Self Plagiarism And The Creative Process
from the but-is-it-infringement? dept
Last year, we had a post looking at the question of joke "stealing" and if it should be seen as infringement. Basically, there are tons of comics who are known for "stealing" the jokes of other comics, and there's even been some questions about trying to copyright jokes. The whole thing seems ridiculous, frankly. The power of a joke is rarely in the joke itself, but the delivery -- and you can't copyright that. Plus, there seem to be social measures in place to deal with "joke theft." Comics who are regularly caught doing it may have their reputations damaged, as was the case with Carlos Mencia last year.But there's even more to it than that. In an interesting post on his blog, Scott Adams writes about how he (not for the first time) was caught drawing a nearly identical Dilbert comic strip to one he had done in the past. He delves a bit into his creative process to explain how it works, noting that there are a ton of ideas flowing through his head at once and he just has to reach out and grab from that mass of ideas:
For me, ideas stream through my head at a frantic pace. I feel like a bear trying to grab a salmon. If my paw misses its target, that salmon is gone for good. I don't dwell on it. I just lunge for the next salmon. I think people who have fewer thoughts per hour have time to let them settle in and form memories. It's just a theory.That's likely true for many creative folks, including stand-up comics. As such, the ideas that you have in your head, and the ones that you hear and see from others end up getting mixed up in that mass of "idea salmon." As such, it shouldn't be surprising or scandalous or bad when someone ends up coming up with a similar (or even almost identical) joke or idea to someone else. It's just part of the creative process at work. It's not "stealing" and it's not "infringement." It's just a recognition of the creative process that involves a large number of ideas flowing around that a content creator tries to bring together in some sort of useful or interesting manner.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: creative process, dilbert, ideas, plagiarism, scott adams
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
And I really don't get the feeling that Mr. Mencia cares at all about how he is perceived amongst comedians. He's making millions off of his show on Comedy Central, where people who are ignorant of the comedy circuit support him without knowing the shameful details of his past.
I don't think copyrighting anything is the answer, much less jokes... but I feel like there should be something preventing him from having all of the success he's had. Maybe the natural order of the universe will balance it out. I won't count on it, though.
I will say that as a Latin-American, I am ashamed to see him represent my ethnicity on television.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Some comedians (Tommy Cooper for example) can tell "Knock-Knock" jokes and make them funny. By the same token a rubbish comedian can easily ruin the funniest joke in the world.
So if another comedian uses a good comedian's material, that hardly affects the good comedian's success, which does not rely on exclusive material - in fact it could actually help the original comedian - if word gets out that Mencia is reusing material from (say) Peter Kay's act - wouldn't that make you wan#t to see Peter Kay*?
* Kay is a popular UK comedian - not sure if you've heard of him in the US.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Mencia
I don't know about Carlos Mencia so I'm not well placed to judge. But it seems to me that if he is as bad a you say, then people like you telling how it is on high traffic blogs is a good start.
If the word gets out then sponsorship dies out.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
If it was good enough for
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I've done it
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I can almost understand the notion that a formula for a wonderful, unique, say, window cleaner or cancer drug should be protected long enough for the innovator to be rewarded (I said innovator not "company who bought (or stole) the formula from the innovator".
But if we're going to trivialize the notion of what constitutes "protected intellectual property" so that it covers jokes, it does nothing but point out just how ridiculous it is that any art should be copyrighted.
The most obvious example to me is pop music. Most pop music is little more than a trivial chord progression over a beat. To call led zeppelin thieves for coming up with a song that's the same as one written by some old blues guy is silly, especially since the old blues guy probably got it from someone before him, maybe slaves working in the field.
The bigger question is why should someone who plays pop music for a living have any expectation of great wealth? And why should someone who wrote a hit song in 1972 expect to be rich for the rest of his life off of the royalties from that one 3 minute opus? Ultimately, copyright probably does more to discourage creativity than to encourage it, which was the original purpose.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
self-plagiarism
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: self-plagiarism
Copying a good idea is not bad, building on that idea with some of your own is even better. (By copying I don't mean copying note for note someone elses work, I mean copying what or how they accomplished something in music) This is how music changes and manages to speak and current and future generations.
Cheers
David
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No such thing!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No such thing!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Yes and no
But that doesn't mean there haven't been legitimate cases of idea/story/screenplay stealing in Hollywood.
I have no idea what Mencia did. I don't find him funny, so I don't care.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Pope Ratzo
Copying a dance step is an '80's movie.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Plagiarising self.
I will often find myself thinking "It would be a great idea to add xyz to the game" then dive into the code and realize that I already added it 5 years earlier.
How many cartoons has Scott Adams done by now? The only surprise here is that this doesn't happen much more often.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's just sad that we market thy creator rather then the collective effort that made it happen.
Oh and as an old player of Aardwolf, I still play Medivia. Old-school MUD plagiarism accusations there.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Self Plagiarism - It Happens
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Self Plage
a rotary cylinder for a car engine completely unaware of
people in Germany with the exact same idea.
As a comedian, I remember helping write a take off of
Gandhi singing Sammy Davis Jr.'s "Candy Man" and having the
same idea appear the next day on T.V.
"Who can skip breakfast...lunch and dinner too...
separate the English from my friends the Hindu...
The Gandhi Man.
Politically incorrect and trite, but parallel ideas happen
all the time.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Stop Plagiarism
G. Murugesan and Dr C. Chellappan Plagiarism Case - Anna University, India
We were informed that a paper recently published contains plagiarized texts from other already published articles. Here's the details:
Paper Title: An Economical Model for Optimal Distribution of Loads for Grid Applications
Journal Reference: (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp 62-66, October 2009
Authors: G. Murugesan and Dr C. Chellappan
Authors' Affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering Anna University, Chennai 600 025, India
Paper Link: www.ijcns.org/papers/Vol.1_No.1/091010.pdf
While we went through the paper (not completely), we found that texts at different location of the paper were copied word by word from the following listed articles (by the way, you can check yourself, do the search on Google):
1. Multi-Source Grid Scheduling for Divisible Loads by TG Robertazzi (2006)
Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4067758/4067759/04067800.pdf?arnumber=4067800
Link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.61.9294&rep=rep1&type=pdf
2. QoS Guided Min-Min Heuristic for Grid Task Scheduling by HE Xiaoshan
Link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.75.9892&rep=rep1&type=pdf
3. A static jobs scheduling for independent jobs in Grid Environment by using Fuzzy C-Mean and Genetic algorithms by S Lorpunmanee (2006)
Link: http://eprints.utm.my/3338/1/A_static_jobs_scheduling_for_independent_jobs_in_Grid_Environment.pdf
4. Grid Scheduling Divisible Loads from Multiple Sources via Linear Programming by M.A. Moges (2004)
Link: http://www.actapress.com/Abstract.aspx?paperId=17820
5. Resource-Aware Distributed Scheduling Strategies for Large-Scale Computational Cluster/Grid Systems by S Viswanathan (2007)
Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/71/4302721/04302731.pdf?tp=&arnumber=4302731&isnumber=430272 1
6. Divisible Load Scheduling for Grid Computing by D Yu (2003)
Link: http://www.ee.sunysb.edu/~tom/MATBE/div-grid.pdf
We stop reviewing this article at page number 2, column 1, as the amount of copied texts is ENORMOUS!!!! A REAL SHAME!!!
Due to limited resources we won't be able to go through the entire paper which is 5 pages long!! So definitely, there may be other people works that these people have plagiarized!! We will be grateful if someone can check this and report to us so that we can update this post for all our readers.
We further noticed that they published a similar paper, probably with a 80%-90% similarities in the content (trying to hit 2 birds with 1 stone):
Paper Title: An Economic Allocation of Resources for Multiple Grid Applications
Journal Reference: Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science 2009 Vol I WCECS 2009, October 20-22, 2009, San Francisco, USA
Authors: G. Murugesan and Dr C. Chellappan
Link: http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2009/WCECS2009_pp213-217.pdf
These 2 authors can be contacted at: murugesh02@gmail.com and rcc@annauniv.edu
SOURCE: http://stop-plagiarism.blogspot.com/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]