I like the idea of the going-grey day, but I'm a little ooked out by the Wall of Shame thing for plagiarists up at the same site.

I'd almost say that's the craziest thing I've heard in a long time.

You know, I'd have said you were right if I hadn't heard this crazier thing. Which I may discuss in LJ later. I was laughing for hours on the phone last night about it.

Plagiarists should be exposed. Some of them are pretty sad emotional basketcases, notwithstanding.

People who created the vid politely asked him to take them down, and he refused! The hell?

Ah, but you see, in his tiny brain, the vidders had no rights in the work, since it's merely snips of other people's work spliced together without permission. He seems to think making a vid is like clipping headlines from a newspaper and taping them to construction paper.

I read the thread, was tempted to send them off to read Rebecca Tushnet's Yale Law Review article on the intellectual property interest inherent in derivative creative works, and then thought better of it. That kind of person can't handle all the multi-syllabics and footnotes...

Anyone who's created something knows that vidders and ficcers have a legitimate (if not well-recognized) ownership interest in their product. Even if there is no enforcement mechanism in place, it's a gross violation of community standards to take someone else's work and distribute it or change it without their permission.

The problem, of course, is that it's damned near impossible to enforce such community standards. I have yet to hear of a fan who's rich enough and crazy enough to take such a case to court, and I'd be terrified of the judge, because all it would take would be one conspitated judge for this whole infrastructure to come tumbling down...

Yeah, they should, but that doesn't mean people can't learn from their mistakes, or should always be branded as a result.

(ETA: I was replying to Theodosia.)

See, I want to know who's stealing stuff. I don't want to end up reading a story or watching a vid and liking it and not realizing that someone stole that work.

Oh, and I'm not even going to touch the claim that thousands of people would be attracted to Firefly by watching vids. I mean, really: vids are for invested fans, and don't do much to attract newbies to a show. You generally have to know the characters and the show to get what a vid is telling you. Otherwise it's just pretty pictures set to music.

The guy's a nut, and a stupid one at that.

Well, what if you're a plagiarist who gets caught, apologizes, takes down the work, and goes on to write original material in the same fandom? To take a hypothetical example that in no way is happening right now in SV?

And, also, what if someone uses that same information not to avoid someone's work, but to mailbomb the plagiarist, and shut down the mailserver for the entire ISP?

This is actually more what I'm worried about, stuff like that.

Actually, I know a plagiarism case in professional horror fiction that pretty much derailed a legitimate career. "Dawn Dunn" was actually two sisters; one mostly did detailed plots and the other handled the expanded prose. First sister started stealing plots (somewhat changed) from Dean Koontz' earlier and more obscure novels,which second sister, who hadn't read them, dutifully wrote out.

As they got more contracts and started writing faster, first sister began lifting whole sections, omitting changing details. About four books down the road, a Koontz fan reported back to Koontz, Koontz got his lawyer and publisher on the case and all hell broke loose. Second sister really hadn't known, but whatever she's written on her own and submitted on her own since then has been blackballed by most legitimate publishers on general principle.