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Musical plagiarism
Jan. 29th, 2010 02:12 pmIf I can talk about something that I actually really dislike instead of the relentless tirade of vague complaining that I usually fill this thing with, it's music plagiarists. Not that my own music has ever been considered good enough for anyone to consider claiming it as their own - I've had a couple of my songs uploaded to Youtube, they've always been credited and I've always been rather pleased about it. But there seems to be an increasing tendency for people to post music on FA that clearly wasn't made by them, therefore accelerating the already rapid knocking of decent music off the front page.
There are two kinds of people who do this - the first are the ones who don't know that the music section isn't meant to be used for any old MP3s they happen to like on their hard drive, despite the same theory applying to the rest of the site and a large notice on the submission page saying something to the effect of "Do not post music that you didn't make or we'll replace your entire gallery with the back catalogue of the Wurzels and you'll be mocked for the rest of time". These people aren't really plagiarists - I would describe them charitably as morons. The second type are the ones who do the same thing, but then deliberately put their own name on it and claim it as their own. It's usually very easy to tell when this is done (for the slightly sad reason that the recording quality is just too good), but distressingly not everyone can tell, and I've seen people with sizable numbers of fans where their entire gallery was stolen.
Fortunately, even though a nomination for me to become King of the Land of Imbeciles in the form of music admin didn't ever go further than that, I can still do something about this. My usual way of opening communications is as a hint that I know exactly where their music is from - there's an online song recognition service which proves a very useful resource for my more obsessive moments. After establishing that the haunting piano ballad masterpiece that they've been getting so much praise for is in fact a performance lifted directly from an album by Richard Clayderman or similar, I tend to act casual and ask if it was inspired by this version, giving a link to it in their comments thread. Their reactions range from pathetic to laughable - sometimes they quietly remove the submission, sometimes they reply vaguely, but a user called Russianshepard plumbed all-new depths by choosing to blame it on a time paradox.
If that doesn't make them realize that not all of FA's listeners are taken in by their renaming, the next step up from that is submitting a trouble ticket, which is a wonderful invention as it's the next best thing to owning a slow-acting disintegration ray. I thought that their use was confined to the more drama-prone members at first, but I quickly learned to love them - you submit one, point to a submission, point to its identical source on Youtube, and the next morning the offending item has vanished courtesy of one of the admins. Then you sit back and, more often than not, watch the plagiarist either upload it all again regardless, or announce to their followers that "they" removed "their" music and have decided to pursue a career of uploading barely-literate fan fiction instead.
There are moments when I feel slightly bad that I enjoy reporting these and watching the subsequent squirming quite so much. But they never last very long.
There are two kinds of people who do this - the first are the ones who don't know that the music section isn't meant to be used for any old MP3s they happen to like on their hard drive, despite the same theory applying to the rest of the site and a large notice on the submission page saying something to the effect of "Do not post music that you didn't make or we'll replace your entire gallery with the back catalogue of the Wurzels and you'll be mocked for the rest of time". These people aren't really plagiarists - I would describe them charitably as morons. The second type are the ones who do the same thing, but then deliberately put their own name on it and claim it as their own. It's usually very easy to tell when this is done (for the slightly sad reason that the recording quality is just too good), but distressingly not everyone can tell, and I've seen people with sizable numbers of fans where their entire gallery was stolen.
Fortunately, even though a nomination for me to become King of the Land of Imbeciles in the form of music admin didn't ever go further than that, I can still do something about this. My usual way of opening communications is as a hint that I know exactly where their music is from - there's an online song recognition service which proves a very useful resource for my more obsessive moments. After establishing that the haunting piano ballad masterpiece that they've been getting so much praise for is in fact a performance lifted directly from an album by Richard Clayderman or similar, I tend to act casual and ask if it was inspired by this version, giving a link to it in their comments thread. Their reactions range from pathetic to laughable - sometimes they quietly remove the submission, sometimes they reply vaguely, but a user called Russianshepard plumbed all-new depths by choosing to blame it on a time paradox.
If that doesn't make them realize that not all of FA's listeners are taken in by their renaming, the next step up from that is submitting a trouble ticket, which is a wonderful invention as it's the next best thing to owning a slow-acting disintegration ray. I thought that their use was confined to the more drama-prone members at first, but I quickly learned to love them - you submit one, point to a submission, point to its identical source on Youtube, and the next morning the offending item has vanished courtesy of one of the admins. Then you sit back and, more often than not, watch the plagiarist either upload it all again regardless, or announce to their followers that "they" removed "their" music and have decided to pursue a career of uploading barely-literate fan fiction instead.
There are moments when I feel slightly bad that I enjoy reporting these and watching the subsequent squirming quite so much. But they never last very long.
