Videos stolen wholesale from other creators.
Continue reading “VidAlpha: MrDalekJD Confirmed Plagiarist, Apologizes”
Tag: Plagiarism
VidAlpha: IGN Brasil Caught Stealing Videos
Bad Press: The Internet Falls For Another Con Artist [Fortnite Edition]
The internet has a such a vibrant imagination.
For those of you healthy adults who don’t follow Fortnite news, Epic yesterday was accused of stealing artwork and using it as a cosmetic costume in their battle royale shooter. The tweet highlighting the claim showcased a Deviant Art user’s creation submitted September 2018 compared to the Fortnite model released in November of the same year. Taken at face value, the models look very similar, almost too similar to not be a coincidence.
Here at MMO Fallout, I pride myself very highly on my BS detector. It came at a very high price, my eternal soul which upon my death will be stored in a garage in Buffalo. Not all too different from my living soul. This gift has come in very handy as in MMO Fallout’s nine years of existence, I have had to correct perhaps one or two pieces in total while breaking some stories that were later confirmed by third parties as genuine and preliminarily offering my doubts to numerous other stories that turned out to be fake.
So when yesterday’s story started hitting that Epic Games was being accused of plagiarism of a Deviant Art…artist, my detector shattered six coffee mugs and bolted down the street singing Queen. Maybe it’s the difficult task of taking seriously a person whose username comes from a television show for toddlers. Maybe it’s because Deviant Art is a bastion of plagiarism under the guise of “this is my OC character, plz donut steal.” Perhaps I just found it very hard to believe that an Epic Games artist would look at this drawing and think “I need to rush this into production yesterday,” funneling the skin from original post to seeing it to designing a knockoff to modeling to testing to release all within two months. That’s an artist with pull.
That could be it. It could also be that I’m aware of Deviant Art allowing people to change photos without altering the “user submitted” date. Such as with this 2009 creation.
The story didn’t fool many people outside of the reactionary Youtube news vlogger circuit, but it did manage to snag the attention and coverage of none other than Forbes Magazine. And why not? Their coverage of the faux-controversy has gathered nearly 140,000 views as of this publishing, far more than discussion of The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead, and the Epic Chinese Avengers poster. Web hosting doesn’t come cheap, folks, and clickbait doesn’t have time for verifying your facts. If you think about it, the fact that the accusation happened is news in and of itself. Basic investigative skills are for nerds like Twitter user Ding Dong who decided to check the website’s cached version and found that the art was swapped. Maybe Forbes should hire Ding Dong instead.
Perhaps the other side of this coin is the general habit of the public to immediately believe anything bad about an individual/entity that they don’t personally like. This claim was instantly believed by large swaths of the internet because Epic did a thing and made a game they wanted exclusive, so why wouldn’t this no-good scumbag literally-Hitler company steal artwork from an innocent 13 year old? It boggles the mind to think that a company you don’t personally care for wouldn’t be guilty of every half-baked accusation that gets laid out over Twitter.
But of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Yanked PUBG Ad Is Basically Plagiarized From Community Artwork
The above photo is an Xbox One ad concept created by Reddit user Macsterr and posted on PUBG’s subreddit about a month ago. This image may look familiar if you follow Xbox on Twitter because someone from the company saw the concept and apparently loved it enough to create official advertising that you might refer to as an…aggressive homage. The following appeared on the Xbox Twitter account yesterday, December 26.
The original tweet has been deleted, but the internet doesn’t forget things so easily and the archived version can be found here. The tweet on the Xbox account as deleted with no additional statement by Microsoft.
(Source: Reddit)
The Takedown of Orion: Answering The Call of Duty
Orion developer David James is threatening a counter-suit after a DMCA takedown notice from Activision resulted in Orion being removed from sale on Steam during one of the larger sales of the year. The takedown notice alleges that Orion stole assets from Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
James has uploaded his own comparisons of the weapons in Orion to the weapons in Call of Duty, but the truth seems to go a bit deeper. Community members have been creating their own comparisons that show a more damning story.
The allegations against Orion would be more surprising if this were the first time that the developer had been accused of content theft, and it isn’t. Spiral Game Studios has been the focus of numerous scandals in the course of its existence. Their previous title, Orion: Dino Beatdown was alleged to use stolen assets from several games. In his responses, James conduct readily slips into immature schoolyard banter (emphasis mine).
We need everyones help and support to rectify this immediately as this erroneous claim has already costed what is a very small team a significant amount of money and we need it remedied ASAP so we can get back to work on real content, something that Activision should take note of.
What Activision is claiming isn’t a valid or legal use of DMCA. If they were alleging that we had actually RIPPED the Black Ops 3 weapons FROM their game and used them exactly – their shipped meshes, their shipped textures – that is a DMCA case. And the fact that they made an artist feel this way when it’s ALL they do is absolute crap.
On a side note: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes production of technology that circumvents digital rights management. Title II of the DMCA provides limited liability for content hosts if they respond to a takedown notice and remove said offending material within a certain period of time. James is incorrect in his statement that DMCA is not valid in this case.
Alternately, you can check out Orion’s original character: Bloba Fett (not his actual name). And yes, the name of the video is Every Man’s Sky, a polar opposite of that game No Man’s Sky. You may have even noticed the name of the developer, Trek Industries.
When it comes to copyright, the law is very lenient when it comes to ‘real’ things. You can’t sue for making similar looking trees, for instance. In regards to inventions that don’t have any real world counterpart, the law is more strict. The Orion gun, shown below, appears to be cobbled together out of several Black Ops 3 weapons.
The case appears to be open and shut, however we will have to see how Trek Industries responds and whether or not Activision decides to push this into a full lawsuit.
(Source: Steam)
Star Vault Crosses Games: Bans Mortal Online Rulebreakers In Eve Online?
The above is a screenshot of the Mortal Online terms of service. You’ll notice that failure to abide by the rules presented in the terms of service (not pictured) will not entitle you to a refund for any fees paid for the use of the Eve Online client, servers, or website, and you will forfeit any unused game time. I sincerely hope Star Vault didn’t pay a lawyer to draft up their terms of service, because it appears to be ripped directly, with a little rearranging, of the Eve Online terms of service.
The Eve Online terms of service can be found here, and the Mortal Online PDF here. Since this has apparently been in the game since launch, does this mean anyone banned from Mortal Online for breaking the rules can fight that they were not punished properly according to the terms of service?
Star Vault has updated their terms of service to ban players from the correct game, and no doubt myself from any future press releases.
Let’s Ask John Smedley: Keynote Speech Edition
When I said that there were unconfirmed reports that John Smedley had made the same speech of:
“Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay elements – combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest 2, we’ve added a fourth element to the equation; a story“
in 2004, I definitely should have done some more digging. In fact, after further research after I published the article, I found that the reports had come from, who else, Derek Smart. It was Mr. Smart himself posting on the Kill Ten Rats blog.
Apparently it didn’t come to mind to any of us (except for myself, despite what I imagine to be numerous restraining orders by John Smedley against me attempting to communicate with him and all of my phone calls to him being directed to the local county police office), to actually contact John Smedley and ask if he said that back in 2004. That is, all of us except our best friends (as of ten seconds before I got the idea for this article) at N3rfed. John Smedley’s answer? Never been to New Orleans.
“Um. I’ve never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it for family reasons 😉
I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he’s attributing it to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.”
So not a confirmation that it wasn’t said, and there exists no transcription of events to prove it, so we’ll leave it at this question: How is plagiarizing a quote from 2004 any better than a quote from 2008?
We do have one confirmation, however, that the coincidental misspelling of “multiplier” and “everquest” were due to rogue spell checkers.
More on Alganon as it appears. I promise this is the last article I will run on this issue.
Let's Ask John Smedley: Keynote Speech Edition
When I said that there were unconfirmed reports that John Smedley had made the same speech of:
“Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay elements – combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest 2, we’ve added a fourth element to the equation; a story“
in 2004, I definitely should have done some more digging. In fact, after further research after I published the article, I found that the reports had come from, who else, Derek Smart. It was Mr. Smart himself posting on the Kill Ten Rats blog.
Apparently it didn’t come to mind to any of us (except for myself, despite what I imagine to be numerous restraining orders by John Smedley against me attempting to communicate with him and all of my phone calls to him being directed to the local county police office), to actually contact John Smedley and ask if he said that back in 2004. That is, all of us except our best friends (as of ten seconds before I got the idea for this article) at N3rfed. John Smedley’s answer? Never been to New Orleans.
“Um. I’ve never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it for family reasons 😉
I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he’s attributing it to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.”
So not a confirmation that it wasn’t said, and there exists no transcription of events to prove it, so we’ll leave it at this question: How is plagiarizing a quote from 2004 any better than a quote from 2008?
We do have one confirmation, however, that the coincidental misspelling of “multiplier” and “everquest” were due to rogue spell checkers.
More on Alganon as it appears. I promise this is the last article I will run on this issue.
MMO Fallout 
