this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
297 points (93.5% liked)
PC Master Race
15468 readers
752 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.
Notes:
- PCMR Community Name - Our Response and the Survey
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not sure these are the receipts GamersNexus believes them to be. They're all kinda stretching things into a gray area.
The plagiarism part is straight up incorrect. LMG did not say that their discussion was original reporting. The WAN show is explicitly a podcast reacting to news articles and events (WAN = Weekly Analysis and News). Plagerism needs a "passing off as your own" piece, while IANAL given react content typically ends up in the fair use category because of additional commentary and thoughts being added, the WAN show doesn't have to disclose sources. Usually on WAN show they mention where they heard of the story, and not mentioning GN is a dick move, but it's not plagiarism.
The history of not following up on issues was definitely better addressed in the original GN video. But at the same time, this just makes it seems like GN is trying to use the argument "Hey we warned you once that some of your methodologies aren't great and led to skewed results and you didn't really react, so now we're gonna release an hour long video on all of your previous fuck ups and not tell you, k thx bi*"
To Linus's original point on not getting a heads up, that's not industry standard behavior and also kind of a dick move.
The unprofessional communication part I can go either way with. Would I talk to my boss like that? No. Technical mentors and peers that I had a good relationship with? Absolutely and I have done it. By the book it's unprofessional it's hardly the damning statements Gamers Nexus is trying to sell them as.
Also for those of you who have not watched any LMG content since that original GN video, LMG has cleaned up their act quite a bit, so credit where credit is due. Linus also only asked for receipts since he was getting increasingly frustrated with several negative comments coming from GN whereas on the LMG side they've continued to praise and recommend GN content
You can't publish an entire NYT news article verbatim and then claim, "I'm just reacting." The GN article is copyrighted.
Are we talking copyright or plagiarism here? GN is claiming plagiarism, not copyright infringement
Edit: spelling
Plagiarism is when you don't make legal claims on someone copying your work or where the work wasn't copyrighted.
GN was being nice about it by calling it plagiarism instead of invoking lawyers.
Edit: don't just downvote. Explain why plagiarism of copyrighted work isn't a copyright violation.
That is not what plagiarism means
Oxford English Dictionary
The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own
Merriam-Webster
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source
Dictionary.com
an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author
All three definitions clearly state that Plagiarism is taking some production of someone else's and claiming it as your own. That there is some kind of deception going on as to who created the original thought/work. Merriam-Webster's definition has that second component talking about the act of using without crediting the source, which LMG didn't do at first but later added a pinned comment. While not immediate and the barest amount of effort on LMGs part, but it still is credit.
Plagiarism has no legal component to its definition.
Copyright does have legal implications as it is someone's right to duplicate a work. In general a creator of a work has exclusive rights to reproduce it, but there are exceptions (everyone's favorite Fair Use laws). With LMG being Canadian the legal side is more complicated but in US courts it's been tested that one such exception is around additional commentary and that the usage of the work was limited as to what was relevant to being actively discussed (big case here being H3H3 a few years back). Even by GN's own admission the WAN show was taking phrases and repeating them verbatim, but just that, only phrases. Ones pertaining directly to the on hand topic of EVGAs ending partnership with Nvidia. They were not showing GNs video, reading his script word for word start to finish. Again, IANAL but I find it highly unlikely that a US or Canadian court would say that what LMG did on WAN Show meets the definition of a copyright violation
Edit:
And to answer your last point directly, Plagiarism and Copyright are orthogonal to each other. You could plagiarize by not giving public credit but still get copy permission from the copyright holder. Semantically kinda weird to think about
That's the point I was attempting to make. Linus used Gamers Nexus copyrighted work without permission or even attribution. It was both plagiarism and a copyright violation. Steve was being polite by only calling Linus out on the plagiarism.
Did you not understand anything I typed out?
LMG used GN material, yes.
LMG did not commit plagiarism
LMG did not violate copyright law
Words have meanings, and by the definitions of the words plagiarism and copyright LMG does not meet the criteria. You and I do not get to change the definitions to fit whatever narrative we have in our heads on who we want to be the good guys and who we want to be the bad guys
From the Gamers Nexus website:
"The script nearly identically matched the order, topics, and words."