Here's Three Stories About YouTube Plagiarism

let's talk about plagiarism for a bit in case you're not hip to all the best YouTube drama a video game youtuber called Ouija the god put out a video recently entitled why the blue Yeti sucks the video is incredibly obnoxious and this is me we're talking about here the blue Yeti is a $100 stainless-steel toy everything good you heard about it forget it there lies born from hobbyists with no concept of quality along with dismissing a fairly decent and affordable USB microphone for newer or young people who don't need professional quality his voices in this annoyingly performative tone his audio is noticeably overproduced and every sentence ends with him smugly droning the final word and it's super grating to listen to but worse than any of that almost all the videos content style arguments and research is stolen I'm here to tell you the blue Yeti is a $100 stainless steel toy everything good you heard about it forget it there lies born from hobbyist with no concept of quality there's a lesson known youtuber called soul brother number three I've been a pretty big fan of his for over a year I used a blue Yeti for a while until seeing his video series how to be an online voice actor and taking notes about the results of better acoustics placement and the value of XLR microphones in fact when I was looking for a good preamp late last year I paused one of his cutaway shots of his own setup and found a version of that one on eBay he made a video about how to use DSLRs and even though I haven't used those for a while I got into samyang lenses as a result of him mentioning them here's me plagiarizing that shot from the video with the exact same lens I'm beginning to think I might be a little obsessed with this guy I've seen all of his videos multiple times so when this video got on my radar I immediately noticed that not only did he rip off so brother style but he even stole entire lines and sentences here he is ripping off really basic things you could have changed to hide it like the diagrams and method of highlighting examples while talking about them it's utterly absurd how much of a ripoff this is when someone pointed this out to eg as if he needed to be told he'd done this he added the video as a source deep in the description claiming he quotes and references him yeah and diesel was just quoting and referencing Stardust Crusaders to the really shitty thing about this though is that it completely reappropriation others ultimate point the source videos are fun and useful tutorials with the intent of informing helping a group of people that could benefit from knowing the fact the blue Yeti isn't the apex of quality is worth talking about when discussing the craft and more importantly elevating voice-acting to a craft is a really great thing to do it's just a for fun or skype microphone it's to actually quote soul brother a toy we G's version of the video makes this the front and center argument the function of the video has become a long and unnecessary take down of a microphone the advice Ouija repackaged was good very good but it's been repackaged into a rant about a popular consumer grade microphone that's probably the most offensive part of this one of the best tutorials on the Internet has literally become a footnote in garbage clickbait if that isn't the Internet's effect on truth and reason in microcosm then I don't know what is now you notice how this sounds are nice and clean and clear and how this sounds like absolute total garbage wheat either gobbler comparing a very expensive professional microphone set up to a microphone that sounds fine especially compared to other USB microphones in that price range or you know no microphone at all well that right there is the difference between a toy and a real audio setup yes that right there is the difference and we call that difference six hundred and fifty US dollars if you want to know what intellectual honesty looks like you know that video I said inspired me to spend far too much money on some nice manual lenses you can't watch that video anymore because soul brother took it down for some slight errors imagine that we G taking down a video because it's got mistakes in it can you imagine what it must be like to be that can you [ __ ] imagine but if you're a fan of soul brother like I am this isn't the first time his work has been plagiarized in December last year a video entitled what happened to Kentucky Fried Chicken made by Austin McConnell came out and went pretty viral it currently has over 1.7 million views watching it someone intimately familiar with soul brothers style will instantly recognize flourishes and stylistic choices all but unique to him all right check it out so alright so check it talent equipment and availability showing weakness in any of these manifests itself in you not getting paid there are five keys to the success of your average fast food joint fail in any of these areas and folks aren't going to want to buy your product recognizable enough that someone noticed this and tipped sole brother off when he asked him about it McConnell openly claimed him as an inspiration now this is an interesting creative gray area no one's on the hook for being inspired by someone else's style or work but completely jacking someone's style for attention is certainly a bad look it's not uncommon in the YouTube community for someone to borrow someone else's ideas if they seem good or popular the guy who first decided to overreact to five nights at freddys footage probably founded numerous careers for several people including that as the game's creator you really can't copyright a style or ideas and that's a good thing McConnell's poor ripoff is still better than the stuff he used to make before it was stealing stuff and the YouTube jump-scare economy has provided entertainment for millions but there's a difference between saying something new and unique to you using a style inspired by others and trying to be someone else this comic persona is occasionally entertaining but it's soul brothers comic persona there's an unwritten rule in creative communities that this sort of thing makes you kind of a dick additionally the very poor pacing and length of the video makes the style he assumed dragged more than it should it starts to feel repetitive and overly long even though it's only eight minutes which is something of an achievement style and tone and pacing are hard to master and in borrowing surface elements from soul brother he fails to accurately capture what makes that method good in the first place he cites soul brother as an inspiration and I strongly suspect that with time McConnell will figure out a style that suits him better and is more appropriate for the work he ends up making if you want to learn some useful tips about voice acting or audio setups or editing or writing or filmmaking you can learn directly from the best soul brother does workshops for $80 apiece and I know people who can vouch for them being worth the money check the description for a link and some testimonials so there's the first two stories about two very different kinds of plagiarism I could bring up that this is a problem that the YouTube rational skeptic community also has and lots of them are constantly accusing each other of ripping off their shtick what a shock they're so intellectually honest otherwise but my third story today is going to be mine because I'm selfish a couple days ago friend and estranged lover Bob Birds put out a video noting the similarities and criticizing ouija it's pretty good check it out my original plan for this video was to just remake his entire video word-for-word for a joke but toward the end he made the comment that without building attitudes to calling out plagiarism when it happens in the YouTube community it's never going to get discussed properly and I'd much rather contribute to that than putting a lot of effort into a silly joke so here you might recall my amazing video about why blood-borne is great it was very well received creatively and culturally and changed the world one thing that most infused scholars was my introduction and codification of a concept in game design theory I called play conditioning my theory was sound no one could possibly criticize it because it's perfect and everyone loved it so of course like with all beautiful and perfect ideas someone stole it let me introduce you to Liu Kapoor his video blood-borne did something incredible is a cheap knockoff of the general thesis of my video and of play conditioning presenting it as if he just suddenly came up with it coincidentally in regards to the same game as me four months after I did found some overly esoteric and difficult in a way that wasn't fun and full of overly defensive get good spouting fanboys and these people seemed to be hardcore get good preaching masochistic troglodytes who members of the souls community don't even recognize rebutting it with a simple get good firstly the most obvious one viz new shield the problem was all centered around one mechanic in a word shields blood-borne I gave about injecting yourself with increasing amounts of dangerous liquid is itself the ultimate gateway drug giving you a high that essentially turns the game into a socially acceptable drug a good deal of players will spend a lot of time with their shield up playing it safe waiting for only the best possible moment to drop it strike and then bring it back up again gamers throw up their shield and dance around the enemy until there's an opening they stab they put the shield back up rinse and repeat maybe you shouldn't have rinsed and repeated my video Luke almost inevitable death of this guy's hand things immediately communicates that you're going to be facing seemingly insurmountable Dodd's immediately be greeted by a giant beast who would crush them repeatedly he talks about how uninviting the previous games are and how much they hammer home that you're going to die like I did but as we learn later he never played the previous games before blood-borne so to get across how uninvited he was he has to use footage from the first game he played which is blood-borne he's using footage of the game he's trying to say made the series more inviting to prove that the previous games were uninviting also immediately greeted with a giant beast Oh gasp quick knee isn't a giant by Phil's game standards you don't encounter him immediately and he only even transforms into this monster after two thirds of the fight Luke this is [ __ ] nonsense what are you doing this is a weird thing like what I'm talking about people's inability to get into the games and how those people are dismissed by fanboys I use footage from on the bridge in Demon Souls when he's saying what I said but worse he's using footage from a very similar area in Dark Souls 3 why he thought to do that I don't know I guess he thought I used that footage for a good reason so he had to as well well spoilers I used that footage completely at random because I had no idea what to put there so uh well done you even managed to copy my laziness idiot so he just copied the bit on the bridge right that bit ends in my video like this then blood-borne happened I introduced blood-borne which by the way came out before Dark Souls 3 the game you were using footage from there Luke the music cuts to music from the game to be dramatic and then I fade to the opening sequence of blood-borne Luke copying not just my points but their pacing an order introduces blood-borne and then uses an audio cue from blood-borne which i think is the only time even things to do it in the video when he's copying what I did and they responded in 2015 with blood-borne and then talks over the same piece of footage as me about what bloodborne did and about how Miyazaki fixed the problem in my video I outlined play conditioning here and slowly whittled down the problems that lead to people not enjoying the souls games into early design elements and the shield using examples of how other people who started on the earlier games played it he just goes oh no the problems fields now he played blood-borne first so how he knows shields are a problem having only played that one on Dark Souls 3 afterwards I don't know my ideas and argument are so poorly mangled at this point it's a little embarrassing to think he got the idea from me then he rips off my jokey anecdote about Miyazaki in a boardroom meeting can you imagine being in the room when he'll attack in Miyazaki was looking at play test footage of the previous game and coming up with the concept of blood-borne and he was like hey hey take out shield bad jokes aside I can just picture the day that Miyazaki walked into the conference room sat down at the head of the table looked left looked right at all of his development leads and just said get rid of the shields nor shields ever non okay one shields but it's a joke put a joke in the arm description about them and gender and positivity passivity god I can't do this voice they took away all the shields of the game well except for one in the base game which proves my point with its in-game description which reads quote shields are nice but not if they engender passivity my joke about what Miyazaki might say in a boardroom CEG's directly into this point I make it into part of the joke actually and have him say that in the board room meeting Luke just awkwardly CEG's from his half-hearted ripoff of that section to just be suddenly talking about the shields item description he isn't just copying what I say he's copying the order I say it in it wouldn't really have been that hard for him to make it less obvious the immediate next section of my video is about the rallying system right after the item description he immediately fades into talking about the rally system even using the exact same method of enlarging the health bar on the screen to demonstrate it better I'm sure other people do this but doing it immediately after badly copying a bunch of my talking points and also the order I save them in yeah I wonder a Luke idea from and I can personally attest to this I had never played a souls game before I played blood-borne and once I finished blood-borne I felt like a god I wanted more I wanted to taste that drug that I was talking about earlier again so I went I played Dark Souls 3 in the span of a couple of weekends I became consumed with the series and his personal a Testament doesn't make any sense if he hadn't played the previous games how would he know they were uninviting or not fun to play or how they would have conditioned him he was smart enough to know not to steal my story about having a friend who tried the previous games and didn't enjoy them and then went back after blood-borne to find he suddenly did but not smart enough to substitute it with an anecdote that makes any sense at all additionally in what is my real problem with his work here his version of my arguments rest on hearsay and general ideas with no examples given and no experiences of his own to relate to about the games or examples of problems with the previous games except of course that they have shields and encourage their overuse which he just psychically knows is the problem despite having never played the previous games he mangled my longer and more rigorous discussion of shields so badly he essentially argues that shields are bad because they help with defense at all missing my point that they're fine but the previous games design encourages overuse these mistakes transform my ideas in two versions incredibly easy for commenters to pick Holden inadvertently this video is like a straw man version of my argument but completely accidentally because he's trying to legitimately make it because he didn't understand what he was feeling unless of course Luke Ipoh is destined to be an excellent contributor to design theory and just needed to get a foot in the door which simply happened to be my foot I don't know I'd honestly preferred if you'd stolen more of my ideas as it stands this video is just insulting to its audience and the ideas you're trying to present I'm not mad I was plagiarized really I am being a bit hyperbolic here but I am a little annoyed about the effects of plagiarism not to get too apocalyptic but to me a cardinal sin is to make an idea look weak simply by presenting it poorly I want to make videos where if I saw them I'd be convinced and learn something and it would further a wider conversation about design or cult show whatever else the hell I'm talking about most the time if I saw this video I'd think the idea was full of [ __ ] and write it off I didn't talk about this much before because I didn't like the idea of going after people you know but Bob's right if we don't talk about this when it happens and create that sort of culture there's even less to stop this going on and I like discussion and furthering of ideas I want to see play conditioning looked at more closely so its parameters can be explored and shown in relation to other games not more people just re coming up with it in regards to the same game even the two most upvoted comments on that video or a comment making fun of how my video often finds itself in the related videos section of his and a comment by me and honestly having me in your comment section is punishment enough the economics of YouTube presents a problem for the content of YouTube and the wider social conversations taking place through the medium if you want to make a living on this shitty website it's currently set up so that the best business practice is to see what's popular and make something similar often disgustingly similar this stunts creativity and originality sell brother's video essays it's just a small piece of the stuff he makes most of the time he's making high effort read herbs of anime or cool little animated things that are difficult to copy and not many people would even think to copy because they're far from the most popular thing he does but that kind of attitude making what you feel it's worth making is an important one to have in a space widely dominated by people trying to make a living by being what already did well but you know again and with their face on it in days of old entertainers and writers would measure success by how well-regarded their work was or in how much the wider discussion was furthered by their contribution nowadays you measure success by the amount of imitators you launched so special thanks to number one age Brahma guy found Liu Kapoor I wish him best of luck in his endeavors and hope he himself or one day produced something worth stealing I doubt it though I mean Jesus Christ this videos Paulie Mayes you used the same audio loop for like eight straight minutes hey Lew Kapoor I know this guy he does some really great editing workshops look him up his name soul brother

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 1,004,791

Rating: 4.8311625 out of 5

Keywords: hbomb, hbomberguy, weegeeplays, plagiarism, soulbrothanumbuh3

Id: ZDtJ7bte_zg

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ivanwarrior]

I'm big fans of both Soulbrotha and McConnell,for some reason I thought they were friends and that's why their videos are similar. Maybe Austin did an outro for Soulbrotha once?