. The most memorable character by all accounts is Nancy and she's already out as a witch, openly practicing the craft. She wears goth lipstick and black, laced-up Stevie Nicks boots. She has a sexual history and a noose hanging in her locker. Bonnie is a girl with self-image issues due to scars that cover her arms and back. HBOMB: Swapping "back" and "arms" to "arms" and "back" doesn't work. We can still tell. JAMES: Chris--your typical teenage movie football jock-- persists in making bullying comments about the three spiritual deviants who he calls the Bitches of Eastwick. Because he's just so clever. HBOMB: Wow, what a great addition, Jimmy. You really spiced up that anecdote. Made it your own. Put your fuckin' spin on it. Oh, well, this is a bit skeevy, but at least Park's name is in the credits so people can at least see his name and check him ou-- No, he's not in the credits. Half the people James plagiarized in this video didn't make it in. He forgot. This whole "it wasn't plagiarism, "I said it was based on them at the start" excuse really doesn't work when you forget to put half their fucking names in. My personal theory is James came up with this phony excuse during the "Evil Queens" fiasco when he was already making this video so when he made this list he'd already forgotten half the people he plagiarized. The segment about "Aliens" is completely taken from Bart Bishop's essay, "Queering James Cameron's Aliens." JAMES: "Aliens" is curiously progressive in its sexual politics overall, especially for a movie released during the Reagan years. Take for instance the exchange between Hudson and Frost. This isn't just queer behavior being portrayed in a positive manner but one of the many ways that the movie obfuscates gender and supports a pansexual ethos. HBOMB: My favorite part is when he reuses an extremely long quote from author David Greven along with Bishop's exact commentary on it with a very slight change. JAMES: David Greven in "Demeter and Persephone in Space" observes, "Bishop, the cyborg re-- [speech played at rapid speed] Greven further suggest that the aliens-- and especially the Alien Queen-- represent a cis-gendered, heteronormative status quo that resents the changing times. [speech played at rapid speed] So while Greven suggests that the conservative Alien Queen has contempt for the queer family dynamic, the metaphor could go even further. Cameron creates a future where gender norms have all but disappeared. HBOMB: He changed "I'd go even further," to, "the metaphor could go even further," suggesting he is at least uncomfortable using someone else's words in first person. The copying of Bishop's "Aliens" essay was eventually pointed out on his web site. Bishop responded calling this very strange. Bishop also made a Facebook post about being plagiarized, +which is disheartening to read. This situation demonstrates perfectly the way respect and social status factor into stealing. James fundamentally doesn't respect the people he's copying. He knows to quote people when they're well-known but when he thinks he can get away with it, he doesn't. A lot of queer analysis is sadly unrecognized and James exploited this obscurity for clout and hid a little excuse where people will miss it, but only for about half of them. As with several previous authors, Bishop was not credited. However, the video's credits do contain David Greven-- one of the authors Bishop quoted. At first I thought Greven was in the credits because he quotes him by name in this section But no, he's in here because he also stole from Greven. JAMES: In terms as resonant as they were phobic, Scream was a cry of despair over an apparent amorality in the millennial or late Gen X youth, especially in the male population. The homoeroticism of the Billy-Stu relationship-- which the film develops into an all-but-explicit queer love affair-- shows both the unpredictable, anarchic, bewildering behavior of the generation and the shifts in male gender roles synonymous with it. HBOMB: By complete coincidence, the competent writers he's plagiarizing are familiar with each other's work and sometimes even quote each other. Greven doesn't actually come up by name when James reads his words out loud for five and a half fucking minutes. The authors James steals only get their name mentioned in the video if someone else he was stealing happened to mention them! I'm losing my fucking mind! When he quotes Bishop quoting Greven, he puts this text up like he's quoting them. However, like iilluminaughtii, he doesn't list the source in any useful way. This is because he doesn't know the source. He got it from this article, and he can't list the article as a source because he doesn't want you checking and finding out what he's done. It's the same reason he didn't film himself next to "Evil Queens." He'd be giving the game away. Ironically, this is how the Bishop plagiarism was discovered in the first place. Someone was trying to find the source of one of these quotes and Googled it and discovered the whole segment was a quote. Somerton's videos are anti-educational. They go out of their way to hide where they come from or where to learn more. But this gives me an idea for a hot new game. Go to a random section of Somerton's video and just Google the words he's saying. Okay, I'm gonna literally click on a random part of the video right now. I'm gonna hold my mouse up to the microphone so you can hear it. [mouse clicks] JAMES: Dedicates an entire subplot to romance between Richie and Eddie. HBOMB: Okay. [keyboard clacking] And here we go. One result. Well, that was easy! JAMES: "It" by Stephen King was published in 1986 and has made a lasting cultural impression. The novel inspired a miniseries, two movies, and ruined clowns for generations of children. And adults, frankly. HBOMB: Ha ha, good one. This one is an analysis of Stephen King's "It" by Rachel Brands. He reads this article for about four and a half minutes. And Brands is one of many people whose name didn't make it into his dumb fucking credits. I reached out to Brands about her essay being used in this manner and she told me she'd never been asked permission to use it but she already knew it happened. You see, she was a fan of Somerton's work and even supported him financially on Patreon so she saw this video as soon as it went out and realized it was copying her. This is so fucked up. A queer writer who supported James financially because she thought he was making original work discovered she was funding the plagiarism of work like hers, including literally hers. Brands was never paid by the web site she wrote this essay for since at the time she was writing for exposure, which she definitely didn't get when James didn't even fucking credit her! Somerton makes a lot of money doing this. Tens of thousands of dollars in Patreon income, ad revenue, his many sponsorships, and another massive payday we haven't even gotten to yet. Brands has never been compensated for her contribution to James' financial success and she's not the only person James plagiarized in the section on Stephen King's "It" alone. After reading Brands without crediting her for almost five minutes, suddenly he starts saying new words. - Childhood trauma looms under the skin of the Losers Club well into adulthood. HBOMB: Wow, did James write part of his video all by himself? [mouse clicks] Nope! [laughs] It's from "The Hollywood Reporter!" We've seen this song and dance before. It goes on for ages. I'm just gonna highlight one of the parts he changed because it's so funny. - Like every person on the planet, the Losers remain trapped in their trauma. They've just found new ways to cope. Richie ended up telling jokes and becoming rich and successful... But always alone. HBOMB: Somerton specifically removed mention of a character finding success using other people's material. That probably hit a bit too close to home, huh? - The plagiarism thing, I don't-- I'm not--that's not-- it's not a thing. HBOMB: After several minutes of stealing Joelle Monique's article, the video still has a bunch of run time left to talk about "It." - It is the hate that's unnatural. The hate that is evil. [keyboard clacking] HBOMB: Oh, for fu-- JAMES: When we get into the head of Don Hagarty-- Adrian's boyfriend-- and the author lets the reader know him... He's sympathetic. He's smart and loving. He also sees the town for what it is-- sees its evil clearly and wants to leave it. HBOMB: The entire 12-minute-long "It" section is copied from three different articles back to back to back, and only one of the three authors is even in these shitty credits. Somerton didn't thank Brands or Monique for the articles about Stephen King's "It" he stole for money. He did, however, take the opportunity to thank Stephen King! I love it when small indie writers finally get the acknowledgment they deserve. It boggles my tiny mind just how much every tiny thing is stolen in this video. He really briefly, like, for 30 seconds discusses the appeal of witchcraft to queer people and he steals an article for that, too! JAMES: Witchcraft, on the other hand, offered a spiritual space where queer people could step into their personal power and explore otherness without shame, guilt, or fear. Furthermore, the idea of a coven creates a space for community. HBOMB: Based on the works of whoever wrote this sentence. Of the 18 authors I found him stealing from, only nine of them make it into the opening or closing "based on" credits. So at least half the people he copied didn't even get a bullshit credit, and that's just what I found. I'm pretty sure I missed some. Maybe he reworded some parts better than others so it's harder to check. But after seeing how much shit he stole for this video, I have no doubt the blank spaces are just someone else I missed. After this video came out I think he decided he'd gotten away with it so he stopped using the "based on the works of" excuse and just went right back to stealing shit. [Masakazu Sugimori's "It Can't End Here" plays terribly warped] Here's one of his next videos: "Codebreakers: Queer film theory (and why it matters)." This videos opening credits are just James and the description thanks no one but it's still full of plagiarism. Zink Hero of YouTube loved this line by Somerton so much! What am I willing to bet he stole this line, too? Place your bets... Directly into my pocket because yeah, obviously, you fucking piece of shit! - It also bears mentioning that if a filmmaker doesn't choose to queer history, that doesn't mean they're telling history like it was. It just means they're straighting history. Replacing the gay agenda with a straight agenda does not mean that there's no agenda. Somerton's fans praise him for the quality of his writing, unaware it's not his. Since the true author's names have been erased from the story, they are prevented from learning who they actually enjoyed and being able to go read more. I find this genuinely sad. I know how! At one point he starts explaining basic film theory. Not basic by nerd standards. I mean, it's like he's just reading Wikipedia. Actually... Not like. - Today there are many different schools of film theory. So let's talk about them. The structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and conventions, not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication. An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an additional idea. The blank expression on a person's face, an appetizing meal, and then back to the person's face. While nothing in this sequence literally expresses hunger or desire, the juxtaposition of the images convey that meaning to the audience. Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory. Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the development of the montage-- a Russian invention. Eisentein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist in favor of telling stories where the action is moved by a group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next, whether in composition, motion, or idea. Formalist film theory is a theory of film study that is focused on the formal or technical elements of a film, i.e. the lighting, scoring, sounds, set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. It's a major theory of film study today. Formalism at its most general considers the synthesis or lack of synthesis of the multiple elements of film production and the effects-- emotional and intellectual of that synthesis and of the individual elements. For example, let's take the single element of editing. A formalist might study how standard Hollywood continuity editing creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or jump cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile. - Cringe. There's no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It's embarrassing. It speaks volumes what James thinks of video essays as a format. To him, reading Wikipedia is equivalent to what everyone else is doing. I don't know why you would make videos like this unless you were just in it for the money. Where's the joy of doing your own research, your own learning, and getting to share it in your own way? These videos are a cash grab with absolutely zero original thought or soul. I didn't think YouTube videos could have souls but now I've experienced ones that don't. The end credits don't thank any of the people or wikis who wrote this video. Just James and his co-writer Nick. Oh, and he thanks all his patrons who give him thousands of dollars to read Wikipedia to them without telling them. And this puts us onto a related problem with his videos. This might be obvious but James is a little bit lazy. In "Codebreakers" in between the rest of the stealing, he brings up the potential gay overtones in "Legend of Korra" between Prince Wu and Mako. JAMES: Mako's will-they-won't-they with Prince Wu-- HBOMB: But I thought the clips from "Avatar" looked a bit blurry for a video from 2020 when much higher quality sources were available. Did he just Google an old AMV shipping these two characters and download it and slap it in here? Nah, that would be ridi-- yes, of course he did. It was this one. It took two minutes to find. He just added black bars to the top and bottom because he's trying to pretend his shit is cinema. This is probably the laziest moment in video essay history. He's downloading other people's videos to use as backing for a voice over he probably didn't write about characters whose names he can't pronounce. It's like staring into a low bit rate abyss. But it doesn't stare back. James stares back. The phrase "by James Somerton" is doing so much heavy lifting he probably stole that from fucking Atlas. There's a section where he just reads the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's explanation of what homosexuality is. JAMES: As has been frequently noted-- [speech played at rapid speed] HBOMB: He looked up homosexuality in an encyclopedia and pasted it into his fucking script! Oh, my God! The lack of effort is a running theme. James doesn't really care what he's saying and is just Googling "movie name" "gay" so the quality of some of the places he's copying are not very good. His coverage of "Alien 3" in "Society and Queer Horror--" yeah, there's more people I didn't show you yet-- is taken from, uh, the "Cracked" article "Five Terrible Movies With Awesome Hidden Meanings." People sometimes compliment James for his fancy opening titles with 3D movement and graphics but he just bought these. Anyone can. Look, here's the place he got "Society and Queer Horror's" opening. I bought it. Now it's mine. Whee. The opening of "Evil Queens--" the highest production value part of the whole affair is just more stuff he bought. I'm not criticizing him here. This is normal and fine. He buys the fancy-looking bits and gets the rest from an AMV. Presumably he hired a co-writer so he could stop pretending he does any, but that makes the fact they're still full of plagiarism even more shocking. Kat looked at his video about Jeffrey Dahmer and found about five places he plagiarized without even checking too hard. JAMES: Thus the term "homosexual overkill" served to normalize heterosexuality, even heterosexual serial killers while pathologizing homosexuality. HBOMB: Look how much effort he put into rewriting the thing he stole to hide it. His dedication to not coming up with his own ideas is almost creepy. This video was a couple months old when I started looking into James. This is recent and I can't believe how much he's still stealing. The first words in the fucking video are stole. - We all like true crime. It's very suddenly become one of the most engaging forms of contemporary entertainment. HBOMB: He's really extruding the original words here. He's put so much work into changing it, it might have been easier to write something from scratch. But this is James we're talking about. He stops putting in the effort after the first few sentences. JAMES: Again, both Bundy and Dahmer were serial killers who tortured and murdered dozens of people whose families are still alive and can see these tweets and posts on TikTok. HBOMB: He actually copies the previous section of the article right before but Kat asked me before I play this part to ask you to pay specific attention to the change he makes here. - There is a thirst for Dahmer made apparent on TikTok and Twitter with hordes of white women droning over how attractive he is. HBOMB: This change is part of a running theme throughout Somerton's work. Um, misogyny? [Masakazu Sugimori's "It Can't End Here"] [booming] In the parts of James' videos that he actually writes himself or rewrites after stealing, he really doesn't like women. I didn't wanna open this can of worms, but the thesis of the stuff he stole for this video gets completely fucked up by his rants about women being attracted to serial killers. He argues women are only attracted to Dahmer because he killed gay men and not women, which makes it easier for them to ignore the brutality of his crimes, and if he'd killed women, they wouldn't be so thirsty. JAMES: Despite his cannibalism, despite the decades-long erasure of his victims, these women and mostly teenage girls are swooning over him. And why not? To our knowledge Dahmer never killed any teenage girls or any women at all so there's a level of disconnection. HBOMB: Women are attracted to the wrong serial killer. How terrible. But he couldn't stop himself from also complaining about women being into Ted Bundy who did murder women. He goes off script from the article he's stealing for that section to complain about it even more. JAMES: Navigating the ethics of true crime content is tricky. [speech played at rapid speed] A whole new generation of girls fell head over heels for the infamous killer, which was a grim remake in itself of the real life Ted Bundy trial. He had fan girls defending him in the press and even begging to marry him. Netflix's social media team actually begged viewers to stop stanning Bundy. HBOMB: He added a whole new bit fantasizing about millennial girls' attraction to a serial killer when, like, no, they were attracted to Zac Efron, the famously attractive celebrity actor. This was a stupid tangent to begin with but now his own video contains examples of women fancying a serial killer who killed women so his rant about women loving Dahmer because he didn't kill women makes no sense Really, he just wanted an excuse to complain women see their gay friends as disposable. - Because unfortunately to this day many women still see gay men as nothing more than a fancy accessory, especially teenage girls who lust for the perfect gay best friend. A boy whose sex life is secret so you never have to hear about it, but he's always there to tell you if your boyfriend's being a jerk. Gay men and boys as a purse or a fancy iPhone case. Something to show off but ultimately something disposable. HBOMB: What teenage girl did this to you in high school, James? And why are you inserting fan fiction about her into an article you stole instead of going to therapy? This is the only new stuff he wrote. The rest is stolen. This is all he has to say. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? These insecurities affect how he talks about gay women. The videos are continuously punctuated with tangents about how lesbians have it easier than gay men. In one video he claims gay women historically saw less legal persecution and his example is made up. - And if you're wondering why this section is so man-centric, this is because the vast majority of legal persecution of early queers was focused on men. In the legal case of Radcyffe Hall, she in her book "The Well of Loneliness" depicted World War I ambulance drivers as being primarily lesbians. English courts were really not pleased with this depiction, but women who love women was such an uncomfortable topic for them that they threw her case out of the courts and just let her carry on in her happy life. HBOMB: Over here in reality, Radclyffe Hall was found guilty of obscenity and all copies of her book were ordered destroyed. He's rewriting history to pretend women had it better. This approach to female queers reaches a territory where he doesn't even accept other people's identities if he has a bone to pick. In one video while trying to argue queer women have it better than men in Hollywood, he misgenders two show runners. JAMES: So why don't gay men get to represent themselves in media? At least media that's widely accepted by the mainstream. Queer women get to represent themselves at least sometimes. Look at animated hits like "Steven Universe" or "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power." HBOMB: ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar are trans masculine and non-binary respectively, but for the purposes of James' point, they count as women, and if he really doesn't like something, he just assumes a straight woman did it. JAMES: The only way I can possibly account for anyone saying that this is straight is a bunch of women and girls who are experiencing the most willful ignorance I've ever seen. HBOMB: His "Yuri on Ice" video just guesses anyone who interprets the characters not being gay must be a dumb ass woman. He's shockingly committed to this principle. In a video that just came out he claims he still gets comments on that video from straight women denying the gay anime is gay. - Then again that video still gets comments from usually straight women-- no hating, but still-- who incessantly deny that there's any queerness coded or otherwise present in that series. HBOMB: James, how do you know they're straight or women? Did they all say so in their comment? If you don't like something so you assume a woman wrote it, you're doing misogyny. There really isn't another word for this It's pretty straightforward. Also I just went through the last year of comments on that video and none exist that make this accusation. He's lying. He just made up straight women to get mad at. As arbiter of gender, James also gets to decide who's queer and who isn't. I don't know who gave him this power, but it means he has a lot of fascinating opinions about "Love, Simon." The film is based on a book by Becky Albertalli-- a bisexual woman who was not public about her sexuality when the book was published. Albertalli was subsequently harassed for years, accused of writing a book about being gay without being queer herself and being a straight woman profiting off the queer community. In 2020 she came out publicly with a quite powerful essay about how she was doing it specifically because of this type of shit. This event hopefully serves as a lesson not to make assumptions of people's sexuality and then write criticism based on those assumptions. But James didn't get the memo. In 2022 he managed to write a video complaining that many stories about gay people are written by straight women and used "Love, Simon" as the only example. - Because their life experiences did not match the experiences about gayness set by straight women with a kawaii idea of two gay people. You have mass consumption media which takes gay emotions and removes gay experiences, leaving a husk of empty gestures and unanswered questions which feels more like a gambling addiction than even implied representation. HBOMB: James was years late to the party and still accused the openly-bi author of being a straight pandering to the gays. I'd say I wonder what Becky Albertalli thinks about this but I know what she thinks because she left a comment on his video explaining how shitty it feels getting lumped in with the straights yet again years after coming out specifically after being treated poorly by people like James. When this happened this is how he complained to his fan Discord about her. "She isn't happy I included her in "the straight female authors section. But I never said she was straight." James is still sore about this mild push back. He now refuses to acknowledge "Love, Simon" by name, referring to some unspecified incident. - This is compounded through several other high profile instances of gay media, specifically one which made waves in 2018 but that I will not explicitly mention for reasons. If you know, you know. HBOMB: Someone asked what he meant by this in the Discord and he clarified he meant "Love, Simon," and in true James fashion made up a story where he didn't do anything wrong. He simply mentioned he wasn't its biggest fan and the author ripped into him on Twitter and stuff. As far as I can tell Becky never tweeted anything or said anything anywhere about him except his comments section. He's having to twist the story pretty hard to seem like he didn't do a shitty thing here. He called a bi author a straight with kawaii ideas about gay people, didn't think she would see it, and she criticized him for doing it. So this is the non-stolen work. The stuff he writes himself. Open bitterness about women, lies, and grievances over being criticized for this. I'm gonna regret saying it but he should have stuck to the plagiarism. He complained on Twitter about being criticized for being so harsh on the women who thirsted after Dahmer, not realizing he was actually being criticized for a pattern of behavior. These criticisms were valid already but I would like to supply the context that he stole the words he is saying here and reworded them to be more mad at women specifically. James, what the fuck are you doing? I am trying to maintain focus for once in a video and stick to the plagiarism but I just can't get away from how this guy fucking sucks. James doesn't get caught stealing as often as he should do because he's cultivated an audience of younger queer people who don't read the kinds of stuff he's stealing from and don't recognize open misogyny as long as it's qualified as "white" women. But on the rare occasion that he is caught, his solution is to private or delete the video and reupload a slightly changed version and hope no one digs into this extremely suspicious behavior. For example... [Akemi Kimura's "There's No Sleeping Tonight"] While I was doing preliminary research late last year, a funny thing happened. Somerton's YouTube community page was wiped. Hundreds of posts from over several years disappeared overnight. At this point I'd spoken to a few of the writers Somerton had stolen from and I wondered if maybe one of them had publicly accused him but after doing some more looking it turned out, no, someone else had independently noticed they'd been plagiarized because there was still more! Seldomusings--a Wordpress blog-- had made a post accusing Somerton of plagiarizing a blog post about "Attack on Titan" from 2013, and then I thought, "Wait. "Doesn't Somerton have a video from September 2022 called, like, 'Attack on Titan and the Death of Media Literacy?" Well, he did. Finding a link, it was suddenly set to private. Over a million and a half views had been wiped from his channel. Huh. I already had a copy downloaded because, well, Somerton has deleted inconvenient videos before and I figured something like this would happen again. I'd been going through his videos chronologically so I hadn't got to that one yet but what's kind of funny is I know I would have noticed this plagiarism myself if I had. That blog post has gone viral multiple times. It's one of the main sources for western awareness of "Attack on Titan's" author's right-wing views. If you're deep on anime fascism discourse, this is a classic post. I've seen it linked and referenced dozens of times over the years. It would make sense to point to this post if you were discussing the political implications of "Attack on Titan," or you could even quote it and cite it as a source. Well, wouldn't you know it? Somerton doesn't link the post or quote it anywhere or acknowledge its existence. He just copies it. - This outrage should come as no surprise knowing the history between Japan and Korea, but that is exactly what most people may not be aware of. Korea was occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945-- [speech played at rapid speed] HBOMB: James doesn't acknowledge the writing he's stealing at all though he does find the time to make a long opening sequence. "James Somerton presents, "directed & edited by James Somerton, written by Nick Herrgott and James Somerton." This site was active briefly in 2013 with a post in 2016 clarifying the blog was done. They came back six years later to talk about James stealing their work. HBOMB: Somerton saw the author call him a plagiarist and panicked and hid the video, deleted all his community posts so there was nowhere to leave a comment asking what happened this time. He was preparing for his plagiarism to go public and locking everything down. If what Somerton was doing was a defensible artistic choice he'd be defending it, wouldn't he? He'd say, "This is a normal thing to do and I'm going to keep doing it." Instead, he does it secretly and hides the videos when people notice. It's clear he knows what he's doing is wrong and would just rather keep stealing than actually do any work. But while we're talking about the "Attack on Titan" video, you know he didn't just steal one thing. The video's an hour long. No self-respecting marketing expert would do all that work himself. In this video and only this video, he quotes several YouTubers, like he has their text on the screen and he reads it out, and he would never normally do that. He would just steal their words and pretend he came up with them, which means he must be stealing from someone who quoted them. And, uh, yeah! - For a long time anime fans had no way of knowing what their favorite writers and artists even looked like, let alone what they thought about the world. HBOMB: Three and a half minutes of this video comes from Gita Jackson at Vice Motherboard. And, yeah, when he quotes YouTubers, he's actually quoting Jackson quoting them. I can't believe I fucking called it. - YouTuber Geoff Thew argues: HBOMB: Now, this isn't just an article quoting someone. Jackson reached out to Geoff for his opinion on this topic. There's no where else James could have got this quote, and this time he really fucked it up. At one point he uses a quote Jackson got from historian and scholar Andrea Horbinski but remember how he sometimes find-and-replaces words like gay or trans to queer or LGBT to hide it? He accidentally did that to the quote. - As they put it: - This is the most amateur shit I've ever seen. This is sub high school level plagiarism hiding. You don't find and replace text in the quotes, James! People in Somerton's official Discord server were asking what happened to the video. On January the first this year he said the video was coming back up that day and that it had to come down because of a missing source. That's a very strange way of saying someone noticed me plagiarizing them and criticized me for it and I deleted fucking everything. The new version he uploaded is a minute shorter. He just cut out the sections where he directly read the blog post. The video is even more stilted and strangely written than normal. The point Somerton was trying to make here was so important he was willing to steal it from someone else. Now that point is missing and the surrounding conversation makes no sense. The new version opens saying the original had a citation error, but if that was the problem, why didn't he add a citation instead of deleting the section completely? Well, one reason might be he wants the credit for himself, but the other is if he added their name now, anyone who checked would see the author's new post saying he plagiarized them. Somerton's only way out is to hide it and hope no one notices. He doesn't want to stop stealing. He just wants to not get caught doing it. If he thinks he can get away with keeping something in, he does. The three minutes of the video written completely by Gita Jackson are still in the new version completely unchanged. As of recording this video, no one else seems to have noticed this yet but if anyone does he'll doubtless delete the video and reupload a new version with that piece missing, too, and call it a day. James has done this repeatedly in the past. Several other videos open with text claiming they had to be reuploaded to avoid a mysterious and unexplained "copyright issue." One of them was "Codebreakers." At some point it was taken down, altered to hide some but not all of the stuff he stole and reupload it with a new title. "Queering Cinema (by any means necessary)." The opening titles still call it "Codebreakers," though. Every time he reuploads the video, the name is different. It's very confusing. And his well-meaning fans assume that his constantly taking down of video and reuploading with pieces missing is a sign of his integrity. They talk about how much more they respect him every time he reuploads a video like this. Every time because he has to do it a lot. The reality is Somerton has had years' worth of chances to be the man of integrity his audience wants him to be, and despite this being his full-time job, which he makes thousands and thousands of dollars doing, he would rather keep stealing. By the way, that reupload of "Codebreakers"-- "Queering Cinema--" around the time of the "Attack on Titan" drama, it disappeared again. As far as I can tell it's still gone nearly a year later. Maybe some authors noticed what he did and said something. Maybe so many pieces had to be taken out there was nothing left. The frequency with which he's had to hide videos to cover this up is staggering. Scrolling up his Discord's video announcement page you can see right away a shocking amount of stuff that mysteriously went missing without any explanation given. For some reason Nick wrote a joke on this page about how to tell who wrote what part of each video. It's cute but I'm gonna take it as confirmation that if a section doesn't contain these words, neither of them wrote it. While I was browsing his public fan Discord I found myself wondering about Nick, his co-writer. Does he know? [dramatic suspenseful musical sting] Nick Herrgott-- also known as N.T.Herrgott-- is a writer mostly for James's videos but he does have a self-published young adult novel. So, there we go. He's a better writer than James as far as I can tell in the sense it doesn't look like he steals things. So does he know what his boss is doing? I checked the fan Discord to see if they talk about the writing process and I found Nick has a special section dedicated to previewing part of the scripts for upcoming videos, which is a really nice feature. Or, it will be if they wrote them. Nick showcases parts he's written and as far as I can tell they're actually his. And they're pretty decent, too. And sometimes he shows things James wrote. This is part of the script for a video called "How Disney Tore Down 'The Owl House'." And it actually made it into the video. Let me play it to you. - [inhales sharply] [claps] Nick literally says, "James wrote this." So at the very least-- at the very least-- James Somerton wrote this text, right? Right? No! HBOMB: It's an article by Julie Tremaine for the "San Francisco Gate." I wonder how she feels about having her work reposted to an audience being told it was written by James Somerton. Holy shit! If it's any consolation, Julie, James Somerton's Discord thinks your writing is harsh but true. "I love any time y'all talk about Disney." Jesus Christ, it wasn't y'all! It was someone else! It was them'll! But the way this post was phrased implies Nick has no idea James did this. He probably saw the text his boss put in the shared script and assumed he wrote it because if he didn't that would be really fucking bad. And it's not just these two paragraphs. A solid four minutes and 40 seconds are taken from this article. What's weird is James actually acknowledges in the video he has no idea why he went on this tangent. So, what does all this have to do with "The Owl House?" Well, I just wanted to point out how big of a tool Bob Chapek is. HBOMB: He stole a bunch of words for literally no reason. They don't even connect to his point. He just needed to pad his run time, I guess. Here's another section of a script Nick shared. This is from a draft of the "Attack on Titan" video. Wait, what's this? "Shonan?" Okay, "shonen" is a Japanese word. There's, like, five ways to spell it in English and this isn't any of them. Here's how we translate "Bessatsu Shonen Magazine" where "Attack on Titan" was published. Has he never seen a single issue of "Shonen Jump?" This video sucked, by the way. He didn't know anything about the genre he was discussing and now it turns out he can't even spell it. I hope this section was plagiarized. Then again maybe this time Nick found something he liked in the script that James actually wrote. Uh, nope! It's also stolen! Again! It comes from culturalreview.com, the web site-slash- personal blog of Tyler Hummel who hopes to bring thoughtful and enjoyable commentary on popular culture and entertainment from a culturally conservative and religious perspective. In case you're wondering what that means, he thinks Batman is too woke. Right before the section James copied into a document and told Nick he wrote all by himself, Hummel complains about Marxism and critical race theory and then randomly whines about people who criticized "Game of Thrones'" final season before posting Lindsay Ellis' video about it as an example of people he hates. In his quest to seem like he knows what he's talking about, he's willing to borrow the words of a guy who hates him and everything he stands for, including Lindsay Ellis who he credits for getting him into making video essays. Another crime Lindsay should pay for. Wait a minute. Did he film himself next to "Disney War" because Lindsay did? Was he copying that, too? Normally I would think I was overreacting but he's stolen everything else. I don't know anymore! At least that means he didn't get "shonen" wrong. That must have been the nutcase he copied from. No, that's one of the few new words he added to the stolen segment. James Somerton is the dumbest motherfu-- To be completely fair, this piece of the script didn't make it into the final video. So it seems Somerton thought better than to steal from one of the most insane people in the world. But the fact Nick keeps accidentally showing pieces of the script James stole, assuming he did write them implies even his co-writer has no idea he's doing this. I feel kind of sorry for Nick. His trust has clearly been violated here. He's been made a liar without his knowledge because he trusted his boss and I assume friend. That's a messed up situation to be in. Seriously. I thought it would be worse if Nick was in on it but it's the opposite way around, isn't it? It's so violating imagining people work for James and I assume make most of their income from working for him and don't know what they're signing up for. I don't know how I would feel in his position, but not good. This sucks. Worst of all, I think James might be using Nick as a shield. Whenever any mention of the old plagiarism stuff comes up, James immediately brings up how Nick actually writes the videos and there's no way he would plagiarize. - I have a co-writer who came from academia who--where--plagiarism in academia gets you kicked out of school. Like, it gets you fired. Um... Nick co-writes my videos. There is no plagiarism. It's like he's trying to redirect possible negative attention onto his unsuspecting co-writer. Whenever plagiarism comes up, James brings up how great Nick is for writing all the videos in a totally not suspicious way. - Because if it was like somebody accusing me of plagiarism especially recently, the videos are so heavily written by Nick that there are--they would be accusing Nick of plagiarism and I will not fucking tolerate that. HBOMB: Remember, James knows there is plagiarism in his videos because he did it so when he responds by saying, "No, Nick writes the videos, and he would never do that," it's like he's setting him up to take the fall. - Nick is an angel for tolerating me and writing the videos as well--like-- with his fantastic talent so that I would just not tolerate. - So either Nick is plagiarizing as well and that's why the new videos still have a ton of plagiarism, or James is doing it and now when it comes up he throws Nick under the bus. But James isn't content pretending to make video essays. No. He wants to wipe on a bigger canvas. [dramatic suspenseful musical sting] In 2022 James Somerton started an IndieGoGo for a film studio he wanted to open called Telos Pictures, which intended to produce films focusing on LGBT characters and stories. His video pitching Telos included a series of ideas for miniseries', feature-length movies, and short films. For example, "Final Girl--" a short about a woman who had survived a typical slasher story. The initial goal of $6,000 was to make two of the short films but with stretch goals for making more. The campaign made enough money to make almost all of them, over $86,000 Canadian dollars, so a bit over 63,000 in USD. Telos has been a runaway financial success for James. As of today, 18 months after raising over $64,000-- more than ten times its initial goal-- Telos has made nothing. For people who supported Telos, updates on what's happening have been few and far between. A few months after the campaign ended, he claimed "Final Girl--" one of the short films on the slate-- was in pre-production and had been expanded into a full movie, but they were having trouble with casting and were considering relocating to another part of Canada. The next update would come seven months later with the announcement James had moved to Toronto to try to find actors and they dropped "Final Girl" and moved on to a new project, one which wasn't on the original list people funded, called "The Listener." He'd be spending 20 to $30,000 of the Telos money on it and as an apology for the lack of updates, he would be adding an update page to the Telos web site later that week to keep people informed. Ten months later, this hasn't happened. The Telos web site does, however, have a working donation page where you can give him more money for rewards up to and including getting to make requests about the films. Uh, what films? Months later this July he announced Telos had finally been incorporated as a real company. He called this a long and pricey process. Incorporating in Canada is a few hours of paperwork and costs $200 Canadian. He claimed an update was coming within a week. This was almost three months ago. The Telos Twitter account hasn't been updated in well over a year but he recently opened a Telos Bluesky page which has made one post with a poster for a new movie supposedly coming in 2024 which isn't "The Listener" or any of the previously-mentioned films. Every time I look in on Telos, I find no updates on what's happening but I do find out about a new movie they announced. The web site is currently claiming another new film called "The Sub," estimated release of 2023, is in pre-production. Better get a move on, then. Telos keeps announcing new projects with a new poster to go with it consisting of a stock photo with text over it and then not making any of them. This one's already being used for a real show that exists. He keeps putting text on stock photos and pretending it's a real film in pre-production. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence how fast new films are being dreamed up. One of them even had a teaser consisting entirely of stock footage only to never be spoken of again. This one isn't even mentioned on the web site at all anywhere. Movies take time to make, even short indie films. And for the record, so do video essays. But the lack of updates on what is happening or which film is even being made is a little disconcerting. Continuing the trend of James' work not really being his, we need to talk about "Final Girl--" the first project which was canceled. "Final Girl" was at one point coming this fall which at the time was 2022. The people who funded this film were told to expect it by autumn last year. They got pretty far on this one. In late June James tweeted the script was done but then all of a sudden James moved on to "The Listener" and the five other films he started since then. But unlike many of James' other announced projects which still have a poster and a tentative release date on the site, "Final Girl" disappeared completely. What happened here? He claimed he gave up because it was too specific to Nova Scotia and he had to move to find actors but there could be another reason. The name and synopsis of "Final Girl" are extraordinarily close to a book which already exists: "The Final Girl Support Group" by Grady Hendrix. I wonder if Somerton is aware of the similarity. It would be weird if he wasn't because it was one of his favorite books of 2021. He started the IndieGoGo with this short film idea a few months after making this post. You'll be shocked to discover but something of James' turned out to be stolen and evaporated. The 18-month journey of Telos consists of Somerton being paid $65,000 to make a dozen fake movie posters. So far James has ripped off bloggers, novelists, authors-- anyone who writes text for a living, really. Oh, and Wikipedia and AMVs because watching Korra for himself was too much effort, apparently. If you're queer and you wrote something good, no you didn't. But now we need to talk about the time he somehow went even further than that. Let's talk about the time he ripped off another gay YouTuber. Remember "Unrequited--" the video that ripped off "The Celluloid Closet and plagiarized Peter Howell? Before any of "The Celluloid Closet" stuff had even been discovered, James had already been caught ripping off someone else with the same video! How? How are there still more? [upbeat electronic music] A later section covered examples of queer baiting in various TV shows including BBC's "Merlin," the recent "Teen Wolf" TV series, and "Sherlock," whatever that is. But people began to notice these sections were suspiciously similar to one another YouTuber had already made. Alexander Avila whose channel used to be called "AreTheyGay" has a series of videos exploring the queer implications between characters of various shows and he's covered "Merlin," "Teen Wolf," and "Sherlock." The part of Somerton's video covering "Merlin" feels like he watched Avila's video and very slightly rephrased it, but what made it really obvious was the footage he used. They weren't just similar. They were exactly the same. Avila had this one part where he fades between several different scenes across different episodes to show the evolving character dynamics. This is Avila using editing and his knowledge of the show to make a point. That same sequence appears exactly in Somerton's video. Avila's video puts text over the footage to explain the character's thoughts and justify his interpretation of the show. This text is still in there in Somerton's version. This is sloppy even by James standards. He even keeps in a joke Avila made. - If I wasn't a prince-- - What? - We would probably get on. - ♪ Let's get it on ♪ HBOMB: Um, in case it wasn't obvious, uh, Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" wasn't in the original show. Avila put that in there for a joke. And, uh, you're not gonna believe this! - We would probably get on. - ♪ Let's get it on ♪ HBOMB: Uh-- Somerton stole Alexander Avila's video essay and reused it and just recorded his own very similar version of the voice over and jokes. ALEXANDER: It really is like a romantic comedy. - Oh, come on. You've seen a romantic comedy. You know how this works. HBOMB: This is the worst and laziest example of plagiarism I've ever seen. Reusing other people's work like this is not right, especially when, you know, you make a living making these videos. He only said things about the show Avila also said. It's extremely clear Somerton hasn't seen "Merlin." He just reused Avila's work. The other sections covering "Teen Wolf" and "Sherlock" also had extremely similar-looking sequences. He'd downloaded and reused several of Avila's videos. When this was discovered, Avila tweeted to Somerton about it, asking for proper credit and in the future to ask people permission before doing something like this. He also left a similar comment on the video which finally got James' attention. The next day Somerton set "Unrequited" to private and contacted Avila on Twitter. I reached out to Avila and asked him what they discussed, and he gave me permission to share these messages with you. Somerton apologized for using his material without asking, claiming he intended to reach out but forgot to and he had been in a rush to finish the video before the end of pride month, and in this rush, he ended up using a lot more of your content than I ever intended. He then offered to credit Avila in the description of his video. Ah, yes. That old trick. He also perplexingly asked Avila to delete his comment because he put an awful lot of work into his videos and felt discredited by it, which, frankly, is a wild thing to say to someone you just admitted you stole from. You're not the one putting the work in, buddy! Avila said he would rather Somerton upload a new version that credited him in it directly or perhaps he could watch Merlin and make his own arguments. He also reminded him that passing someone else's work off as their own is far more discrediting than pointing out someone did that. Somerton never replied. Somerton admitted he plagiarized Avila's work but he had an explanation. He was too busy. To busy doing what? You don't do anything! The video was never unprivated. Instead, a few days later, it was reuploaded with pieces missing, of course. This reupload was also in three parts saying the video had been edited to remove content owned by other parties. The reuploads also say which part of three they are, except for part three which is also called part two. Somerton had put in about as much work as you'd expect from someone who copies for a living. In the new version the "Merlin" section was completely removed. However, this was the only change. So later parts of the video still refer back to it. JAMES: Much like with "Merlin," the pair start the series off of a bad paw. HBOMB: The "Teen Wolf" and "Sherlock" sections were kept the same so all the video sequences got from Avila for those parts were still in there. He didn't accidentally use any obvious parts where Avila's text or jokes came up so I guess he decided it was fine to keep it in. The way James treated Alexander-- stealing several of his videos then when caught offering to hide a credit in the description like that would change what he'd done and then reuploading the video with half the stuff he stole still in it-- is a clear indicator how little he thinks of his fellow queer creators. He does not care about doing right by other people in his community. He cares about making money by any means necessary What makes this even clearer is how publicly he does not admit fault or even pretend he learned anything. To this day he lies about what happened. When the plagiarism allegations came up on that live stream, he made up a completely new story that contradicts the apology he gave to Alexander. He claims he downloaded a highlight reel of "Merlin" clips from somewhere else and that highlight reel stole from Avila's video so technically he didn't steal from him and it was all just a misunderstanding. - In the original "History of Queer Coding" video, I used a highlight reel from the show "Arthur" that another, um... Uh, YouTuber had, um... Used and I thought it was just a highlight video but apparently it actually came from another video, um, from the channel AreTheyGay. HBOMB: He repeats and refines this story throughout the stream. - And there was one where I took a highlight reel... In 2020... From a highlight video that happened to be from a video from... Um, a YouTube channel-- HBOMB: The only problem with this story is we have receipts. - And I took a highlight reel to highlight the queerness in the "Arthur" show--uh, no, "Merlin" show and... It was pointed out to me that that didn't come from a highlight reel. That came from... Uh, an actual video and it had been stolen from that video for the highlight reel that I took it from. Um... Nick co-writes my videos. There is no plagiarism. There was--as I said and I will say one more time-- a highlight reel from the show "Merlin" that I took from a larger highlight reel video that was apparently sourced from a video from the channel AreTheyGay. HBOMB: James admitted directly to Avila that he took from his work on purpose although he intended to steal less. How considerate of him. James is lying directly to his audience to protect his reputation. He can't even own up to his behavior. He just keeps lying, and he didn't even stop stealing. A little while after the stream where the allegations came up, he made a post on Patreon to try to explain the allegations for people still asking about them. You have to be a Patron to see it so avert your eyes if you're not giving James money. In addition to repeating the lie he got permission from Sean Griffin to adapt "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens" before making the video, he again states he got the clips from a highlight reel which got them from AreTheyGay. Left to his own devices, James will just make up what happened, and since his paying customers haven't seen the evidence of him admitting he did it, they have no option but to assume it's true. James did this on purpose with multiple videos and is lying to his backers so they continue to support him financially. James, you've been to business school. You know there's a word for that. And even if I hadn't reached out to Avila and got that woefully hilarious confession, I could still have objectively proven he did it. [suspenseful music] ♪ ♪ There's one last missing piece of the puzzle here. Ignoring for a second he admitted to Avila he took from more than one video, ever since he's always pretended it was just "Merlin." If I could somehow prove he also used Avila's other videos for those sections, that would show the extent of the copying and how much he's lying to cover it up. But like I said, the "Teen Wolf" and "Sherlock" sections aren't as obvious. He doesn't steal any jokes. He just very boringly spouts arguments similar to Avila's while playing what looks like the same footage. It's harder to prove he downloaded his video to make this which is probably why he feels comfortable pretending he didn't. I was thinking of watching both videos closely side-by-side and contrasting the clips to show they're all the same, wasting even more of my precious life watching "Sherlock" than I already have, but then I was reading James' tweets from when he was making this and I saw that he posted a picture of him editing this video with his timeline visible. Forgive me but the opportunity to do something like this comes once in a lifetime. [pinging] [Masakazu Sugimori's "Pressing Pursuit - Cornered"] [beeping] [whip cracks] [beeps] Before you'd even uploaded the video, you posted a picture of the Sherlock section of your timeline and the source footage is clearly labeled, "Are They Gay?" You had proven you plagiarized Avila before the video was even done. Also, delete your channel. Let's get a big picture look at how much stealing James has done. As of making this motion graphic there are 56 video essays on his YouTube channel dated after October 2018. A minimum of 22 contain some amount of plagiarized material. He also has two essays exclusively to his Vimeo page. According to him YouTube flagged them not safe for work. These have a ton of plagiarism in them, too. Several videos were taken down and then reuploaded with parts removed like "Attack on Titan" and a few others. I don't know how I should account for reuploads on this list, but we should at least include videos which were deleted and never came back, like "Codebreakers" and, hey, welcome back, "Unrequited." He took that reupload down, too, at some point. I wonder why. And let me be clear, this is just the plagiarism we know of. We could have easily missed the stuff in the other videos or there could be more deleted ones we don't even know about. That's a minimum of 26 videos that steal stuff. Like James said, there's not three or four examples. There's hours of examples. An entire channel's worth of examples. This isn't a one-off mistake or a misunderstanding or a citation error. This is a pattern with no sign of stopping. There's no fixing this, and there's no undoing the damage he's done directly and indirectly by using so many people's work without credit for money. A lot of people have been burned by James. Not just in terms of having their writing or videos stolen, one even giving him money to find out he was stealing from them. But on a basic level, liking someone's work and funding them only to realize you're funding plagiarism is humiliating. James has become one of the biggest LGBT YouTubers in the room essentially absorbing all the support and attention that would have otherwise gone to people who actually do work. Other gay video essayists have to come up with their own opinions and actually write them. They can't compete on volume with a guy who's willing to rip off dozens and dozens of other people. Many of the people he's copied were paid very little and in some cases not at all for their original material when they wrote it. They were hoping their writing would be recognized and result in future work and more of a career, and in a way their good work was recognized but only by James. How much recognition do you think they got when James read their words without crediting them? And on the other hand, how much money has James made from them? How much money has he made in fundraising to start a film studio on the back of this career he got from them while making no films? Gay writers are already poorly recognized for their work and contributions. It's a common problem. James should know about this. In "Codebreakers" or "Queering Cinema" or whatever it'll be called next time, James has a surprisingly eloquent section about how gay people keep going missing from history and being forgotten. This part was stolen, too. - So as we start out on our lifelong personal journeys, how do we discover our queer identity if we don't know much about those who came before us? HBOMB: Steven Spinks' column is extremely moving to read and genuinely important. And no one watching James' video had the chance to learn his name. James made a lot of money repeatedly reuploading a video about the erasure of queer people and he did it by erasing queer people. I guess when he renamed it "Queering Cinema (by any means necessary)," he meant it. Every reupload, the credits get longer. The list of people he's conned grows. The works he's stealing from aren't doing quite so well. This column was written in 2019 for "Midlands Zone" magazine, the UK's biggest regional gay publication. Due to the impact of the pandemic, "Midlands Zone" ceased production in 2020. This year their official site went down along with its archive of articles like this one. Googling the words James stole now gets you no results. I only found this plagiarism because I noticed it before the web site fell off the internet. Good writing about queer living is hard to find and easy to lose, and in obscurity it becomes even easier to pretend it was yours. None of the money he makes will go to the people who wrote the great lines his viewers enjoyed. They get to rot in the very obscurity he pretends to criticize. While James takes all the oxygen for himself to promote only himself and position himself as a crusader for real representation while giving a speech he stole about how gay people keep going missing from the story, I wonder how that happened. - It provokes a deep and meaningful question, I think. What is the real, tangible impact of gay erasure? HBOMB: There is something a little bit soul-crushing about watching a man be paid thousands and thousands of dollars to literally plagiarize the phrase, "What is the real tangible impact of gay erasure?" This is the impact. I don't know what I'm supposed to do about this. I don't even know if I should be making this video. I was just trying to double check two or three old plagiarism accusations and I ended up finding a whole bunch more and I have functionally made a drama video about some guy. And worse, if this video goes up and is monetized and gets views, I have been paid-- financially rewarded-- for making this. I don't find that acceptable. Especially not when the story is really about people who were never compensated for their work being stolen. So to make sure I have no financial incentive to make a video like this again, I'm going to be dividing any of the ad revenue this video makes among the creators James stole from. I'll be conducting a thorough examination of every video James has posted including the many he has deleted I can find archives of and contact everyone I can. At least the stuff he got from that weird right wing guy isn't in the video so he technically wasn't stolen from and doesn't need to be paid. You dodged a bullet for me there, James. It also occurs to me now that I will have to make a substantial donation to Wikipedia. Something that really got to me researching this video is watching James pitch himself as the queer creator to support. Making YouTube queerer entails giving him and his movie studio your money and not the other talented people who have a fraction of his support. He extremely rarely recommends or speaks positively of any other creators as if to him fellow members of his community are competitors. He acts like no one else is talking about these issues and no one else sees things his way even though he stole those observations so obviously people do. The trickle-down effect of this behavior is a little upsetting. From the look of his comment sections, his devout fans believe him when he says there's no one else doing what he does. It's a manipulative strategy. Some young queer people feel underrepresented because the main guy they watch says they are, and that sucks to see happen. So I want to recommend some of my favorite queer creators in case James fans who made it this far need to know someone else they could watch and support. Matt Baume is a brilliant creator who--to put it bluntly-- is the platonic ideal of "What if James Somerton was good?" His videos are entertaining but also well-researched. He doesn't need to steal from books to discuss the evil queens of the Disney canon. He writes his own books because he actually does his own work. His video about Disney villains is a favorite of mine and a palette cleanser after watching someone reconstitute other people's observations into smug hamburger. Khadija Mbowe's ability to be energetic and funny when handling sensitive topics is incredibly refreshing and instantly makes the conversation at hand so much more useful. Their video about the politics of coming out, the evolution of the concept, and whether maybe we fixate a little too much on what it's come to mean in modern culture is great. Give it a shot. Lady Emily's videos are all made for me. But the one about Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy explores the history of two of DC canon's most important characters and why they make such an engaging couple in stories. I recommend it especially if you've not seen any of the good stuff coming out of DC lately, which does exist, like "Teen Titans Go!" Or the Snyder cut. Shanspeare covers a broad range of issues from AI to Lolita but their video about true crime is a great tour of our species' long-term morbid fascination with gruesome stories. Shanspeare asks "why are we fascinated with true crime" with real curiosity rather than judgment. They don't even make up any white women to get mad at. Amazing! RickiHirsch has made a ton of videos about media and gender over the years. Kat only found her by searching "queer horror" on YouTube and scrolling down for several minutes to see what was buried under the huge pile of James Somerton and X and Y being gay for Z-minutes straight I recommend her recent one about body horror which explored gender's role in it in a way that made me say out loud, "Oh, right, yeah. It's good. Give it a shot. I just found out about Verity Ritchie and their channel verilybitchie. Good one. But their videos with the help of co-writer Ada are really entertaining. I should recommend the video about the lesbian gaze just to offset the baggage I had to experience making this, but the one about "Doctor Who" and women is great and also deals with gayness, so it counts. And after all this I'd be amiss not to recommend Alexander Avila whose latest videos have been real bangers. The type of content he makes has evolved in the last year or so from funny queer-oriented media analysis to funny queer-oriented life analysis. "TikTok Gave Me Autism" is really good and I'd plagiarize it if I could get away with it at this point. There's a ton more queer creators out there covering the topics James pretends to and they manage to do it with their own words even without his massive budget. Linked in the description is a playlist with these and more video essays on queer media or history or politics or philosophy or queer anything, really, from creators you should consider giving a look if you haven't. It's been reassuring, putting this part of the video together and getting to fully realize there's plenty of us out there, and most of them are very cool. James was the exception to a group of entertaining, thoughtful, and kind human beings. I'm proud of us. Yeah, I guess that's the word, isn't it? Anyway, let's try to pull a rabbit out of this bloody mess of a hat. I'm gonna put my wall back up and try to come to a wider conclusion about plagiarism real quick. One sec. [groans] Rachel, you haven't even held the camera. Can you help me with this at least? That's right. She's real. You don't know me. [grunting] To me, to you. [grunting] It's on! Thanks for that. [laughing] We've talked a lot today about what plagiarism is but we should also talk a little bit about what it isn't. It's completely fine to be inspired by someone or build on ideas you got from somewhere else, especially if you're open about it. Famous big boy YouTuber Ludwig has a thing he calls the Yoink and Twist where he gets ideas from existing videos and openly broadcasts he's doing his own spin on it. In his video about that one guy copying the capsule hotel video, he happily says where he got the stuff he drew on for his own work. - This is me trying silly chess ideas. And--and look at all the tweets beside me with the "Your ideas suck." Genius. Genius thumbnail. I got it from Fundie. I got it from Fundie. I made your dumb ideas from Minecraft and then he has a bunch of tweets next to him. HBOMB: It's hard for anyone to feel ripped off when he's open about where he got the ideas. I'm old enough now that when I was yay high, I was here for the first time this conversation happened on YouTube. It's easy to get rose-tinted about the early days, the 240p wiki-wiki Wild, Wild West before anyone had sponsorships or even qualified for ad revenue. There was no money in it so people just made what they liked making. Things were better. More original then. This was never the case. There wasn't capital but there was social capital and that spends almost as good. The AVGN--one of the subjects of this video-- had dozens of knock-offs vying for his spot. The Irate Gamer, The Game Dude, The Sega Kid, Urinating Tree, Armake21, Acoustic Rocker, Undercover Filmer, The Pissed-Off Angry Gamer Man. - Nintendo Shit Cube. - Even before there was any money in it, we were drowning in people competing to be the guy calling NES "Batman" a shit load of fuck. But even back then, you could draw a line between people who cynically wanna be the guy and people who wanted to be themselves but inspired and informed by ideas they liked. Second generation critics like The Spoony One are open about drawing inspiration from Armake21, one of the better angry reviewers. And how many people claim inspiration from Spoony One today? Too many. Stop Skeletons From Fighting who-- unlike everyone I just mentioned-- is still around today because he developed his own new ideas, started out by taking inspiration from all these people, and then deliberately doing the opposite with the Happy Video Game Nerd, being positive about games he liked. Now that's a Yoink and Twist. YouTube is a beautiful cesspool of inspiration, remixing, riffing, parody. Drawing on existing ideas is a great way of making something new and unique. It's only wrong when you add nothing and try to pretend it was yours in the first place. And you don't have to cite your sources like a rocket scientist, either. Sonic lore YouTuber Cybershell frequently uses information and images he got from web sites like "The Cutting Room Floor" and just explains where he's getting it from and often asks permission to use it. A coward would hide their source in a Pastebin and not mention it anywhere else, but his videos are great because he shows you where you could learn more and maybe even makes fun of you for not reading the web site yourself in the first place while explaining the topic in his own way. This is why Kat is forcing me to tell you his channel video is objectively the best thing on YouTube. Uh, thanks a lot, Kat. Fittingly, when Cybershell inspires someone, they're equally open about it. When one of his videos led Allen Pan to invent a device to steal soda from Universal Studios, he tells you right at the start he found out about the original from Cybershell's video. This is the community spirit I love to see on this web site. It's kind of beautiful watching a wider story unfold. One generation of Baja Blast thieves passing on their designs to the next. If you're honest about it, there's not even anything wrong with adapting a book or telling people what you found on Wikipedia. Different people like getting information in different ways. Wikipedia lets people record and upload readings of pages so you can learn about Bhutanese passports through audio and they do it for a reason. - Bhutanese passport. Some people might even prefer a video version. It would practically be an accessibility feature. Making video adaptations of interesting books or Mental Floss articles is an idea with potential. It's a way of spreading writing and ideas to a new audience and all you have to do is be honest about it. That also forces you to be accountable. You'd have to ask permission and get the approval of the people who wrote what you're adapting which clears up any potential criticisms or infringement on the existing work. Speaking of adaptation, what about different languages? This is another way of sneaking plagiarism under the radar. - You might be wondering why I am subtitled in Portuguese. A few years back Geoff Thew-- the guy James quoted someone quoting-- covered how a Brazilian YouTuber had been stealing dozens of videos from him and other English-speaking creators but in Portuguese so us [speaking foreign language] would never notice. This sucks but it also points to one of the core barriers to accessibility for creators. Most videos are trapped in their mother tongue, making them hard to watch in other languages and therefor easier to steal. This is why some clever creators very smartly let their producer trick him into paying people to do proper captions for the vaccines video in Portuguese, Spanish, and French so more people could engage with the facts of the story. And "Pathologic" into Russian because I know who watches that video. Translation is a big part of video discovery in more ways than one. For Spoony fans a lot of his old videos used to be missing as non-YouTube video hosts died and their content didn't make the jump. Many of his videos weren't viewable on YouTube were it not for TheSpoonyRUS. A Russian fan of Spoony reuploaded his videos with Russian subtitles, and some of these were the only versions of those videos that existed on the net, at least for a while. Subtitling his videos didn't just make him accessible to a new language but to the original language, too. That's pretty cool. But you can go deeper than sub. You can dub. - [speaking in Russian] HBOMB: CounterStrike tuber 3kliksphilip dubbed two of a Russian creator's videos about mods they made into English with permission, of course. It's very cool that a video about game development got to cross the language barrier for us [speaking foreign language] to enjoy. There might actually be a market in adapting videos like this. I'm sure some of my videos would do very well if someone translated them into English. I think a lot of people are inclined to protect creators they like on the grounds that plagiarism is a very academic-sounding problem, like something that happens in research papers or journalism not something that you can do in a silly video made for entertainment purposes. Why are we holding YouTubers to "standards?" That would be like expecting accurate history from someone whose name has "historian" in it. Because YouTubers often project a sense of being scrappy, do-it-yourself amateurs, it feels almost wrong to expect them to be professional but a lot of them are professionals, regardless how authentic their persona might be. YouTubers are now among the most recognizable faces on the planet and have become immensely wealthy doing this. Some are so influential we literally call them influencers. Maybe it's a good idea to have some standards for not stealing. Maybe. In current discourse YouTubers simultaneously present as the forefront of a new medium, creative voices that need to be taken seriously as part of the next generation of media and also uwu small beans little babies who shouldn't be taken seriously when they rip someone off and make tens of thousands of dollars doing it. YouTubers who act like serious documentarians gain a shroud of professionalism which then masks the deeply unprofessional things they do. We just saw that with James. I think he's partially got away with what he's doing for so long because he acts so professional about it so people assume there's no way he could just be stealing shit. So they don't check. And on top of that a lot of James' videos contain obvious mistakes and made-up facts which we haven't even had the time to get into in this video. But because they're often presented next to well-researched stuff he stole, no one questions it. I've seen James repeat a lie in his videos and then other people claim it's true and link his video as the proof. He has helped to solidify misinformation by seeming like he's doing his diligence. To quote the great philosopher Daniil Dankovsky, "Truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance of truth does evil." Just kidding, he actually stole that from François Deelarozièracoes. Sight your sources, Bachelor! This becomes extremely glaring once you've seen how the other side lives. At he last VidCon I went to, like, four years ago, I was taking an Uber and a bunch of people came in it with me 'cause we were all going to the same place. A bunch of big YouTubers who I don't know super well, including really massive one, like way more important than me, you know? And we were all just making small talk and I made a joke that was actually quite funny about the topic we were talking about, and this big YouTuber, she laughed... And took out her phone and tweeted it. She heard my joke and just casually went, "Ooh, I'll have that." And it became her joke. And she just took it. People really liked the joke, too, which felt kind of good but not really. What are you gonna do? Complain? And start a massive public fight with someone extremely famous and get smashed into dust by thousands of fans? No, thanks. And that was my Uber, too! I paid money to have one of my jokes stolen by a multi-millionaire! When people hit a certain level of celebrity they start to think the world actually revolves around them and they can just take something if they want and say it's theirs. I don't have a clever analysis here. Some people are just fucking weird. I'm not smart enough to know what we're supposed to do about plagiarism. I think trying to fix it in any systemic way could risk making it worse. Let's imagine YouTube introduced some kind of plagiarism claim system. We'd be expecting someone at YouTube to be able to decide whether something is plagiarism or not and I don't like the idea of YouTube having any more power than they already have. If there was a system for handling plagiarism the iilluminaughtiis of the world wouldn't stop. They'd find ways around it. We've seen in this very video how easy it is to get away with copyright infringement. Just blur the logos and slap a filter over it. These systems are so untrustworthy, when Internet Historian correctly got copyright claimed for stealing an entire article, people automatically assumed it was some kind of mistake because YouTube is quite fairly viewed as bad at handling this. Just as likely to shut down perfectly fair use work as it is actual infringement of copyright. A system like this would also allow bad actors to falsely accuse people which would create a lot of problems for their targets. People falsely copyright claim videos they don't like all the time already. It's happened to me. I almost had to give a Nazi my home address so that a video would go back up. I'm half expecting some of the people this video was about to try it with this one. Maybe let's not give YouTube any more easily-exploitable features. I want my joke back but I can live without it if it means not giving the bad guys another toy. Simply being able to talk about plagiarism and bring attention to it and let people decide if something is and who they want to support going forward, that's good enough for now. But don't take my word for it on this. I'm certainly not. Someone smarter than me might come up with a better idea so let's keep our eyes peeled for that. As technology progresses, the methods of plagiarism are getting strangers and more complex. The hot new tool in the stealing tools box is generative AI like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney, which can produce new art or words on command using a process known as stealing. Sorry, that's an over-simplification. The process is called, um... [papers rustling] Complicated stealing. Theoretically, generative AI works by training on a large data set of existing material to figure out how to make new things. Before we even ask whether stuff generated by this counts as original we have to ask, how did they get all that material? Well, by taking a lot of stuff without its creator's consent. ChatGPT has intricate knowledge of copyrighted works it shouldn't legally have access to and when you ask it to write something original, it's just smooshing all the stolen data together and using pattern recognition to try to guess the next word. It can't actually intuit things based on context. Here's what ChatGPT thinks I'd say about ChatGPT. "It's like having your own personal tutor, therapist, and fact-checker rolled into one." "So whether you're here for the knowledge, the banter, "or just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, buckle up!" [laughing] It knows I say "buckle up." I'll give you that. None of the people whose stuff was stolen to create this were asked permission or compensated. I certainly wasn't. But you bet they're charging you a monthly subscription for the privileged of using theft machine 4.0. What you look into what a large language model actually does it boils down to a slightly more advanced version of mashing the predictive text button on your phone which makes it especially dangerous when it comes to writing reliable information. AI frequently hallucinates imaginary people, books, and historical events, because it doesn't actually know any facts, just what facts look like. It's like asking James who came up with Disney Gay Days. You can't trust it. They had to put "Don't trust me," at the bottom so they don't get in trouble for inventing a machine that makes up lies. But because it has copied a lot of text and can guess a lot of new ways of saying it, the power this tool brings specifically to thieves is tremendous. ChatGPT's one truly impressive feature is how well it enables plagiarism. You could just pasted a bunch of stolen stuff you got from Wikipedia or someone else's video in there and tell it to rewrite it so it sounds different. I wouldn't be surprised if James' videos suddenly stop having easily-detectable plagiarism in them right around the time computers become able to launder this type of theft. Now it's a machine accidentally changing the quotes. Some creators have found people copying their work using this exact method, feeding their videos' transcripts into a GPT, asking for a different-sounding version, and using it as the basis for a new video. While it's scary to consider a world where machines crank out videos copying your work and replace you, the plagiarism is extremely obvious. It's just someone's script reworded badly. The thumbnails are just a thesaurused version of the originals that doesn't even make sense. And the videos themselves actively demonstrate they're using footage from the original video. It's sloppy. The videos are unwatchably bad, so no one watched them. When someone finally did, they were caught immediately. Not to downplay the chance for these to be successful, or the possibility of a more sophisticated version in the future, but it's heartening to recognize that these aren't even really AI. A person had to make these videos. It's still just people doing the stealing here. Pointing out AI was involved is almost a misdirection. A human being stole a video and made his own. All the AI did was speed up the process of making a shitty, obviously-stolen video by doing the bad rewriting for them. People have been ripping each other off long before AI happened and for now it's still people. So why do people plagiarize? We've talked a lot of superficials in this video, wanting money or prestige or clout or to get one over on your enemies by jacking their stuff, but these are small things. There's other ways of getting those. The reasons humans copy like this I think goes a bit deeper. We don't exactly live in a world built for humans, do we? There's no guide book for happiness or success or a sense of place in the world, and the people claiming to have one for you are really just trying to sell you something. We spend most of our little lives struggling to make these feelings fade away or find something to placate them. It's either ennui or being on weed. [laughs] I know it's a little pretentious but we're all searching for a sense of meaning and purpose on our lives and those things are hard to come by. There's a little bit of nothing in all of us, and we'd like to fill it with something. Opening your web browser and seeing someone who seems to have it figured out, making you feel better and entertaining you, and seeming to attract an audience on this roulette wheel of a planet, that's powerful. There's someone who seems to understand what they're supposed to be doing. And it's working. That's all anyone really wants. Sure, in retrospect, a bunch of people wanting to be exactly like the AVGN sounds silly but he knew who he was. He was the angriest gamer you've ever heard. We can laugh. In fact, you're supposed to. But that's a human being with purpose. There's someone who's not anxious about their place in the world anymore. It's very difficult not to want that completeness for yourself, not to just be like someone, but to be them-- to attain that sense of knowing. In real life James Rolfe is a human being with all sorts of problems and fears, but that doesn't stop people from wanting to be like the person he seems. Someone who knows their place in the world. A know this is getting a bit pretentious and heavy for a video about plagiarism. But I do worry there are people out there who will never get the chance to become who they are because they're too busy trying to be like someone else who at best has it figured out for themselves just a little bit. I feel like I know who I am and how to live my life, and that makes me feel happy and somewhat complete. And I don't think I'd have ever found myself if I was trying to chase someone else's sense of completeness. Basically, no one knows how to live your life. And you might not, either. But the only person who's gonna figure it out is you. And you won't find that by trying to be the next that person. You can only be the first of whoever it is that you are. Other people help in small ways, though. They give you pointers to who you could be, and I think what makes me happiest in the world is feeling like I might have helped some people with that. People take inspiration from my work sometimes, and that is very cool. It's the ultimate flattery and let's be honest, the closest I'll ever come to having children. If you find any happiness or success making something creatively, and you think I helped... Thank you. Feeling like I can do that for someone makes me happy in a way I can't describe. And, uh, if you find a lot of success doing it... Give me all of your money. [cheerful music] ♪ ♪ Wow, the boom mic is still out of frame. Oh, the light literally just went off right now. Went out of battery. Pretty good timing that it went off just right then. I'm just gonna leave it off. Thanks very much for making it all the way through this video. And a big thank you to my patrons whose names should be going past the screen right now in some form, uh, for keeping the lights on and allowing me to keep making stuff like this. Not literally this, though. This shouldn't have happened. I have good videos coming that I've also been working on. Those are happening as well. I didn't just make this for ten months. I promise. I have a video about "Myst" that's 90 minutes long and it's just up for patrons. Check it out! That video is actually good! ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You know, uh, the review in "Film Comment" of "28 Days Later" that was ripped off in the Cin-- [thuds] In the Cinemassacre section? I knocked it over. The "Film Comment" web site claims that that was printed in the physical magazine. "Film Comment" has an actual magazine edition. Um, so obviously I thought, "Well, if I could get "a copy of that, "that would be great for some footage. "I should get some-- get some shots of it for the video." So I painstakingly tracked down a copy of a 20-year-old magazine. Which I just knocked on the floor. One second. Here we are. Um... And I have footage of me opening this to get the shot of the review and it's not in it. [laughs] I thought, "Oh, "maybe they messed up which issue of the magazine it was in on the web site." But then before I did any more searching for ancient magazines, uh, I e-mailed Professor Sayad and just asked if it was ever printed and she said no, it wasn't. So I wasted a lot of time trying to get a shot that I ended up not getting. And that's why videos like this take this long. Imagine something like that happening once a week. This is why people steal things. Doing your own research is life-ruining. Tune in next time when I make a doughnut. That's not a joke. That happens in the next video. Bye.

Transcript for:Understanding Plagiarism in Creative Media

Transcript for:
Understanding Plagiarism in Creative Media