Kirsten Hacker posted: " A British comedian named Darius Davies recently got sued by a higher profile British comedian named Kae Kurd who is supported by the British Crown's legal team. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/09/27/when-joke-theft-becomes-serious/ For detailed"
A British comedian named Darius Davies recently got sued by a higher profile British comedian named Kae Kurd who is supported by the British Crown's legal team.
Apparently, not only can an author not take a well-connected plagiarist to court these days, they are also not allowed to complain about being victimized.
The Crown's Court Jester insisted that his version of the joke was different enough that the person from whom he copied it had no right to complain and disparage his reputation.
The joke Davies complained that Kurd stole was about a texting refrigerator and it had the exact same punch line.
Both men talked about getting a fridge with an ice maker as a status symbol and comparing a texting smart fridge with an annoying spouse or partner. Both also included the punchline, "Why can't you be more like the kettle?"
Maybe the British Crown just likes protecting the right to plagiarize since they get their Royalties regardless of who gets credit. Or maybe it is just be a culture thing. After all, one of their most famous poets, T.S. Eliot, plagiarized the entirety of his famous poem, The Wasteland, and was completely unapologetic about it, ending his days as an untarnished, high-profile author and suffering no consequences for shamelessly recycling the work of unacknowledged and unattributed poets.
For the original reporting about T.S. Eliot, please click on this Plagiarism Today article.
I am sympathetic to new authors who are experimenting with how to create and present material (since I was once one of them). Sometimes, you try to imitate or re-work material to see if you can transform it into something truly original, but sometimes you do a lousy job or stop working before the originality is achieved. I once wrote a page of text, knowing that it was taking too much from a much better author than me and I planned to turn that page into a whole chapter and dig into the character traits that were expressed, but I discovered that improving upon a passage that was a already highly effective just wasn't coming easily to me, so I put the chapter into the drawer and decided to try again later. Later never came, so that chapter remained as a one page, infringing passage that I'm ashamed of and would like to go back and correct or attribute if I could find the original source text.
Personally, these experiments in expanding upon other people's material never worked out for me. The result always disappointed me in some respect because I could still see the unoriginal material, even after I'd tried to make it new. I tend to get results that satisfy me when I re-work my own old material because those seeds still have the flavor of originality for me and they tend to grow something that feels authentic, original, and grounded. Grafting other people's material onto existing root stock can create a fascinating result, but I think it only becomes appealing art when attributed.
Regardless of mistakes made while experimenting, it seems to me that if you are getting elevated to premier status, you need to attribute anything and everything that can be attributed. You need to make praise rain down on everyone who influenced you and not hide those influences like skeletons in the closet.
Maybe the entertainment industry discourages such attribution because they are in the business of creating illusions and the greatest illusion is that of boundless talent. The media is not merely advertising the work of mere mortals, they turn people into ***stars*** to be worshipped and adored by smiling children.
Perhaps audiences of the past enjoyed being infantilized, but the internet has stripped away a lot of the illusions that used to enchant us, so I wonder if it is time for us all to upgrade to a more adult form of entertainment that allows performers to be human beings instead of demigods who magically channel their talent from unnamed sources.
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