#made me think about this again

[mikkeneko]

This post got me thinking about plagiarism as applicable to fandom works, and how like many other things that used to be topics of common discussion and common understanding in fandom, no longer are. Got me thinking that perhaps a touchstone on the topic would not go amiss.

Obligatory disclaimers: I am not an IP lawyer, nor a BNF, nor any kind of authority on matters; I am only familiar with copyright and IP conventions in the United States; and I am speaking from the perspective of "I was present for the discussions that hashed this out in excruciating detail in the _journal days, and this was my takeaway from those discussions."

WHAT PLAGIARISM IS:

1) The direct copying of actual text, that is to say the exact same words in the exact same order, from a source text, republished in an independent context without permission or acknowledgement that the text is copied, without acknowledging the original author, or by claiming to be the original author. 2) A dick move. 3) Grounds for specific retaliatory actions in specific communities, i.e., an academic setting or an archive, which may choose to reject a plagiarized work or expel a member of the community found to have done it.

WHAT PLAGIARISM IS NOT:

1) Illegal, in the sense of being punishable by legal action. 2) Using some of the same words, in sort of similar order to the original text. 3) Using the same title as a different text. 4) Using the same story setup as a different text. 5) Using the same characters, settings, plot elements, or narrative arcs as another text. 6) Translating a text into another language. 7) Reading, saving a copy of a work to your hard drive for re-reading, printing a copy for hardcopy reading, etc. 8) Copying out sections of a text in a comment, or as an excerpt to accompany a work in a promotional post. 9) Using a work as reference material. 10) The only kind of dick move there is.

Thousands of hours of round and round debate boil down to this: You cannot own an idea, but you can own the actual words that you write, and you own those words by default, without needing to take any specific actions to that end. (Proving that you own the words is something that you might, under some circumstances, need to take action to do, but really only if someone else tries to stick their oar in to claim ownership for some reason, which is one of the reasons why plagiarism is A Dick Move: forcing people to defend ownership when they shouldn't have to is inconveniencing and unpleasant.)

Even then, there's a fair amount of wiggle room on the topic of Actual Text which falls under fair use. For instance, if you reference a line or several lines of canon dialogue from a book because you are retelling the scene from a different perspective, that is generally considered fair use, but copying the actual text of the entire scene would not be. By the same token if you had a line referencing canon dialogue in your fic, and another person references the same line of dialogue in their own fic, the other person is not plagiarizing you. And if two people in completely separate fandoms reference the same Hozier lyric as a title for their separate fics, that is not plagiarism either.

I also said that plagiarism is not illegal, because strictly speaking it's not. It's an extremely rude thing to do, but it doesn't become illegal in the sense of being punishable by legal action until a lot of other factors start coming into play, most of them having to do with money. At which point the objectionable action is usually not described as "plagiarism" but as "copyright infringement" or other more legally granular terms. (You'll note that I said up above that you cannot own an idea; whether you can own a specific implementation of a character or a setting is another matter, and where IP law starts getting really into the weeds. But this post is only about plagiarism, not copyright infringement.)

Generally speaking, you can't get the law on your side unless you can pose a reasonable argument that the other person's actions have harmed you in some way, including some financial way. This last distinction is the primary reason why fandom creativity has stuck out as long as it has despite our society's (historically speaking) very restrictive IP laws; IP holders are not losing money to sales if fanfic authors are not selling, and they are not losing reputation or recognition if the fanwork is not seeing wide reach.

WHAT ABOUT AI?

That said, there's an awful lot of breadth between what is considered outright illegal and what is considered a really rude thing to do which may start seeing social penalties accrued. Which is why scraping someone else's Actual Text and doing something like feeding it into an AI bot without their consent is an incredibly rude and unpleasant thing to do, even if it does not fall under the definition of Literal Plagiarism, and if a person does this a lot and word gets out about it, that person may find themselves very unwelcome in the community.

[mumblesplash]

i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers

you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.

AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character

see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.

mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.

[hinamie]

"I'll show you every day that choosing to live was worth it"

some of my favourite scenes from @hijinks-n-lowjinks' fic things i would miss from the other side . this fic tore my heart out fr but like in a good way and i wanted to pay it homage the only way i know how <3

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

multishipping

[egophiliac]

this is basically what happened, right?

(these guys are very lucky that everyone at NRC 1) has the combined intelligence of a sack of bricks, and 2) is easily distracted by shiny things.)

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

[petricorah]

scenes i loved from Real Enough to Get Me Through by @marriedzukka <333 [ids in alt]

[tubbytarchia]

got an urge to design ponies oops

[starlitmeadows]

Reunion

[choccy-milky]

sometimes you gotta lure your overly-studious ravenclaw gf into spending time with you 🥰 📚 ( from 'Every Teardrop is a Waterfall' by Kat_12739 on ao3, GO READ IT!!! the first story is about seb falling sick and still pushing himself/not admitting he's sick until he ends up in the hospital, the second story is about the birth of seb and clora's daughter and seb's reaction to clora almost dying in childbirth, and the third is about dealing with a fussy newborn lewis😭🥹THEY'RE SO GOOD AND SWEET AND SOMEWHAT SAD (not to mention beautifully written) so go check it out!!💖💖 )

[angelblushe]

Losing my mind at the fact that diamond wants the stone hearts to guard their cornerstones like their LIFE. And aventurine just broke his,,, into a bunch of little pieces.

To the point that Sunday even regards them as useless jewels in his bag.

Despite the fact that those “useless” jewels are representative of Aventurine’s own life.

It speaks volumes about how fast he was ready to give up his cornerstone, and the underlying implications of that idea.

[cali]

thank you tipsilon you will keep us warm

[lazylittledragon]

ok i swear i'm not going to talk about my breakup forever but the thing that just keeps bothering me:

i know that not getting what you need in a relationship is a COMPLETELY valid reason to end it but also. i feel like having a very vulnerable moment where i opened up about my struggles with intimacy and being relieved that i didn't have to keep doing things i wasn't comfortable with, then being dumped a YEAR later because of my lack of intimacy. is something i should be allowed to be very hurt by???

[vaspider]

It is truly wild how much that, like, having a Following on any social media makes you this weird poppet onto which people project their weirdest hangups. Does the thing have anything to do with who you really are? Nope! But it sure says a lot about that person, the things they project onto you.

Like, my friend, this is a parasocial relationship you have with that person. It's just a negative one. Your obsession does nothing to them, and it's bad for you.

[taitavva]

are you sure about that akechi

[og post under cut]

[juicywizards]

what if you watched a show and it was so bad and you never got over it