Transcript of TomSka's Guide To Plagiarism

this video is sponsored by surf shark VPN the end and that concludes my brief 4-Hour video about plagiarism thanks for watching don't steal my video idea I'm going to steal that video idea no Tom please good artists copy great artists steal me right now that's my quote I I said that creativity is messy and originality is a liberal myth it's been said that there is nothing new Under the the Sun by me uh just now and maybe that's true maybe there is nothing original maybe every creative decision anyone ever makes is just all the stuff they've consumed experiences they've had and feelings they've felt being Blended together and served up as a dish that seems fresh but is in fact entirely made up of regurgitated ingredients if you only ever played a child country music and then asked it to write a completely new song they're probably going to make you a country song right big truck love Christ second truck hate wife when it comes to the subject of plagiarism which is defined as the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and part them off as one's own by me just now that's enough of that bit uh I want to know where we draw the line between inspiration or influence and theft is originality without plagiarism even possible and did Domino's Pizza steal my comedy sketch stop I'm you from the future the future in this video I would like to argue that plagiarism exists across a spectrum of severity and by severity I mean how much conscious appropriation has gone into any piece of work creative or otherwise and I'm going to explore this through the lens of all the times I've stolen from other people and all the times they've stolen from me now this may be surprising to you but I am neither a philosopher nor an academic the only book I've read in the past 20 years that didn't have pictures in it was Resident Evil 2 and I'd love for that to be a joke but it is not so while I would love to get into the ethics and morality of plagiarism I'm want to save my thoughts on that for the very end because right now I'd like to just introduce you to my 10-point spectrum of plagiarism which I am titling the summon scale named of course after the English town of summon no other reason not one the summon scale is intended to be something you can use to compare any two works or ideas so naturally at the very beginning we have no correlation the relationship between Martin sc's gurov and this really cool picture of a rat I drew is zero even if they are both our respective masterpieces and it's safe to assume any two random things you compare will probably land right around here so let's move on in 2016 Annie Schumer was accused of stealing jokes and it was famously claimed that she just spontaneously happened to come up with the same jokes as other people in a case of parallel thinking parallel thinking at least in theory is used to explain instances where two people coincidentally come up with the exact same idea it can also be called simultaneous invention or multiple discovery and it genuinely happens all the time hey you know that comic about the striped shirt wearing catapult wielding mischievous little boy Dennis the Menace which debuted on March 12th 1951 you know this one both the UK and the US got their own version of Dennis the Menace on the exact same day with zero evidence to suggest that any Foul Play had taken place I swear this movie and the marketing for it just gasset the absolute [ __ ] out of me as a child hello English child do you like Dennis the Menace I sure do well you should check out this movie Dennis the Menace wow it's about Dennis the Menace yes it technically is why are you saying it like that is it a Dennis the Menace movie or not it is a movie for a character that is called that please shut up and buy it # noty Dennis it was a scam they took something from me that day mostly my pocket money when the Super Mario Bros movie came out a lot of people messaged me to say that they thought the character Luma only hope is the sweet relief of death was oddly similar to as of movies Mr Muffin but I want to die they're both cutesy death obsessed characters voiced by children now sure they're similar but even my ego isn't big enough to claim ownership of a relatively simple idea I mean taking a very cute thing and having it say a very dark thing is just Peak subversion of expectations but then I saw the movie and I learned that the head of Story on on it was Ed Scutter Luma Le is just like Doom and Gloom please we are depressed enough the very same Ed Scutter that I had worked with to record Sam lao's lines for Mr Muffin back in 2013 that is actually a little suspicious so I reached out to him and said hey dude uh is there any chance these two characters share any DNA as it were and you know what uh he he didn't he didn't work on the on the script he he didn't do that it was just a coincidence similarly in 2020 I had a lot of people reach out to tell me they thought the new Domino's UK adverts were very similar to my 2015 sketch Pizza Time everything is on fire both being comedy shorts surrounding a near future version of a wouldbe takeaway orderer arriving to forewarn their past self that doing so will trigger a disastrous chain of events before encouraging them to order something else right I'm getting dominoes while that's by no means black and white that that's that's a little sus so we Tracked Down the Ad Agency and the director of the ad and I reached out to the director and he said that he had nothing to do with the script it came from the agency so I reached out to the agency and yeah they explained to me the brief they got from Domino's and they walk me through the creative process it took them to get from that brief to the ad they made and short of just calling them Liars seems like just parallel thinking and I'm sure that's the last thing we're going to hear about Domino's Pizza in this video subtle foreshadowing although one last thing I want to say about these ads before moving on is that while looking into them I discovered that one of them became the center of a weird manufactured controversy some tabloid had basically found that a couple terminally online people had claimed that the ads were racist because one of them says anything but Chinese and so they ran a whole story on this saying that the woke left are trying to cancel dominoes and now the Youtube upload of the ad has just pages of comments saying yeah dominoes we'll stick with you as long as you don't kneel to the left woara and it's like come on guys you get played so [ __ ] easily I cared more about these [ __ ] ads than anyone else and I didn't even care that much Himalayan herrings in 2009 my friend got a string of texts from an unknown number confessing their undying love and begging for another chance before a followup saying sorry uh wrong number delicious this Exchange would become the inspiration for my sketch musical suicide where I took the basic premise of confessing your love to the wrong person heightened it to an extreme and World Behind in the craziest most overt place that could happen reused a few visuals from my University short film hit it and made it a musical because my partner at the time was very much into musical theater I can pretty confidently Trace back where every creative decision I made for that video came from so imagine my surprise when the video comes out and someone points out that it is almost identical to a 2007 man stroke woman sketch that's just just the same gag just without the singing I thought you were someone else now I have absolutely no recollection of seeing that sketch or even any episode of that show but what if I had what if I'd seen it and forgotten what if my mind have betrayed me moving along the summon scale we have what I'm calling subconscious appropriation the technical term for this is Krypton IIA which is uh not when you forget the password to your crypto wallet am I right crypto Bros Crypt Bros subconscious appropriation or cryptomnesia is the phenomenon of mistaking a memory for an original idea and everyone does it all the time essentially it's when you've taken in some piece of information be it an idea a joke a melody and then you've forgotten where you got that from or that you actually got it from anywhere at all here's an interesting article on it I'm not a science boy in 2021 little big released and a few people said hey that's just and while I can hear the similarities beep beep I'm a sheep is really just which we all know is just come for come on for H which is ultimately just oops upside your head say oops upside your head my point being a good Melody isn't called an earworm for no reason sometimes an idea can bury itself deep into your head without you even realizing I grew up on the work of Robert nox bener and his claim I bet you can't shoot me I bet I can no it's why I asked him to play the stegosaurus in as of Movie 4 I am a stegosaurus but it wasn't just his claims I enjoyed it was also his redubs of the Matrix movies good for you here is the first as of comic I made in 2006 which I would then adapt into the first Aster movie in 2008 die potato and here's a clip I recently discovered from nox's Matrix Reloaded dub from 2004 dye tomato yeah I definitely stole that [ __ ] and I had no idea hell the only reason it probably changed from dye tomato to Dy potato is because if I said Dy tomato in my accident it would be dye tomato and I did all of that subconsciously and it it sucks it feels bad man I thought I came up with that myself I thought it was really clever when someone stepped on a potato oh dear oh dear in 2016 I released secret Santa in which a child walks in on a startled Father Christmas who says no Witnesses before drawing a gun and pretty much immediately upon its release Viner Brandon Bowen rightly pointed out that that sketch was almost identical to a Vine of his from 2014 no Witnesses I didn't really use Vine nor did I follow Brandon but I can't say with one 100% certainty that I never saw his skit in a Vine compilation Lord knows that it would have come and gone fast enough for me to potentially remember the gag but not its source subconscious appropriation may be but it turns out that Mad TV beat us both to the punch anyway so face the tree [ __ ] us I guess calling out someone for copying you is messy and unless you've got an airtight case that you can present effectively you can come out the other side of it looking like the bigger [ __ ] in 2014 I called out smos for this gag in their video 19 more crazy Vines that don't exist Does anyone know CPR I doing nerd because it was pretty damn similar to this as of movie 6 joke from the year before he's anybody here a doctor I am well you're a nerd Anthony promptly responded on social media saying the joke was admittedly similar but that they had never seen as of movie 6 nor would they steal a joke from anyone people called me a dork ass loser I got embarrassed and I deleted everything good job me good follow through however in my desire for the debacle to just be over I failed to present my key piece of evidence which is that smos put as of movie 6 on the front page of their website the day after it came out so I reached out to Anthony when I started working on this video and he said yeah there's a strong chance that a wrer was influenced in some way even subconsciously but I can't say for sure subconscious appropriation probably Vindication AR of the Angel so we've talked about coincidental and accidental plagiarism But Where Do We Begin when it comes to consciously actively allowing someone else's work to play a role in your own in 2012 jonty Weeble picking made a silly song and music video called in 2013 when PJ Lori came around my house to shoot a sketch that was never released he brought with him a horse mask and even though that HSE mask never made it into the video when I remade that sketch I put a HSE mask wearing character into it I love it so in 2014 when I made an entire video just about that character I did so while repeating jonty's shalots over and over in my head to the point that I had to ask him to extend the song so we could use it as the theme for the video horse inspiration is a trigger it's the starting pistol that gets you running and while the inspiring instant and the finished product may end up having nothing in common it's still where the journey began it's experiencing grief and writing a poem about life it's watching a terrible movie and imagining a better one it's seeing something that makes you lose faith in humanity and tweeting you know what if you think about it humans are actually the real virus I saw this still from the 199 sitcom get a life being used as a meme on Tumblr and an inspired this tweet from my co-writer Eddie became tell me something I don't know and if it weren't for this fake suicide bomber ad from Dan Brooks and Lee Ford I would have never made the band University of Lincoln adverts no home dinosaur as for people taking inspiration from me uh that's not really something I can quantify no one has shouted me out in an acceptance speech uh yet but I did go to Twitter and ask if anything I've made has directly inspired anyone and I got some really moving responses including this one from NATA who said that my love of peanut butter baby inspired them to make this Tik Tok they've got like 5 million views I'm in Spain without the spin you're in ah actually that Tik Tok is uh kind of familiar it it reminds me of this tweet I made the year before gotcha [ __ ] you're going to plagiarism jail just kidding obviously that Meme is just referencing this tweet because nothing is original to me influence is when someone else's work style philosophy directly guides your execution your process informing not necessarily what you do but how you do it for me the comedy sketches of Brian melini and Nick coacher AKA branic have hugely informed how I structure pace and perform my own sketches you you can probably find traces of influence from at least one of these videos in near enough any sketch I have ever made freeze I'm a police officer Chris we have something to tell you when I made what is the best ASA movie joke I was taking influence from Brian David Gilbert with a little bit of Tom Scott which is why I put them both in the video hey little doggy oh no when I made the hole and the orb I was taking influence from my friends Mike and Jacob Truman and their dryness and delivery in their videos the Hat he's trying to tell you the Hat stays and the shoes I'm pretty sure I fell in the hole and when I made you best believe I was taking influence from I believe that what we think of as a person's individual or creative style is really just a Melting Pot of all the elements they've Incorporated from other people into their own a painter might take influence from one artist's use of color another's brush technique one's composition style and another's use of lighting to create something that is new and original but really is just a culmination of those elements when I adapted my as of comics into as of movie I took influence from the laser collection Dr Octagonapus and stick figures on crack namely their use of minimalist visuals with little to no backgrounds to keep focus on only what was necessary for the gag and their use of TV static in between gags to emphasize the punch lines and make it clear that we had moved on to the next scene what I didn't realize at the time time is that they' taken those elements from things like Robot Chicken and possibly even rejected my spoon is too big we're all just leap frogging off one another it can be weird When someone tells me that they've taken influence from my work or something that I've been a part of because I can usually tell where the thing that they're now doing originally came from for us references are identifiable the value they add to a piece of work comes partially from the fact that they are immediately recognizable ible a spoof movie an adaptation a quote a fanfic fan art a quick Easter egg or a cover of a popular song like Jonathan Colton's 2006 reimagining of Baby Got Back La boy I'm sure that won't come up later am I getting any better at foreshadowing comedy is about the subversion of expectations and this gag in wizo the Wizard who's Harry Potter hi I'm Harry Potter what do you do I make pots r entirely on the audience having an expectation of who Harry Potter is to work that's not magic maybe not to you in a way someone else has to have done the hard work of getting their idea out there into the world for a reference to even work unfortunately the the name of whoever made Harry Potter has been lost a time but you know I'm sure they were a real one one of my earliest uploads to YouTube is a parity of French New Wave films I've referenced Casey Green this is fine dog in two separate sketches this is fine and crash Zoom is just filled to the brim with Easter eggs and references in the same vein as Ed's world including this one which it turned out is just a copyrighted piece of intellectual property from a existing thing and one shop you can't just you can't just work other people's stuff into an integral part of a character design without running it by me first Ben this is our last chance I'm always flattered when someone takes the time to make a reference or even a parody of something I've done be it uh in a video game or a McDonald's app notification uh or BBC Sherlock I Like Trains okay that one probably wasn't actually uh reference to me I didn't invent the concept of liking trains that was autism yes cranking it up one more notch on the summon scale we have illusion references evil twin to allude to something is to reference it covertly subtly in a way that could be easily missed and mistaken for originality an uncited quote an uncredited cover a reference identifiable only to the person making it unlike a direct reference the recognizability of the source material isn't what's beneficial here what is is how well it's been hidden when I first released as movie A lot of people told me I was ripping off Don herzfeld's 2,000 short film rejected but i' never seen it before so what happened after I became aware of it rain uh-oh I knew what I was doing that's illusion baby hell I'll say it I think a lot of the most popular as of movie characters are probably alluding to one thing or another remember this Dr Octagon catchphrase followed by a loud noise well I've done that I like trains and I've done it again hello and I've done it probably a few more times Everybody Do the Flop now as for times it's happened to me well illusion is kind of hard to spot by Design and I need to make it clear that what I'm about to say is my own personal opinion an observation and not an accusation but you know how I thought that Domino's UK might have ripped off one of my sketches in 2020 well you're not going to believe what happened in 2019 for shadowing headed by the Maan Ad Agency Tel Aviv Domino's Israel ran this pizza themed comedy short about a near future version of a wouldbe takeaway orderer teleporting in to forewarn their past self that doing so would result in an unfortunate chain of events before encouraging them to order something else and you might be thinking Tom what makes this any different to the UK one I mean this one's clearly referencing Terminator with the I and suit and the pose well there's the dialogue for one thing I'm you from the future the future oh man I got fat like an hour into the future and after I tracked down and reached out to the director of the ad they confirmed that the original script for it was even more similar to the script for pizza time now I can't and won't claim Foul Play here but boy howdy that sure is kind of similar uh I reached out to the agency themselves for comment and and they didn't reply so this is where that story ends but can we push the Sumiton scale any further oh you bet your ass we can derivative Works can be creatively original or at least altered but are often conceptually unoriginal a derivative film for example may have an original script and dialogue but be noticeably trying to emulate the success or ride the coales of something else in a way that's kind of just sad one day Ben my dog had a fight with a cat called Spider-Man one day me and Ed were around my house then ninjas appeared you know my series content a [ __ ] approach to YouTube trends challenges and games hey you hey you hey you my name is Thomas tomar ridwell and welcome back to content yeah I didn't come up with that [ __ ] Brad and Liam from World of the orange did back in 2013 content content I just picked up the mantle after they were done with it the the video ideas the stuff we did in them that was original but the concept the ethos the execution it was derivative it was them stolen content content I actually reached out to Brad and Liam to ask if I get officially licensed content from them and and give them money in exchange for it and they said we don't [ __ ] care man and I was like too bad take some money cuz I don't want to get sued down the line if you change your mind I have trust issues now everything's fine you know how I love bright tanic sketches well sometimes mine definitely Veer into derivative territory how about a sketch that's a bunch of ways to deal with your girlfriend broken up by title cards reference a 90 sitcom I think we should just be friends make me lasagna how about a sketch where a man's two comrades come up with increasingly ridiculous and ineffective ways to deal with a relatively simple problem my name's Mr fancy hello I am a robot how about a sketch where a bunch of people keep incriminating themselves and accusing each other accompanied by a dramatic sound I [ __ ] Steven Steven evens no Evans the cousin of Devon good Heavens it's almost 11 yes [ __ ] it how about two of them I can't believe you three would abuse me like this wait wait wait wait a second you're not the victim here I am I knew it but who fired the gun I really like branic okay they're just so [ __ ] good as for the reverse well in 2012 I released a sketch about parallel universes broken up by title cards and juny music titled meanwhile in the parallel universe where Thinking by breast makes your head heavy and in 2013 the French show L Grand joural released a sketch about parallel universes broken up by title cards and JY music titled [Music] P which is French for meanwhile now I wasn't particularly upset about this because while yes the concept and execution was clearly based off my work the creative part the actual jokes were at least theirs and given that I knew I had been derivative in the past and would continue to be derivative in the future I wasn't going to take a moral High ground so I threw out a cheeky little tweet bem moing the situation and then was fully prepared to just move on with my life and think no more of it and then all hell broke loose see it turned out that this episode of lran Janelle was a big deal and had a lot of eyes on it the original host and creator of the show had quit after 99 years I you and this was the first episode with the new host a real James Cordon taking over The Late Late Show type of situation and no one wants to be James Cordon so when the French press the media not the cafeta got a hold of my tweet L very much hit lefan at first the producer claimed that it was purely coincidental and had nothing to do with meanwhile and was in fact an adaptation of a sketch they done earlier that year called Etsy you know what now that you mention it was also kind of similar to Meanwhile buddy completely unbeknownst to me the Press just continued to get worse for the folks behind pendon satom namely the actors who were in it who were also YouTubers from the channel Studio Bagel who actually had nothing to do with writing it they were just in it so setting the record straight there the man responsible was a producer named Lorenzo who had now begun emailing me Lorenzo told me that he'd been trying to contact me for months through Facebook Messenger about officially licensing meanwhile but because he hadn't been able to get through to me just decided to go ahead and do it anyway cool man also if you put my name into Facebook you're mostly just going to find edworld role players so there's a decent chance he was reaching out to Tom xtor 69 and I love that for him I told him that it was out of line that he'd just done it anyway but that I just wanted it to be over so I publicly wished him and his team well and once again tried to go about my life and then [ __ ] just continued to get weirder you see pendon thomps was not supposed to be a one-time thing this was intended to be a regular segment in this new season of lron Janelle that would happen four times a week so my blessings and well wishes were not enough the network needed this resolved forly right now they had a press conference in just a few days and the media were going to skewer them over this so Lorenzo asked me what my price would be what would it take to formally license meanwhile and make this all go away and I'll be honest with you I had no idea I I didn't want this I didn't have a price in mind I felt kind of icky asking for anything because you know I myself take influence in a derivative all the time is maybe I just lagged self-worth but I had no idea but I took a day to think about it and I figured that meanwhile would probably take me about 2 days to write from scratch and if I charged a day rate of say €150 then €300 should be fair so there I am standing in my local boots Pharmacy with a box of tampons under my arm when Lorenzo calls me and before the words €300 can ES Escape my lips he says I have sold my car and we can offer you €20,000 20,000 holy [ __ ] I mean Jesus Christ yes sir I only wanted enough to buy a mid-range Lego set and instead I got to build this studio I've really debated whether or not to include that amount in this video because I'm aware that it is Crash and it makes me seem deeply unrelatable but that was a lifechanging amount of money and if any other creatives ever find themselves in this bizarre situation I want you to know your potential worth because I very nearly asked for 1.5% of the amount they were prepared to offer me but I guess they got their money's worth because over the following year they made 108 episodes of pondan s dumps all featuring my name in the credits I've only made four and a half I got to step my game up next imitative works are those which are just one Teensy step away from a full-blown word for word remake they are for the most part Shameless and almost exclusively reliant on just not getting caught you know kind of like taking a tweet and turning it into a really popular Tik Tok how dare you I'm kidding I don't [ __ ] care whereas a derivative work will likely incorporate some form of creativity perhaps approaching the same idea in a different way imitative works are usually neither creatively nor conceptually original at best they may change the format or medium of the thing they are imitating like taking a tweet and turning it into a Tik Tok it's changing the words when copying someone else's homework it's corn ripping off weebl's badger badger just awfully it's SNL releasing a sketch about the son of the shaman Bears family wanting to take up dance instead of wiping his ass for his life I changed my mind now listen to me boy just months after Joel Haver releases an animation about the son of the shaman Bears family arguing with his father what if I don't want to wipe my ass son it's what we do we wipe ass you know which was probably just a coincidence too right usually when these things come up I'm like able to see like oh it's the same concept but they took it somewhere different but this one it was a little weird I was like wow that that's very similar at this point I feel like it should just come as no surprise that when I was making the sketch the confession for I straight up stole a joke from branic I knew I was alluding to them and their sketch the coach when I had this gag where a character panics and denies that an obvious guest is actually something that clearly not bug it's a bird but what I somehow didn't realize was that the following gag was beat for Beat from the same sketch even down to the [ __ ] hay broom get out of here get out of here this is human Ric I'm sorry one but don't worry Karma was Swift because I premiered this sketch in front of branic who immediately called me on it and what's worse is that I got got up on stage after the sketch played and said this to their faces not realizing yet what I had done very uncomfortable to Premier sketch in front of branic whose style I've been shamelessly ripping off for 15 years have you ever made a fool of yourself in front of your biggest Heroes because I [ __ ] have but don't worry I apologized we're cool and I definitely won't be thinking about this every night as I lay awake in bed at 3:00 a.m. for the rest of my life so any hey do you remember that video I made that was basically this wrong bottle plus this you know head explod well just 4 months after I released juice that makes your head explode I was sent this screenshot of an ad that appeared to be copying the sketch to advertise a game called rise of Kingdoms that appeared to have copied the sketch who did this and how did they do it so fast I tasked the internet with trying to track down this ad because I couldn't find it myself and there was no luck even this YouTube channel that almost exclusively posts the ads for this game and there are so so many ads for this game didn't have a copy but eventually someone sent me a cropped version of the ad and hey little guy want to play a game oh what game a game that makes your head explode yeah that's just the first part of the sketch but with the word juice change to game I'll play M this is M our first step to figuring out who had made it was trying to figure out where it had been made now I'm not a geoguesser I don't know anything but the buildings looked vaguely European I thought maybe these blocks of flats in the background there could be Soviet era when we tried to track down the church in the background the only results we were getting were either Disney World uh or this company from the Philippines who apparently built it but that that doesn't seem right yes you're right looking through quite literally hundreds of Rise of Kingdom ads to find answers we started to noce some commonalities strong and mismatched accents want me to teach you a few tricks inconsistently capable performances to be kind your dad has 1 million power nondescript locations with really vague geographies almost as if they were being filmed everywhere and nowhere like they were just trying to specifically [ __ ] with me and my quest for answers I will find you the ads also had common themes almost all of them would follow the same format of person a has a lot of points and person B doesn't have enough points so person B can't be friends with them or get a table at a restaurant first come first serve or get in a lift and then after a SpongeBob title card a few moments later by the way they [ __ ] love SpongeBob title cards days later all of a sudden person B now has way more points actually now I have 5 million power person a loses their [ __ ] yeah and also often their girlfriend dude your ex-girlfriend just posted her engagement like there is a a strange amount of cery in these ads my 500,000 power in RS not enough for you none of these themes were present in the juice that makes your head explode knockoff we we really couldn't find many other examples of them blatantly ripping other people off except for the legend 27 you remember the legend 27 yeah the legend 27 they do and they [ __ ] love playing off that one the king seven killer one super 222 having hit a wall with our Arch we took our limited findings of the church back to Twitter hoping that we could maybe crowdsource an answer and after a while a few people managed to track it down to what was seemingly a new shopping complex in fujo China and after cross referencing it with this promotional construction video yeah there it is like I get that rise of Kingdoms is like a Chinese made game but what I'm in no more for fries unless I can have my revenge on China again we were lost but that's when we noticed something one of the channels that have been uploading rise of Kingdoms at seem to belong to a familiar face oh my God look it's the guy it's the guy from the thing so I dropped him a line set up an interview and learned a lot his name was James Oliver a Canadian expat who lived in Beijing who to make NS meet starred in mobile game ads a lot of mobile game ads and he was actually quite surprised that we'd figured out where the ad had been filmed because they do try to hide that and uh keep the settings ambiguous actually uh that's something the production teams do like if they see see Chinese characters on signage in the background and they try to actually cover up license plates on vehicles and things like that so it's it's interesting to me that you knew that they they don't want people knowing that it's made in China apparently groups of English-speaking actors will be assembled by small independent production teams for long shoot days where up to a dozen ads will be shot back to back so for example the shoot that uh you mentioned that exploding head one that day we might have shot maybe a dozen ads and they all have setups that take time so it's just go go go go go and we need to be able to memorize these very very quickly and uh just hit our beats and and roll on that would explain why there are so [ __ ] many of them for me actually my uh my breakout role was boss angry on airplane throws briefcase hard the teams are not attached to any ad agencies and are entirely Chinese and James is aware of them copying scripts from movies uh other ads and even porn a few times they're like okay you just you sit on this couch and you come in and you strip down to your skibbies and to a woman and then okay you straddle him and then you're gyrating whoa we just met this is this is a mobile game what are you talking about they're like yeah we got to get the audience's attention I saw this in a porn I bet you saw this in a porn so anyway and when they flew James over to fuu to film a game that makes your head explode he noticed that it was unlike anything else they'd really made probably because I hadn't ridden it like anything else they'd made I guess the point I'm trying to make here is they'll take ideas from anywhere including you who me so at some point in the few months since I posted my video some guy in China had seen my sketch copied the word storyboarded it and shoveled it into a day of filming rise of Kingdoms ads and as for this guy being in a pumpkin costume I've got to assume they just didn't have a propeller hat and said yeah now he looks like a child Victor okay that guy's a character he's American from Detroit who's never allowed to go back to the US and uh was deported to Romania what did he do uh it was it was drug related huh he has a Redemption Arc happy happy happy before I move on I just want to say a huge thank you to James for speaking to me and being so forthcoming I'll link to his channel uh in the description and I learned so much about these ads that we can't include in this video I'll probably make a little exclusive video for patreon forgive us uh but for now here's an ad uh that I've made that is entirely uh original and inspired by nothing enjoy and now a word from our sponsor hey can I join your surf shark Alliance you're only on level 1 million we have level 1 billion Sur shock points in our alliance oh away go off with you ah sadness 3 days later what now can't you see I'm busy standing here I have level 1 trillion surf shark points oh how did you do that and how it's easy I signed up to Surf shark VPN and unlocked the legendary hero Boro this gave me access to over 3200 servers in over 100 countries I say wow but I choose my Army of hackers to attack your kingdom but my surf shark army is strong and destroyed hackers and their epic malware attacks spin amazing can you teach me just use the code Tom Scot friends to get up to 6 months for free on your surf Shar subscription for free yeah I just did it and now my surf shock can access content not available in my country and then remake that content as adverts hi I am woman can I play this is for women away this isn't for girls this is a men's game out women cannot play games we don't like women rise of TRS now the thing about the summon scale is that it's actually a circle at the beginning if circles have a beginning we have the source material and as we go around the circle we get closer and closer to returning to that Source material bringing us to our penultimate stop cloning cloning as I'm sure you can figure out is just a total remake zero creative input just a shot for shot beat for beat word for word recreation hey do you remember that Jonathan colon cover of baby got back that I so expertly foreshadowed earlier in the video la face with the well here's a definitely unrelated clip from the show Glee now you might be thinking aren't Glee and Colton just covering the same song and uh no not really Colton's cover is a complete Recreation recomposition with entirely new and unique instrumentals and Glee just copied it note for note and when Colton called him out and it they just went um it's Widow we a coincidence but here's the thing Colton didn't just overhaul the instrumentals he also changed some of the lyrics including putting his own name in the [Music] song and you best believe that the Glee version also has his name in [Music] it just incredible weirdly enough I don't have that many examples of cloning in my back catalog well unless you count this hey man look at my new dog yeah that's pretty cool oh there's no dog there that skit was the winner of a competition I hosted 13 years ago to write an as movie joke it's chill it's nothing unto happened there I also once got permission from another YouTube channel to remake one of their sketches and just did such a bad job and made an infinitely worse version why does it look like it was filmed in Grand Theft Auto 4 okay all my friends are idiots and I can't even show you the original because they have long since deleted it so those three months where I was trying to upload weekly on my main Channel were a dark time now I just upload once a year that's much better as for cloning happening to me yeah all the time but it's usually kids practicing their animation skills by remaking something of mine or just having fun and it would be super weird to get touch you over that although if you are going to just fully remake one of my Tik toks could you make the smallest effort to credit me this is a mockery you and when you do eventually credit me link to the correct account that be super Neato although I am aware that by this point in the video I do not have anything resembling a high horse so I'll just get down and lastly to complete the loop of the summon scale we have the freeboot named after pirates of old freebooting is the process of Simply reuploading reposting republishing someone else's work exactly as it was as if it were your own and it's kind of an inevitability when you put stuff on the internet and it can range from being an annoyance to in the cases where the free booted vers has massively outperformed the original career ending parallel thinking subconscious appropriation inspiration influence reference illusion derivative imitative cloning and free booting with their powers combined they are the Sumiton scale of plagiarism now while I've had a lot of fun trying to Define these terms I do want to say that I don't think it would be entirely helpful to look at creativity through this lens especially not originality I believe it would take a great deal of arrogance or or at least Blissful ignorance to ever believe that you could be truly original I think at the end of the day we're all just building off each other's work and ideas creatively leapfrogging off one another for the betterment of mankind no that's probably too much the betterment of mindlessly entertaining and distracting each other yeah let's go with that to decry a boat simply because you could identify the trees from which it was constructed would be to deny yourself the sea was that deep uh I think that was load of [ __ ] as I said at the start of this video while I believe that the amount of conscious appropriation found in any piece of work can be placed somewhere on this spectrum that doesn't necessarily correlate with how unethical it may be someone re-uploading or remaking one of my videos May Place highly on the scale but I'd argue that it is morally nowhere near as bad as someone reworking my ideas and passing them off as their own especially for profit and freebooting sucks a lot but sometimes it becomes the only way to preserve lost media so it's almost like reality is complicated that all being said though and seeing as this video is pretty much nothing but my own opinion anyway here is how I would personally ascribe some sort of morality to the scale one and two can't really be helped short of running any idea you have through Google stuff's going to happen I mean then again if an idea does come to you that's suspiciously good or it's it arrives fully formed it couldn't hurt to check trust me on that one uh it's got me a few times 3 to five is is the safe Zone with a little bit of humility and self-awareness I think it's perfectly acceptable to let the work of others Inspire or guide us and if we are going to directly quote imitate or reference someone else just a tiny bit of due diligence couldn't hurt six and seven are the danger zone when we find ourselves here it might be worth reworking a project a little bit or simply trying to take influence from more sources to dilute how derivative we're being after all what is originality if not stealing from so many different sources that you can no longer identify one single point of influence as for 8 9 and 10 well I think this is just where things have officially gone too far this is true blue plagiarism town and if you're not careful you're going to find yourself on a YouTube thumbnail oh no you the last thing I want to say in this video is I've definitely noticed a theme over the years of companies and corporations feeling extremely comfortable plagiarizing off independent online creators and I think this happens for two reasons one these companies know it's near enough possible to prove plagiarism and without a publisher and their big scary legal team behind us there's very little we can do and they know they can get away with it but also too I think there's just a broader belief that anything on the Internet is free real estate who made this I don't know I'm not going to check it's mine now it's a lack of respect for art and artists and the concept of ownership in general and it's definitely something I've been guilty of and will be working on improving in myself going forward so that was the video I hope I've approached this with the humility of a man who knows his own shortcomings uh tell me uh what's the most plagiarism you've ever done and leave your full name in the comments so I can tell on you thank you very much for watching tomcar out oh god um okay I I don't know how it took his voice with him but I I'll do it myself hey you thank you for the money hey you thank you for the money money hey you thank you for the money hey you thank you you for the this is hard hey you thank you for the money hey you thank you for the money money uh thank you patrons we appreciate it uh I guess I guess I have to come up with a new song um so uh stand by for that please send help