New Year's Eve...

[cashew]

Weirdly not feeling the festive atmosphere, probably because the Western New Year just another holiday over here and the big one is Chinese New Year, so I'm just kinda being blaaaaaah. It also doesn't help that I spent the past few days watching Hbomberguy, Todd in the Shadows and Philosophy Tube covering plagiarism and the harms thereof and my brain is just...

First, as a former academic, I hate plagiarism with a burning passion.

Second, I'm also really fucking annoyed with people who conflate plagiarism with copyright violation. As Hbomberguy mentioned, the last high profile case where writers suing for plagiarism succeeded was back in the 1970's. There is a reason for this: plagiarism is mostly not covered by the law and considered a legal act, while copyright infringement (which creatives often confuse with plagiarism and thus don't understand why people can copy their ideas and present it as their own) will be smacked down hard. And the test for copyright vs plagiarism is, sadly, examining completely different things. Example: (most) fan works are copyright infringement but not plagiarism, while shovelware/knockoffs are examples of plagiarism that doesn't violate copyright.

Third, am so very annoyed with the reactionary comments inspired by these videos. Calls to sue the plagiarists seem to miss the opening few minutes of Hbomberguy's video making the point that winning a plagiarism lawsuit is extremely difficult, so difficult that the most recent example is from the 1970's.

Maybe I'll feel more in a festive mood when Chinese New Year rolls around.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

The only good part of this time of the year is the year end shutdown for most companies. The bad part is now everyone's starting to get back to work. T_T

Happy holidays anyways.

[cashew]

Thanks for the New Year's wish.

The only good part of this time of the year is the year end shutdown for most companies.

OK, to be completely fair, most MMOs also are running events. Unfortunately, I'm not playing any MMOs to take advantage of said events. =.=