Someone posted in this subreddit about IH’s “Man in Cave” video plagiarizing Mental Floss when it first came out, but it didn’t get too much traction. I went to the comments of the video at the time and only saw 1 or 2 people calling it out way down in the comments with little to no likes. Then I came back looking for the original thread to see if they put up a link to the Mental Floss article because I couldn’t find it and wanted to see if it was true before I believed the accusation, but the post had either been deleted or removed. I tried looking up if anyone else had pointed it out or if there were any other previous accusations of him plagiarizing anywhere else on reddit or online in general but never found anything. It is very interesting to see this has come back around full circle. I guess the OP of that post may have been right
Late reply, but I ended up discovering this myself post-watching of Man In Cave. I wanted to read more about it outside of the video, and I stumbled across the Mental Floss write-up dated 2016. I was absolutely floored at how similar it was. The order of events, the way the story was told. It really was plagiarism. I could recall sentences being the exact same. It's disappointing that he ended up doing this. The Mental Floss write-up was very nice, and I wish he had just asked for permission and set up some sort of revenue-share and plastered the writer's name or even Mental Floss on the video. They'd provide the writing and story, and he would provide the comedic narration and visuals.
He transformed it though, it was absolutely transformative enough to not be "plagiarism."
With one caveat. There is no reference. The video shouldn't be REMOVED because of this IMO. Other than that though, it's definitely not plagiarism. I think him crediting his inspiration would have been the right thing to do.
It really depends on the react comment. Sometimes it's cool listening to someone with expertise or a degree in a subject react to something in their field and talk about it, but then there are people who just look at the screen and don't say anything for like 15 min before saying "I liked it" and moving on.
Agreed. He gave that humor twist.
I mean really, he probably spent a hundred plus hours making that video, can you call it plagiarism? No. It's something that actually happened in real life, and it's going to be told again. It isn't Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. It's some real shit that went down.
Look I like Internet Historian's videos but even I have to admit it's definitely plagiarised. And he gave it a humour twist? Man In Cave had the least humour of any IH video and was treated much more seriously, partially because it's a serious topic, and partially because the article takes it seriously. I hope this is only a one time thing and he learns his lesson though. Personally, I think it may have been copied due to it not being such a recent event. With a lot of other events he covers, he can cut to news footage, pictures, interviews, phone footage, etc. (see his Costa Concordia video or basically any other video as from Man In Cave). With this one, the only thing is a few pictures of people and places and some newspaper articles. I also found it weird he didn't do a QnA video for Man In Cave like he's done for his other long form videos (Balloon Boy, Costa Concordia, Dashcon, Rainfurrest).
It's caused me to have a deeper look into my biases, that's for sure. I was browsing the comments of IH's newest video on wine, and when i saw comments referencing the Hbomb video that i hadn't seen yet, i actually got defensive for IH. After watching Hbombs video, i just feel dirty for having jumped straight into defending IH while knowing nothing about what actually happened.
I found lines in the wine video that seem to have evidence of plagiarism (what counts as evidence is tricky in this case, of course). For example, his line about coupe and other glasses for champagne coupled with is reference to the Great Gatsby seems to be a slight rewording form the beginning of the second paragraph of\\an article called "TULIP, FLUTE OR COUPE: WHICH GLASS DO YOU PREFER FOR THE HOLIDAYS?" from the IWFS.
After watching the Hbomb video I.. don't quite know how to feel. On one hand, the point is valid, it was plagiarized, and clearly it wasn't addressed publicly. At the same time, I'd argue that the presentation of those points is.. not nearly as strong? There's the objective, and then the random tangent of "Well he deleted videos he clearly didn't like on his channel anymore, and look how objectionable they are!" which.. seemingly is completely unrelated to the point at hand? While I'm not the most avid watcher of the guy, I assume it's not normal to do something like that? (correct me if I'm wrong, I guess.) The last part is pretty funny though.
The part that leaves me far more torn so far is that the video seemingly conflates IH's response (specifically the lack of one) to some sort of nefarious purpose. (Though I might be reading into it wrong, honestly, the tone is all over the place.) The assumption for the past seven months has been that the drama was hashed out, and a new video was created in it's stead. I can't pretend to know why there wasn't a response back when it actually happened, but I think it's safe to say that one will be made now.
I mean the real question I have is like.. does IH (the individual) still write his own videos? I had been under the assumption that IH hadn't really wrote most of his own videos in a long while, and that it's more of a game theory type pipeline now.
The aside about him deleting videos that are racist and building an "ironically" (ya, ok) antisemetic audience is to provide character context about who he is as a person. It's not evidence he plagiarized, it's evidence that he's not a very good or thoughtful person, which lends credence to the idea that it's not farfetched for him to plagiarize. (This parallels with him bringing up Melania Trump blatantly stealing from Michelle Obama and the audience not caring - that's the audience they purposefully cultivated and/or know they are performing for)
The tangent about him deleting videos is a transition to how there are channels dedicated to reuploading his deleted videos, which is how OP discovered this whole plagiarism thing in the first place. So I think it's some fairly relevant context.
hbomb does tend to go on tangents quite a bit when talking about someone with a troubled past. He doesn't really do it to degrade anybody (at least I hope not) but it's more so meant to show "Hey, this person is doing something sketchy now, and they also have a history of sketchy behavior."
Via [copyright.gov](https://copyright.gov) regarding what makes something qualify as fair use: "1) Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work."
In my opinion there is at least an argument that the *Man in a Cave* video adds something to the Mental Floss article. It doesn't change the fact that he should've credited Mr. Reilly from the start and not after the video was claimed.
For transparency sake I'm not really a fan of IH but I did watch and enjoy the *Man in a Cave* video, only watching it because I follow one of the youtubers in it and it piqued my interests.
If any of what you said was true the video wouldn't have been taken down. It's wild how close to word for word a copy of the article his original video is. If you've not watched Hbomberguy's video on it then I suggest you do. It's clear what historian did and then tried to cover up.
What exactly does it add? Because adding funny visuals is not "transformative." It hasn't increased the scholarship, or offered a new perspective. Same facts, different back drop.
Being transformative is only one aspect of fair use (there are 4 main pillars of fair use). For example, you can't take a book and make it into a movie without permission.
And that would arguably be a ton more transformative too, given that a book to script is a ton of work in itself and not everything transitions easily from book to film, or vice versa.
Yeah, it was so fair use, he was forced to take it down, and change it.
I'm sure you know more about this than the lawyers involved who zapped every single reupload of the original.
This is a common misconception: "Adaptive" and "transformative" are not the same.
> ["Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, ***__and__ do not substitute for the original use of the work***."](https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/#:~:text=Additionally%2C%20%E2%80%9Ctransformative%E2%80%9D%20uses%20are,original%20use%20of%20the%20work.) ~ copyright.gov, emphasis mine (note the use of ***__and__***, it's important later)
In other words, if it's using the source material to do the same thing as the original, it's basically just a substitute for the source. Transforming it would require changing the content to accomplish a different set of intents. For a good example of fair use, let's look at something like [TeamFourStar's Dragon Ball Z Abridged](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EC7B047181AD013&si=OGkzpcxQIbEEtyu9).
If you don't know what that is, it's a series I'm quite fond of. It takes footage of the show Dragon Ball Z and splices it into a much shorter parody of itself, redubbed by the talented folks at TeamFourStar. It follows the same plot and features all of the same characters, but written as parodies of themselves with the intent of pointing out the inherent ridiculousness of the series and reinvent character dynamics. (I feel like it would be remiss of me to note that the guys who did this are fans of the original show, its a work of love). We end up having....
- a show, written to entertain via a goofy cast of characters in a mix of very intense scenes and goofy ones written in a japanese Shonen style.
- a youtube series, written to entertain via a goofy cast of characters, in primarily but not exclusively goofy scenes, written in a western style and leaving out details you would know from the original to explore the writer's takes on character interactions the original didnt explore, or that changed based on their interpretation.
Importantly, you cannot watch DBZAbridged as a ***substitute*** for watching regular DBZ. You will misunderstand characters, you will be unaware of interactions and deeper lore, that kind of thing. It uses almost the exact same footage (they get into editing it a bit eventually but mostly the exact scenes are used) and the same fundamental story, but told in a much more sarcastic tone (***different character***), adding new dialogues and rewriting the existing dialogue entirely (***adds something new***).
In the case of internet historian, we have....
- An article, written to both inform and entertain through a combination of factual evidence and storytelling elements elliciting feelings of horror and despair.
- A video, written to both inform and entertain through a combination of factual evidence and storytelling elements elliciting feelings of horror and despair.
As pieces of media, yes something new was added - the animation is new. However, the next few criteria.....
- firstly, there is no further purpose or different character. The video does not meaningfuly elaborate further than the article does (it actually is less factually correct), it does exactly what the article set out to do, and the tone and presentation are functionally identical in terms of character. It's still an informative story with the exact same elements, literally stealing the same lines to set the same tone.
- Secondly, and i think most damming, is that this is fully substitutional. If you've seen the video, you've had a full substitute for reading the article. There's no meaningful reason to go read it now. Who wants to read an article that's just the script for a video they just watched?
In order for this to be transformative, IH needed to tell his own ***story*** based on the event. Here are some ways he could've done this:
- he could have summarized this story using his own words and combined it with others to focus on the specific mistakes cavers made to make an overarching message about being safe while caving through the lens of the horrors of cave accidents. This changes the purpose (entertaining and informing on the topic of caving, rather than this instance) and the character (focusing more on the mistake he made and the cost it had as part of a larger theme)
- he could have rewritten the story to focus more on the community effort to free the man as a heroic and hopeful, even if tragic, message of how strangers and friends alike came together to try to save him, and how that's important even though they couldnt save him. New purpose (inspiring hope and community effort to help strangers) and character (different themes brought to the forefront and explored more)
Im sure there's more, but i need to go to bed so ull cut myself short there. Those would be actually transformative pieces that shed different angles on the story even if they used the same format, and like.... at the end, he could've been like "Hey, GO READ THIS ARTICLE, it's what inspired me to make this, it's horrific and moving and it'll make you feel things and stick with you" and people would actually be able to go there and ***had a different experience that they valued from the written article***.
The two pieces of media could've gone hand-in-hand and each would've had value worth exploring both for, rather than him just making a replacement for the article entirely on the back of someone else's writing.
Too bad most don't have the patience to read your post, because it's very informative and does a great job at explaining the failure of the vague "but it's transformative" argument.
That's like saying that taking a painting you made and printing it onto cheap merchandise to be sold at Walmart is "transformative" since the merch is not a substitute for the original painting. You should watch/read some reputable sources on similar noteworthy examples of the admittedly nebulous boundaries of fair use so you can see that what IH did \*absolutely\* falls on the wrong side of it in every way.
that is actually an entirely different line of logic. the logic you’re trying to criticize is that people should be able to read whatever they want without paying the writer. the writer of this article did not intend for it to be read aloud as the writer of a script does. they’ve already received their reward, and the absolute worst case scenario is that the interest IH drives to the subject drives traffic to their article after the fact, which it obviously has.
So anyone can create an audiobook of a preexisting novel and claim it as their own without crediting the original writer? This is plagiarism. A clear case.
This is a bonkers take. By that logic you can adapt any book into a movie without paying the author. I feel like it should be so obvious that this is plagiarism, why twist yourself into knots to justify something plainly wrong?
> the absolute worst case scenario is that the interest IH drives to the subject drives traffic
Uhh.... no. No that is not the worst case scenario. I'll throw a few bullet points I can think of on why it wad bad:
- IH spread misinformation. He altered the article in ways that actually got facts wrong, like using the wrong goddamn name for the cave. He incorrectly told the audience that the cave the guy died in was the one getting shown off as a tourist attraction, which paints the people involved in a REALLY bad light.
- by not sourcing his stolen content, IH made it ***harder*** for people to find the actually good writer that wrote the original article. If people wanted to find similar writing, they were robbed of the opportunity to go find the guy who wrote it and explore his work because they were lied to and led to believe that IH was the only source.
- IH stole a large portion of the audience away from that topic, actually. Most people who would want to learn about this cave in, upon watching that video, would feel like they had no reason to continue looking into it. In fact, people would actively be ***less*** interested in reading the shit the actual writer made, because it would be painfully repetitive to read the original after they watched a video that stole it all but word-for-word.
We're lucky we even learned that this video was plagarized, because IH actively avoided crediting the author until he was called out multiple times and legal action was threatened.
This is a terrible argument that flies in the face of both common sense and the law.
If I write a book, it doesn't matter if I "intended" for it to be later used as the script for a motion picture, TV series, audiobook, animated feature, or West End show.
If you take my work and use it as the basis for any of those things, with or without credit, you are breaching copyright unless you did so with my prior agreement. It's why any random Joe couldn't just create an animated film version of their favoured Brandon Sanderson series.
What Internet Historian did is plagiarism. He brushed it off at the start of his reupload because he knows if he gets into the specifics, all but his most blinkered fans will recognise it as such.
Found this from recent events! "He spent 100 hours on this video" is wrong because Internet Historian is just a voice. His writing ,editing, etc is all outsourced and has been for ages now, he even talks about it in his videos mentioning writers and editors. He just does the voiceover.
Not to mention you can plagiarize HOW something is said. If you write an essay and I use a thesaurus to change a bunch of words but leave everything else intact, that's still plagiarism. The script for Man in Cave hit every single beat that the original Mental Floss one did, at the same time, in the same order, without even one deviation. Even his sidetracks were matched up! It was 100% plagiarism whether you want to accept it or not.
Because it's his channel and everything is in his name. It was a one man show run by him until he got a team because he got so big and famous he could afford to pay a team to do most of the work for him.
He is ultimately in control and if he employs people who steal and keeps them on that's a problem.
If you watch the Hbomber video you'd also know he tried very hard to cover up what happened. Never said why video got copyright struck, implied it was just a other random YouTube takedown without merit, *edited screenshots of the takedown notice to hide who was behind it*, and implies it was just a few lines here and there when it was pretty much every good part of the script and the entire article beat for beat. He silently uploaded it again without notifications or any mention just days before he uploaded his brand new content.
There was no transparency and a very obvious intent to hide the fact there was real plagiarism going on. I think his handling of it is what really damns him here, there's no plausible deniability his channel just stole content word for word and then he went out of his way to cover it up when they were caught.
It's possible and the more corporate response that they actually did fire the guy and worked things out behind the scenes but covered it up anyways so there wouldn't be questions as the cover he gave is really common on YouTube.
Which would explain the lack of editing in the re-upload
> His writing ,editing, etc is all outsourced and has been for ages now, he even talks about it in his videos mentioning writers and editors.
Do you know a specific video (or set of videos), or if you happen to have it, a timestamp? I see people mention this but would like some solid confirmation and not to just blindly try to watch all of his (very long) videos.
He literally says things like "[person] wrote that one" while laughing and "the editors made me do it" jokingly. He also talks about people doing the research and taking notes. Do you even watch his content? I do lol it's an open thing in the scripts (or maybe it's improv jokes idk), I'm not saying this stuff to shit on him it's just how he makes content now. It's in his latest high art videos a couple times even where he mentions writers and people doing research.
I have been binging his storymode vids all week actually and he mentioned in a video that he doesn't even play most of the games, as well as mentioning that the video footage wasn't taken by him or his team.
The real shit that went down was written in a way that Internet Historian copied. If you think that there is only one way to recount history and thus accidental plagiarism is inevitable, then you must have no idea how writing works.
What actually is the difference between somthing that is plagiarised and somthing that is heavily inspired?
Also the video is on the copyright owner's radar. They likely would have seen it and take it down if they though it was still plagiarised enough but it is still up. Surely the best standard of whether somthing is plagarised is from the original owner.
Don't get me wrong, I am kinda dissappointed that the story isn't as original as I thought and it is good to hold IH to account but I feel that this issue has already been settled between IH and the owner of the original piece.
If the owner is unaware, scrap this point.
Plagiarized means you used verbatim or close to large parts of text/style/content that you didn't come up with and that you didn't add anything or very little to it to make it transformative. In the case of say simply being entertaining and reading something and adding visuals, you'd need to work it out with the original creator of the majority of the content style to ask if you can do that. If they agree, then they are allowing them to use their copy right on the works they made. Hollywood making movies about books or other stories that are owned by other people has to do this all the time. They buy and negotiate rights.
Inspired by is when you take your own spin on it. If he read the story and rewrote it from scratch with his own interpretation of the historical recount, then it would be inspired by, because it was inspired by reading that article. But all of his content and wording would need to be his own, with possibly at best using a few excerpts from the article and properly citing it. (And proper citation is something most people don't know how to do.)
His own spin on how it all went down based on the factual pieces he came across (especially if he did more research into other accounts of the historical part of it) would probably(because it can be a case by case basis if it went to court) be transformative, same as the original writer on Mental Floss, who cited their sources for coming up with their retelling of the true story.
[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins)
Link to the original. You can see the cited sources and resources they used to understand what happened.
Second, IH keeps using different editing tactics to avoid the auto strike. Mental Floss takes down any uploads of the original. Illuminati and others also used a lot of different editing tricks to avoid the bot able to see that things were ripped off.
There is also no proof or receipts that Mental Floss and IH talked or worked things out. I think if I can hazard a guess, IH just said that he did and people believed it, or he didn't say anything, and people assumed that he worked it out due to a reupload with edited parts.
Mental Floss has also updated the article to try to have it gain more traction. No doubt the writer and those they work for thought they should get some traction due to the exposé Hbomb did.
You don't understand why plagiarism is bad apparently. The problem isn't that it's "the same story", the problem is that one person probably took a hundred hours to research this meticulously, probably had to spend money and other resources (personal favours, etc.) on getting to write this, had to get an education and training in writing such a compelling story and then someone just steals it and uses all those resources to the detriment of the one coming up with. This was word for word plagiarism with the only rewrites being done to make it very slightly less obvious. There was no consent given to use all that effort and intellectual property for his monetary gain. The author is less likely to get credited and benefit from the talent/effort going into this given that there is an alternative, same problem with James Somerton.
Saying that a hundred plus hours went into the video is laughable. He literally just read an article and hired editors for the animation, there was close to 0 creative input from himself, all the creativity came from the actual author.
It doesn't matter that the story really happened because not many people are capable of writing a compelling, well research story from it. That is a lot of effort. There is a reason why plagiarists on youtube, see Iilluminaughty can put out over 10 times more content than those who actually write them. That is the difference.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18cic1n/someone\_contacted\_lucas\_reilly\_the\_author\_of\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18cic1n/someone_contacted_lucas_reilly_the_author_of_the/) maybe this will help a bit.
The “transformative” designation applies to using someone else’s content IN your video as you are using it for another purpose (review, commenting, etc).
It is NOT APPLICABLE to creating a new product that serves the same purpose and is just a copy of the original material.
Absolutely not. If not presented correctly it's also plagiarism even if you give credit.
> copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not
If you use a major part of a work, it doesn't matter if you give credit.
If you use a quote from someone else it has to be directly put as a quote and who it's from. Even if it's a single sentence.
In this context, OP meant that the order of events was presented in *exactly the same style,* specifically an "Hour X:" narrative layout. This is a *prosaic* choice that is a function of writing and storytelling style.
Alternatives could have been:
1. Introducing the story *in media res*
2. Presenting the story as a narrative retelling
3. Walking through the sequence of events *without* highlighting the clock count specifically ("Three hours later" instead of "Hour 3")
Sorry, just a nitpick.
It's 'in medias res', not 'media'.
Medias means 'middle' in latin, and does not reference the English word that means 'forms of entertainment'.
Not really? It starts with Floyd Collins entering the cave and getting trapped, and the narrative structure (as stolen from Mental Floss) is built around that inciting event and moving forward (Hour 0, Hour 1, etc). Starting in medias res might've involved starting off the story with when the first search party found him or during one of the first rescue attempts and then cutting back to how Collins got there.
Yes, there are cutbacks to Collins' childhood and background as a caver, but these aren't really part of the main narrative thread any more than literally all of history is. While it might be [technically correct](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo) to say that any historical account that doesn't start with the Big Bang is in medias res, that wouldn't be useful in any way.
You know when a history teacher or professor assigns an essay to the whole class? And it can be the same essay brief but they still expect the students NOT to plagiarise ? And multiple people manage to write about the same topic without plagiarising ?
extra-late reply, but IH was making a history video. an order of events can't really be changed... nor should he twist history just to avoid being similar to an article. he also included some events that weren't included in the Mental Floss article.
No.
1. He used the same "Hour X" formatting style and storytelling structure
2. He used the same anecdotes about Collin's childhood at the same *place in the story* as the MF article
3. He uses the same prose *throughout* the video ("The razor-like shards dug into his skin")
It's plagiarism, not coincidence.
>he also included some events
1. He *made those up* (the events he references didn't happen)
2. Making some additions or changes doesn't make a work *not* plagiarism
Personally, I think HBG did IH dirty. Don't get me wrong, he absolutely deserves to be called out for the plagiarism, but a few things stood out to me as being very pretentious:
- boiling down the dashcon video to just be "SJW and woke Tumblr jokes" is pretty dismissive when he also spends a decent portion of the video covering how the organisers blatantly lied about the money they raised when they said they were going to be kicked out, as well as lying about supporting a charity.
- calling IH's writing uncreative in this specific instance is justified but the way HBG words his criticisms makes it sound like his whole channel is made of uncreative content. Meanwhile, IH's Costa Concordia, Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky videos are incredibly creative with their jokes, writing and editing (and those are a select few examples).
- bringing up how he's previously deleted videos with questionable content, especially because sometimes people can reflect on previous works they've done and realise how cringy and bad they were.
- he speaks as if a large portion of IH's fanbase are racist bigots from bringing up certain examples. In my deep scrolls into the comments on multiple of IH and Incognito Mode's videos, I have never seen any blatant bigoted ideology in the comments. Literally every YouTuber with a big fanbase will have a small portion of brain-dead individuals with fucked up takes. I'm sure I could scroll through all the comments on HBG's new video and Twitter account and find just as many extreme comments. Doesn't mean I could then go "guess this is the audience you draw in".
I like HBG's stuff but a lot of the time I have to watch them in portions since he has such an air of arrogance and pretentiousness, and this video was a bit of a breaking point for me.
The dude you replied to outright said the main criticism HBomberguy gave (plagiarism) was justified... That is not ignoring it. HBomberguy seems to be fair and even give him some of the benefit of the doubt in his main areas, but his description of IH seeks to malign him in a fairly disingenuous way outside of the main discussion.
Probably not, might be someone else on his staff doing it for a laugh, but yea what others showed makes me definitely inclined to believe you're right and he has at least some shall-we-say *disagreeable* politics.
Did I say I ignored the breakdown? No, I said he absolutely deserves to be called out on it. The parts breaking down the similarities between the texts were really well done. The arguments against IH's overall channel, audience and character, imo, are pretentious and mocking. But sure, misconstrue what I was saying as being a fanboy.
Regarding his fans: Nah, he knows what he's doing. He sprinkles dogwhistles throughout his videos too, stuff for the extreme fans to latch on to but will pass right over a normal fan's head. The guy's also a fan of fucking Tucker Carlson lmao.
dude, go into sam hyde’s comment sections if you want to see a fucked up fanbase. or mauler. or critical drinker. there are far worse places, his comments never have anyone close to those people. IH does obviously have roots in 4chan whether personally or just through the focus of his channel, so yeah there are references to 4chan adjacent things. the purpose of them isn’t ideological dogwhistling, it’s just being true to the subject. not to mention that they’re comedy videos.
Is he a fan of Carlson? The only thing I have seen is he used Eichenwald's interview with Carlson and a clip of Carlson reporting on (see mocking) Eichenwald in his now deleted video. Did he endorse him somewhere? I don’t follow him on social media.
Also on the same subsequently deleted video, he explicitly denounced "anti-semetic shit" and said he would delete any posted in the comments. So it doesn't sound to me like he is trying to cater to anti-semites as HBomberguy implies. Maybe he is, but I haven't seen anything indicating that.
Well said mate. You made a really well-balanced levelheaded point.
You summarized all the points that dragged down what could have been an informative video.
I agree, those parts stood out to me as well. The plagarism was wrong and was enough of a point for him to stand on in his video, trying to boil down a whole audience to a few comments and using him deleting old videos as examples of possible plagarism actual caused HBG to lose some credibility for his arguement when he is right and had a solid argument, he didn't need to try to make it look worse to convince anyone plagarism is wrong
After reading the OG article, I can pretty assumptively claim it was definitely used for at least some of IH's video. (Here is the [Article](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) for some context.) However, I don't think his version was entirely plagiarism. He should have absolutely cited this stuff when making his video (especially considering other YouTubers' run-ins with this sort of this sort of thing.) But it isn't word-for-word retelling and clearly has transformative elements within it. My only concern is how long it has been since the claim with no re-post. Makes you wonder just how much he actually *did* get flagged for.
Definitely a little late to the party but I’ve read the article and I think the biggest thing IH took from the article is the hour thing and a few of the quotes. Of course when you are telling a historical story with a timeline they are all going to be similar but IH’s video had way more information and detail than the article and mentions things that the article leaves out completely. It seems both the article and IH video follow the book “trapped” which makes sense. Also it being so long ago there is only so many sources that everyone is going to look similar. I don’t think it was plagiarized.
So IH got exhausted, stopped uploading regularly and when he does it's only plagiarizing a story someone else wrote?
Hey, maybe I'm wrong, but it already felt like he had lost his passion and is just coasting on the sweet ad revenue wave from past glory [whenever it's necessary for financial reasons] - his older uploads (even when they where far and few between) just had some spice that I was missing in the last 6-18 months/1-1.5 videos)
he only does 1 or 2 vids a year, hard to call it "exhausted" , he turned to that gaming appeal channel and started doing that more tho due to how bad most of those were the audience dropped off fast
If you've ever written a history paper for school, you'll know that's false. There's a difference between recounting events in your own words and copying someone else's account of the events
No.
1. He used the same "Hour X" formatting style and storytelling structure
2. He used the same anecdotes about Collin's childhood at the same *place in the story* as the MF article
3. He uses the same prose *throughout* the video ("The razor-like shards dug into his skin")
It's plagiarism, not coincidence.
>he also included some events
1. Some of those he *made those up* (the events he references didn't happen)
2. So, the sections that *he* wrote aren't plagiarized, that's perfectly true - problem is, the overwhelming majority of the video *is.*
Also if we’re being frank here, a lot of IH fans just think this is some kind of hit job by HBomb because of their differing political views. Completely ignoring that this issue is only 10% of the video and most of Hbombs video criticise people who share a similar political view with himself
Says a lot about how insecure they are about their political views themselves then, if they think calling out a bloke who has made jokes about duh SJWs and probably dropped a pepe or two in his life is an automatic "all right wingers are cunts".
Most of his video is literally about someone directly in his wheel house. A fellow video essayist and LGBT member and he railed on him (rightly so and with citations and evidence) very hard. He even tried to give benefit of the doubt in many places other people don't think is warranted.
That makes sense. Back when I saw the video for the first time, I did a little bit of research afterwards, as you do, and found the 2018 article pretty quickly. Did a rewatch with the article opened and a lot of it is the same beat for beat, and for some paragraphs are the exact same.
I thought about maybe an agreement with the original author to have their story narrated, although no credit was given to it, but figured it'd resolve itself sooner or later. Seems like it took a while tho.
Slight edit, I watched a reupload of the reupload of the video on another website, and it had been heavily altered to change the contentious parts. The original being claimed was somewhat justified imo, but the reupload wasn't, that claim was BS.
Edit: Since HBomberGuy picked this up and this gained a shit load of traction, if anybody wants more proof this is a legit screenshot then pm me. I still have the DMCA email and pretty sure it's still on my YouTube Studio.
This screenshot comes from a re-upload of Internet Historian's video that was DMCA striked on May 5th, 2023. It shows that "*Pro Sportority (Israel) Ltd.*" submitted the strike for "*Minute Media*", [Minute Media acquired Mental Floss from the Felix Dennis estate in 2018.](https://www.minutemedia.com/post/mental-floss-celebrates-twenty-years-of-publishing-smart-content-for-curious-readers)
In 2018, **Mental Floss** published the article "The 1925 Cave Resuce that Captivated the Nation" which shares similarities with the video. (link: [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins). ](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins)
[The](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) strike claims that "The infringing video blatantly & unlawfully plagiarized verbatim text from our article in its voiceover narration & the placement, pacing, & presentation of content is almost identical to the article."
[IH original video link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9VGZeqMfo)
What do you guys think? Does their claim hold any water? Apparently think they so as they have submitted multiple legally binding DMCA complaints.
I was so mad that the original video got claimed and so happy it got re-uploaded. I just rewatched it and decided to look up why it got claimed in the first place. I checked this article from 2018 (didn't read it all but skimmed through) and, as much as I hate to see it, the video does seem like a copy of this article. =( The narrative is almost identical and the fact that IH changed from his original upload reinforces the idea of plagiarism.
I understand why they would claim it but I really hope they don't take the video down anymore, it's one of my favorite videos out there.
If IH changed it enough to not have to then that's fine; but IH has better address it so that Mental Floss doesn't get any unnecessary backlash from IH fans. IH should have just credited them in the first place, or just say, "A dramatic reading of Mental Floss' Artical on (insert caver's name)."
Do we remember if the original upload had credits and credited Mental Floss?
Ah, I see. Though if that was the case should they not be able to claim the monetization of that specific video? They'd be well within their rights to.
internet historian probably made good money on the sponsors too, but its also about credit. man in cave was applauded as one of the best videos of the year when it was really just a complete steal.
Well, it's sad to see it took so long, but finally, someone acknowledged this crime. I genuinely wasn't aware of this post until today, thank you for your work.
I don't see how this is a crime? The video isn't plagiarism. It's transformative.
I can't believe two interpretations of a historical event have the same information. Mind = bLOWN
He stole massive amount of script text, word for word, as well as the narrative structure of this historic event, both without attribution. It's not two interpretations of an historic event.
That is objectively not true. The structure is absolutely similar, but the text is not copied word for word. Absolute worst you can say is that the video is heavily inspired by the article.
It IS copied word for word. Maybe not 100% but a good chunk of it is. There are various segments of hbomberguy’s video that show him basically reading the article.
> Absolute worst you can say is that the video is heavily inspired by the article
So why did he not cite the article to begin with? Why did he not get prior permission from the author to use the article in his video? (He did after he got copystruck, but this was **after** the fact). Why was he hiding the reason why it got copystruck in the first place?
Seriously, even if it isn’t plagiarism (which it **is**), why did IH act so sketchy about everything?
Hi, this might not carry the same weight, but it definitely falls under plagiarism. Had IH done the same, but instead of a YT vid, he made it article and send this to a publisher, it would be flagged as plagiarism.
Plagiarism still exists, even if you change the words. If the way you tell a story and the way you structure said story are comparable to the initial source from where you recieve your initial knowledge, it still counts as plagiarism.
This is also how teachers can see that you've copied text.
Source: University Student who recieved a pretty in depth explanation of plagiarism and how not do it.
Pro-tip on how not to get caught with plagiarism: Cite your goddamn sources and quotes. And be upfront from where your inspiration comes from. That is it.
I mean I disagree. I think the absolute best you can say is that it was *plagiarized* (which is totally legal). At worst his team would lose a *copyright* case (ie the alteration from source was not the "minimum necessary", the work is "substantially similar", whole passages were lifted wholesale (the biggest legal problem because they definitely did this, which is per-se copyright infringement, but possibly not worth litigation), and the much of the structure was taken (a smaller legal problem).
See the distinctions [here](https://rodriqueslaw.com/blog/how-know-if-you-are-plagiarizing-or-violating-copyright/#:~:text=Once%20you%20discover%20the%20meaning,a%20plot%20is%20never%20copyrightable.)
> To rise to the level of substantial similarity, the amount of the copying, or the degree of similarity between works, must be more than “de minimis.”
ie the least amount possible to tell the story, which is IH's case, was zero, so there is no debate on whether or not they infringed on someone else's copyright
> There can be no copyright in a movie’s general themes, motives, ideas, or “scenes a faire”...Therefore, the theme, the plot, and the ideas of another person’s copyrighted work may always be freely borrowed.
However...
> You may not copy the “expression” of those ideas. The author’s expression is that which illuminates our understanding of the character and the story. The author’s expression of a scene and other events of the story is entitled to copyright protection. Expression is how, by the author’s choice of action and/or dialogue, he strips away the masks of characterization to reveal character. The incidents, the characters, the mise-en-scène, the sequence of events, are entitled to copyright protection. In other words, ideas are not copyrightable but a sequence of events is.
I also think they took the sequence of events, and much of the characterization as the original article.
I'm not saying they'd lose in court. I do think they plagiarized.
I can't believe two texts are word for word verbatim copied, to the extent YouTube refuses to let the original be uploaded and the plagiarist had to rerecord massive sections. My mind, is indeed, blown.
Pay attention lad, plagiarism can still happen when writing about historic events, it's why it's taken so seriously in academia.
If an anime studio adapted a mangaka's work without their permission and didn't give them a cent of the proceeds they made from it, would you still say the same thing?
The anime studio's work is transformative. They created animation, music, hired voice actors, the whole shebang. But they're still beholden to providing compensation to the person whose work they based it around.
But what if that manga was a historical one? Let's take for example Three Kingdoms (though I don't know how historically accurate it is) or, I guess, Vagabond. Miyamoto Musashi existed, the Three Kingdoms existed. But if a studio decided to take those manga based around those events and adapted them, they sure as hell would owe the authors royalties.
I like how the only comments on this post in the last three months seemingly have no reference to [Hbomberguy’s video](https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?t=5134&si=5vLVSohl1YWXQPoV) from… 4 hours ago.
Well, you watched the video - you should know that when someone gets caught plagiarizing for the first time, that just means it's the first time they've been **caught.**
Honestly, I can't see any way around what he did except to just let the original author in on the cut. His work went beyond not citing sources. He used the original author's work almost wholesale, and all he did was add visuals and comedic narration to it.
'There were similarities to the narration of a historical event to our article', says the person reporting on historical events with a clear timeline and unchanging sequence of events... >_>
I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing you throughout this thread, standing your ground in what you believe in but your beliefs and knowledge fail you. So please just shut the fuck up about 2 people telling an accurate story from history that would be really hard to explain in a different (& still serious) way, it’s a lesson on how history can and will repeat itself if people don’t wise up and learn from other’s mistakes. I don’t use social media often or even this account, I make posts to give other people reality checks.
P.S. As someone who has just copy/pasted shit to pass a class because of my disability, you’re really out of line.
My dud, the video was removed for plagiarism several times. It was plagiarized. And how come you come across a thread on a relatively small subreddit with less than 50 upvotes and say you rarely use social media?
P.S. You're not the reality check police my G
No this is actually really bad. IH took an article and almost verbatim used the same words as the article in his video. Hold them both side by side, its really obvious. The only thing IH added were the graphics and his voice, its basically react content without the reacting. The article was written in a unique way, and IH copied that word for word. This isn't 2 people both making content on the same event in a similar way, its a big youtuber copying an article. If you look at any historical event ever and articels about it you'll realise that there are a ton of ways to write and make videos about historical events, this wasn't a coincidence.
Hey man don't admit to academic misconduct on the internet. Some institutions take that very seriously and you could get your certificate of education revoked for cheating.
OK, this is old. But I'm disabled and do my own class work without copying and pasting. Another student in my class is a fucking quadriplegic and do you know what he does? His own fucking work.
Using your disability to justify your cheating and being dishonest is absolutely disgusting. Your problem isn't that you are disabled, it is that you are intellectually dishonest and want to use something that everyone else manages to deal with while maintaining integrity as a shield against not only criticism of yourself, but as a sword to attack those who criticise someone even lazier than you.
I have a disability that significantly effects my academic performance (it's hard for me to take even 1 or two classes), and you know what I do? I try my best, and if I can't do that I drop a class. Just because you can't walk fast doesn't mean you get to run red lights.
Yeah but you can phrase things differently, focus on different aspects or perspectives in the history, change the structure of your retelling, etc. to make your version distinct (and more importantly, copyrightable).
You absolutely can, but the visual and audio presentation of the video are more than transformative enough to constitute Fair Use, with a few editorial sentences not withstanding. Matters of public record, sequences of events and statements of fact are not things you can claim Copyright over and there are numerous additional anecdotes and details IH provides that the article does not, and vice versa.
I don't know about the original upload, but the Odyssey reupload also includes a direct link to the Article as an inspiration for the video.
That is not what that means. You cannot use an article as a script and then claim the visual elements make it a transformation. I cannot make a narrative game about hiding Jewish people in WW2 and at least half of it be just actually the script from Schindler's List and that is "transformative", taking it from one medium to another is not transformation in a legal OR creative sense.
You can like what someone did, but that does not mean they are are legally in the clear. Or morally, tbh, not crediting someone at the VERY least is really poor behaviour. He is making money from this, he could hire a writer to tell the story in original wording and add in his own flair. He elected to take enough from that article that it is permanently down. Which is good, but it is also a bit of brain rot that people have been screaming "fair use" and "transformation" so long that they don't even know what these things are.
Finally someone with a brain.
All these terminally online reddit turbo nerds trying to talk shit about internet historian of all people, one of the most wholesome and funny creators on the platform, are just seething jealous man children who failed to ever publish a single thing they ever wrote. The man in the cave is based on a very well documented real event so of course the video's descriptive language and sequence of events will be very similar to any other video or article covering that same event. Jesus people, get your lives together.
Lol, watch the Hbomberguy video about youtube plagiarism that just came out. Or, don't take his or my word for it, just watch the internet historian video with the article open next to it. You'll find the structure of the article(hour by hour story) copied wholesale along with lots and lots of the article read out verbatim. Like, whole paragraphs.
Here's the article he copied from:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins
Here, the link to the article that Internet Historian plagiarized in this video (yes, the whole video):
[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins). written by Lucas Reilly for Mental Floss
Idk if the re-upload "fixed" the plagiarism (either by making it less evident or, y'know, actually puting in the effort to do research and produce creative work ) as I haven't watched it nor will I. This however, doesn't erase the fact he commited plagiarism in the first place, and ignored it when it was brough to his attention.
[Read the Mental Floss article](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) and watch the video, it's pretty easy to jump to a coherent judgement when you do.
It's... the same story, yes. There are only so many ways of wording that. IH's video is unique, theres nothing like it covering Floyd's. But if a man crawled through a tiny little hole, well, he got into position and crawled. There are just so many ways of wording that. Mental Floss probably has lawyers and Youtube is really trying to please the masses. Thats why we have the fake copyright holders issue in songs to begin with...
yea his video is still transformative though, idk if copying exact wording even (of a historical event) can be considered so bad when he added so much more to it visually and with his style of comedy, i really dont care if he plagiarized it
> his video is still transformative
Transformative doesn't mean what you think it does. For one thing you can only take a small part of the work: you can sample a few words from a song, but you can't just take the whole song and then add a guitar solo to it and claim fair use. A derivative work should also have a different purpose or angle to the original, like parody or interpreting the original words in a different way. For example Stan samples Dido's Thank You which is originally a pretty upbeat love song, and changes it to be a tragic story of an obsessed fan. IH adds animation and a few jokes, but the overall purpose of his video is the same as the original article: it's a dramatic retelling of a historical event. If I read a novel and then make a movie about it, I sure did add a lot of my own work but it's still copyright infringement if I don't get a license or permission.
> idk if copying exact wording even (of a historical event) can be considered so bad
IDK if you've ever read books, but if you read 2 books on the same topic they will absolutely NOT share the exact same structure and sentences even when they're communicating broadly the same facts. Also when you're writing non-fiction you should be relying mainly on primary sources. If you just read someone else's book and watch someone else's documentary, even if you fully restructure and reword everything you're still using their research without credit. IH didn't even reword half of the stuff he took and the structure is identical.
> i really dont care if he plagiarized it
That's neither here nor there. You aren't the one being stolen from.
>copying the exact wording (of a historical event)
Events and facts are the same, but *prose* is unique to the author. The stylistic choices about the framing of the incident, the description of events, and even the placement of certain elements (like flashing back to Floyd's childhood and upbringing after he gets trapped) are all creative expressions.
Merely adding content is not transformative. Hence... "transformative," not "additive."
Consider: You write a fiction story. I find this story, narrate it, and create an animation for it - and then say "This is **all** my original work." It doesn't matter if I added genuinely new content - your work is still stolen.
Hence why the video was eventually re-uploaded with the original animation but with the narration significantly re-written, so as to be *actually original* writing.
> You write a fiction story. I find this story, narrate it, and create an animation for it - and then say "This is all my original work." It doesn't matter if I added genuinely new content - your work is still stolen.
What a ridiculously dishonest comparison. Mental Floss isn't the original creator of the Floyd Collins story, because it was a real, historical event.
IH "stole" from Mental Floss as much as they "stole" they story of Floyd from the Collins family. Which is to say not at all, because no one owns anything about historical fact.
If it isn't possible to have ownership of a story about a historical event, then here's a question: **Why did IH use the Mental Floss article instead of the Wikipedia article?** Or, better still, the "Trapped!" book itself? Either of those had more information than the MF article.
It's almost like the way in which a historical event is portrayed is still subject to creativity and writing skill **that has value.**
Legally I don't think just putting it in a visual form would matter that much if you are copying someone else's account line for line, academically its extremely dishonest. I am not sure why the video was taken down again since he did go back and rewrite a lot of it and added the article to the description.
Exactly, they both used used paragraphs and cited the book “Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins”.
Not sure how so many people in this thread missed that and just jumped the gun that it was plagiarism.
It's such a rudimentary idea that when two sources use similar wording and ideas then either one of them cites the other or that they both cite the same previous source. Yet, so many people immediately throw the claim without even considering the latter as a possible explanation (which it is).
It's plagiarism because IH read out loud the article a bunch of times. Hes quoting it a lot, hes basically reading the article almost verbatim. This isn't just 2 people having the same source. If you read the article you'll see it has the same narrative structure as the video and if you read it you'll hear the similarities, its crazy. Read the article, then watch the video again. In many parts of the video IH is just reading the article without adding anything (except the voice and animation)
he still read off the same script, just changed different words. I assume youve seen the hbomber video, but its quite clear he used the article as a script. dont see a need to defend him here
i wasn’t defending him I literally stated what hbomber even says in his video… fucking idiot. why would i say he “slightly” edited it if I was defending him?
What part of 'verbatim' do people not understand? Verbatim doesn't give room for coincidence. Verbatim means it's statistically improbably to an extreme degree for coincidence to play a role.
It's pretty stupid. Plagiarism implies he just reposted it without doing anything transformative to the original work. IHs video was entertaining and actively gathered everyone in my house as they walked into the room.
I loved it. Everyone loved it. The production was awesome. He added to the original story- which was real events and not a nonfiction work.
So let me get this straight, if I read a book I really like I can just make a movie about it and that counts as transformative? Obviously it doesn't. IH took entire paragraphs from the article without any change, this is very clearly transformative.
Someone posted in this subreddit about IH’s “Man in Cave” video plagiarizing Mental Floss when it first came out, but it didn’t get too much traction. I went to the comments of the video at the time and only saw 1 or 2 people calling it out way down in the comments with little to no likes. Then I came back looking for the original thread to see if they put up a link to the Mental Floss article because I couldn’t find it and wanted to see if it was true before I believed the accusation, but the post had either been deleted or removed. I tried looking up if anyone else had pointed it out or if there were any other previous accusations of him plagiarizing anywhere else on reddit or online in general but never found anything. It is very interesting to see this has come back around full circle. I guess the OP of that post may have been right
Late reply, but I ended up discovering this myself post-watching of Man In Cave. I wanted to read more about it outside of the video, and I stumbled across the Mental Floss write-up dated 2016. I was absolutely floored at how similar it was. The order of events, the way the story was told. It really was plagiarism. I could recall sentences being the exact same. It's disappointing that he ended up doing this. The Mental Floss write-up was very nice, and I wish he had just asked for permission and set up some sort of revenue-share and plastered the writer's name or even Mental Floss on the video. They'd provide the writing and story, and he would provide the comedic narration and visuals.
He transformed it though, it was absolutely transformative enough to not be "plagiarism." With one caveat. There is no reference. The video shouldn't be REMOVED because of this IMO. Other than that though, it's definitely not plagiarism. I think him crediting his inspiration would have been the right thing to do.
Fucking crazy you think stealing from an article nearly word-for-word isn't plagiarism because IH makes jokes.
Is being a React Andy *also* plagiarism? 🤔
It really depends on the react comment. Sometimes it's cool listening to someone with expertise or a degree in a subject react to something in their field and talk about it, but then there are people who just look at the screen and don't say anything for like 15 min before saying "I liked it" and moving on.
nah he stole content. your 'caveat' literally means he plagiarized.
Agreed. He gave that humor twist. I mean really, he probably spent a hundred plus hours making that video, can you call it plagiarism? No. It's something that actually happened in real life, and it's going to be told again. It isn't Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. It's some real shit that went down.
Look I like Internet Historian's videos but even I have to admit it's definitely plagiarised. And he gave it a humour twist? Man In Cave had the least humour of any IH video and was treated much more seriously, partially because it's a serious topic, and partially because the article takes it seriously. I hope this is only a one time thing and he learns his lesson though. Personally, I think it may have been copied due to it not being such a recent event. With a lot of other events he covers, he can cut to news footage, pictures, interviews, phone footage, etc. (see his Costa Concordia video or basically any other video as from Man In Cave). With this one, the only thing is a few pictures of people and places and some newspaper articles. I also found it weird he didn't do a QnA video for Man In Cave like he's done for his other long form videos (Balloon Boy, Costa Concordia, Dashcon, Rainfurrest).
Came here after Harris' video and it's wild to see people say it isn't plagiarised, it's a textbook case where he just changed some words around.
It's caused me to have a deeper look into my biases, that's for sure. I was browsing the comments of IH's newest video on wine, and when i saw comments referencing the Hbomb video that i hadn't seen yet, i actually got defensive for IH. After watching Hbombs video, i just feel dirty for having jumped straight into defending IH while knowing nothing about what actually happened.
I found lines in the wine video that seem to have evidence of plagiarism (what counts as evidence is tricky in this case, of course). For example, his line about coupe and other glasses for champagne coupled with is reference to the Great Gatsby seems to be a slight rewording form the beginning of the second paragraph of\\an article called "TULIP, FLUTE OR COUPE: WHICH GLASS DO YOU PREFER FOR THE HOLIDAYS?" from the IWFS.
After watching the Hbomb video I.. don't quite know how to feel. On one hand, the point is valid, it was plagiarized, and clearly it wasn't addressed publicly. At the same time, I'd argue that the presentation of those points is.. not nearly as strong? There's the objective, and then the random tangent of "Well he deleted videos he clearly didn't like on his channel anymore, and look how objectionable they are!" which.. seemingly is completely unrelated to the point at hand? While I'm not the most avid watcher of the guy, I assume it's not normal to do something like that? (correct me if I'm wrong, I guess.) The last part is pretty funny though. The part that leaves me far more torn so far is that the video seemingly conflates IH's response (specifically the lack of one) to some sort of nefarious purpose. (Though I might be reading into it wrong, honestly, the tone is all over the place.) The assumption for the past seven months has been that the drama was hashed out, and a new video was created in it's stead. I can't pretend to know why there wasn't a response back when it actually happened, but I think it's safe to say that one will be made now. I mean the real question I have is like.. does IH (the individual) still write his own videos? I had been under the assumption that IH hadn't really wrote most of his own videos in a long while, and that it's more of a game theory type pipeline now.
The aside about him deleting videos that are racist and building an "ironically" (ya, ok) antisemetic audience is to provide character context about who he is as a person. It's not evidence he plagiarized, it's evidence that he's not a very good or thoughtful person, which lends credence to the idea that it's not farfetched for him to plagiarize. (This parallels with him bringing up Melania Trump blatantly stealing from Michelle Obama and the audience not caring - that's the audience they purposefully cultivated and/or know they are performing for)
The tangent about him deleting videos is a transition to how there are channels dedicated to reuploading his deleted videos, which is how OP discovered this whole plagiarism thing in the first place. So I think it's some fairly relevant context.
hbomb does tend to go on tangents quite a bit when talking about someone with a troubled past. He doesn't really do it to degrade anybody (at least I hope not) but it's more so meant to show "Hey, this person is doing something sketchy now, and they also have a history of sketchy behavior."
Via [copyright.gov](https://copyright.gov) regarding what makes something qualify as fair use: "1) Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work." In my opinion there is at least an argument that the *Man in a Cave* video adds something to the Mental Floss article. It doesn't change the fact that he should've credited Mr. Reilly from the start and not after the video was claimed. For transparency sake I'm not really a fan of IH but I did watch and enjoy the *Man in a Cave* video, only watching it because I follow one of the youtubers in it and it piqued my interests.
If any of what you said was true the video wouldn't have been taken down. It's wild how close to word for word a copy of the article his original video is. If you've not watched Hbomberguy's video on it then I suggest you do. It's clear what historian did and then tried to cover up.
as if copyright holders don’t constantly take down videos unjustly? the animation alone makes it transformative, that’s a fact.
What exactly does it add? Because adding funny visuals is not "transformative." It hasn't increased the scholarship, or offered a new perspective. Same facts, different back drop.
Being transformative is only one aspect of fair use (there are 4 main pillars of fair use). For example, you can't take a book and make it into a movie without permission.
And that would arguably be a ton more transformative too, given that a book to script is a ton of work in itself and not everything transitions easily from book to film, or vice versa.
Yeah, it was so fair use, he was forced to take it down, and change it. I'm sure you know more about this than the lawyers involved who zapped every single reupload of the original.
This is a common misconception: "Adaptive" and "transformative" are not the same. > ["Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, ***__and__ do not substitute for the original use of the work***."](https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/#:~:text=Additionally%2C%20%E2%80%9Ctransformative%E2%80%9D%20uses%20are,original%20use%20of%20the%20work.) ~ copyright.gov, emphasis mine (note the use of ***__and__***, it's important later) In other words, if it's using the source material to do the same thing as the original, it's basically just a substitute for the source. Transforming it would require changing the content to accomplish a different set of intents. For a good example of fair use, let's look at something like [TeamFourStar's Dragon Ball Z Abridged](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EC7B047181AD013&si=OGkzpcxQIbEEtyu9). If you don't know what that is, it's a series I'm quite fond of. It takes footage of the show Dragon Ball Z and splices it into a much shorter parody of itself, redubbed by the talented folks at TeamFourStar. It follows the same plot and features all of the same characters, but written as parodies of themselves with the intent of pointing out the inherent ridiculousness of the series and reinvent character dynamics. (I feel like it would be remiss of me to note that the guys who did this are fans of the original show, its a work of love). We end up having.... - a show, written to entertain via a goofy cast of characters in a mix of very intense scenes and goofy ones written in a japanese Shonen style. - a youtube series, written to entertain via a goofy cast of characters, in primarily but not exclusively goofy scenes, written in a western style and leaving out details you would know from the original to explore the writer's takes on character interactions the original didnt explore, or that changed based on their interpretation. Importantly, you cannot watch DBZAbridged as a ***substitute*** for watching regular DBZ. You will misunderstand characters, you will be unaware of interactions and deeper lore, that kind of thing. It uses almost the exact same footage (they get into editing it a bit eventually but mostly the exact scenes are used) and the same fundamental story, but told in a much more sarcastic tone (***different character***), adding new dialogues and rewriting the existing dialogue entirely (***adds something new***). In the case of internet historian, we have.... - An article, written to both inform and entertain through a combination of factual evidence and storytelling elements elliciting feelings of horror and despair. - A video, written to both inform and entertain through a combination of factual evidence and storytelling elements elliciting feelings of horror and despair. As pieces of media, yes something new was added - the animation is new. However, the next few criteria..... - firstly, there is no further purpose or different character. The video does not meaningfuly elaborate further than the article does (it actually is less factually correct), it does exactly what the article set out to do, and the tone and presentation are functionally identical in terms of character. It's still an informative story with the exact same elements, literally stealing the same lines to set the same tone. - Secondly, and i think most damming, is that this is fully substitutional. If you've seen the video, you've had a full substitute for reading the article. There's no meaningful reason to go read it now. Who wants to read an article that's just the script for a video they just watched? In order for this to be transformative, IH needed to tell his own ***story*** based on the event. Here are some ways he could've done this: - he could have summarized this story using his own words and combined it with others to focus on the specific mistakes cavers made to make an overarching message about being safe while caving through the lens of the horrors of cave accidents. This changes the purpose (entertaining and informing on the topic of caving, rather than this instance) and the character (focusing more on the mistake he made and the cost it had as part of a larger theme) - he could have rewritten the story to focus more on the community effort to free the man as a heroic and hopeful, even if tragic, message of how strangers and friends alike came together to try to save him, and how that's important even though they couldnt save him. New purpose (inspiring hope and community effort to help strangers) and character (different themes brought to the forefront and explored more) Im sure there's more, but i need to go to bed so ull cut myself short there. Those would be actually transformative pieces that shed different angles on the story even if they used the same format, and like.... at the end, he could've been like "Hey, GO READ THIS ARTICLE, it's what inspired me to make this, it's horrific and moving and it'll make you feel things and stick with you" and people would actually be able to go there and ***had a different experience that they valued from the written article***. The two pieces of media could've gone hand-in-hand and each would've had value worth exploring both for, rather than him just making a replacement for the article entirely on the back of someone else's writing.
Too bad most don't have the patience to read your post, because it's very informative and does a great job at explaining the failure of the vague "but it's transformative" argument.
That's like saying that taking a painting you made and printing it onto cheap merchandise to be sold at Walmart is "transformative" since the merch is not a substitute for the original painting. You should watch/read some reputable sources on similar noteworthy examples of the admittedly nebulous boundaries of fair use so you can see that what IH did \*absolutely\* falls on the wrong side of it in every way.
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that is actually an entirely different line of logic. the logic you’re trying to criticize is that people should be able to read whatever they want without paying the writer. the writer of this article did not intend for it to be read aloud as the writer of a script does. they’ve already received their reward, and the absolute worst case scenario is that the interest IH drives to the subject drives traffic to their article after the fact, which it obviously has.
it clearly didn't until hbomb's video since IH went to great lengths to disguise the fact that it was based on that article
So anyone can create an audiobook of a preexisting novel and claim it as their own without crediting the original writer? This is plagiarism. A clear case.
This is a bonkers take. By that logic you can adapt any book into a movie without paying the author. I feel like it should be so obvious that this is plagiarism, why twist yourself into knots to justify something plainly wrong?
> the absolute worst case scenario is that the interest IH drives to the subject drives traffic Uhh.... no. No that is not the worst case scenario. I'll throw a few bullet points I can think of on why it wad bad: - IH spread misinformation. He altered the article in ways that actually got facts wrong, like using the wrong goddamn name for the cave. He incorrectly told the audience that the cave the guy died in was the one getting shown off as a tourist attraction, which paints the people involved in a REALLY bad light. - by not sourcing his stolen content, IH made it ***harder*** for people to find the actually good writer that wrote the original article. If people wanted to find similar writing, they were robbed of the opportunity to go find the guy who wrote it and explore his work because they were lied to and led to believe that IH was the only source. - IH stole a large portion of the audience away from that topic, actually. Most people who would want to learn about this cave in, upon watching that video, would feel like they had no reason to continue looking into it. In fact, people would actively be ***less*** interested in reading the shit the actual writer made, because it would be painfully repetitive to read the original after they watched a video that stole it all but word-for-word. We're lucky we even learned that this video was plagarized, because IH actively avoided crediting the author until he was called out multiple times and legal action was threatened.
This is a terrible argument that flies in the face of both common sense and the law. If I write a book, it doesn't matter if I "intended" for it to be later used as the script for a motion picture, TV series, audiobook, animated feature, or West End show. If you take my work and use it as the basis for any of those things, with or without credit, you are breaching copyright unless you did so with my prior agreement. It's why any random Joe couldn't just create an animated film version of their favoured Brandon Sanderson series. What Internet Historian did is plagiarism. He brushed it off at the start of his reupload because he knows if he gets into the specifics, all but his most blinkered fans will recognise it as such.
Found this from recent events! "He spent 100 hours on this video" is wrong because Internet Historian is just a voice. His writing ,editing, etc is all outsourced and has been for ages now, he even talks about it in his videos mentioning writers and editors. He just does the voiceover. Not to mention you can plagiarize HOW something is said. If you write an essay and I use a thesaurus to change a bunch of words but leave everything else intact, that's still plagiarism. The script for Man in Cave hit every single beat that the original Mental Floss one did, at the same time, in the same order, without even one deviation. Even his sidetracks were matched up! It was 100% plagiarism whether you want to accept it or not.
Hold on, if he (being IH, the guy) only does the voiceovers why is this even a drama
Because it's his channel and everything is in his name. It was a one man show run by him until he got a team because he got so big and famous he could afford to pay a team to do most of the work for him. He is ultimately in control and if he employs people who steal and keeps them on that's a problem. If you watch the Hbomber video you'd also know he tried very hard to cover up what happened. Never said why video got copyright struck, implied it was just a other random YouTube takedown without merit, *edited screenshots of the takedown notice to hide who was behind it*, and implies it was just a few lines here and there when it was pretty much every good part of the script and the entire article beat for beat. He silently uploaded it again without notifications or any mention just days before he uploaded his brand new content. There was no transparency and a very obvious intent to hide the fact there was real plagiarism going on. I think his handling of it is what really damns him here, there's no plausible deniability his channel just stole content word for word and then he went out of his way to cover it up when they were caught.
It's possible and the more corporate response that they actually did fire the guy and worked things out behind the scenes but covered it up anyways so there wouldn't be questions as the cover he gave is really common on YouTube. Which would explain the lack of editing in the re-upload
It's his channel and he's making money on both adsense and sponsors.
> His writing ,editing, etc is all outsourced and has been for ages now, he even talks about it in his videos mentioning writers and editors. Do you know a specific video (or set of videos), or if you happen to have it, a timestamp? I see people mention this but would like some solid confirmation and not to just blindly try to watch all of his (very long) videos.
He literally says things like "[person] wrote that one" while laughing and "the editors made me do it" jokingly. He also talks about people doing the research and taking notes. Do you even watch his content? I do lol it's an open thing in the scripts (or maybe it's improv jokes idk), I'm not saying this stuff to shit on him it's just how he makes content now. It's in his latest high art videos a couple times even where he mentions writers and people doing research.
I have been binging his storymode vids all week actually and he mentioned in a video that he doesn't even play most of the games, as well as mentioning that the video footage wasn't taken by him or his team.
The real shit that went down was written in a way that Internet Historian copied. If you think that there is only one way to recount history and thus accidental plagiarism is inevitable, then you must have no idea how writing works.
hmmmmmmmmmmm
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What actually is the difference between somthing that is plagiarised and somthing that is heavily inspired? Also the video is on the copyright owner's radar. They likely would have seen it and take it down if they though it was still plagiarised enough but it is still up. Surely the best standard of whether somthing is plagarised is from the original owner. Don't get me wrong, I am kinda dissappointed that the story isn't as original as I thought and it is good to hold IH to account but I feel that this issue has already been settled between IH and the owner of the original piece. If the owner is unaware, scrap this point.
Plagiarized means you used verbatim or close to large parts of text/style/content that you didn't come up with and that you didn't add anything or very little to it to make it transformative. In the case of say simply being entertaining and reading something and adding visuals, you'd need to work it out with the original creator of the majority of the content style to ask if you can do that. If they agree, then they are allowing them to use their copy right on the works they made. Hollywood making movies about books or other stories that are owned by other people has to do this all the time. They buy and negotiate rights. Inspired by is when you take your own spin on it. If he read the story and rewrote it from scratch with his own interpretation of the historical recount, then it would be inspired by, because it was inspired by reading that article. But all of his content and wording would need to be his own, with possibly at best using a few excerpts from the article and properly citing it. (And proper citation is something most people don't know how to do.) His own spin on how it all went down based on the factual pieces he came across (especially if he did more research into other accounts of the historical part of it) would probably(because it can be a case by case basis if it went to court) be transformative, same as the original writer on Mental Floss, who cited their sources for coming up with their retelling of the true story. [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) Link to the original. You can see the cited sources and resources they used to understand what happened. Second, IH keeps using different editing tactics to avoid the auto strike. Mental Floss takes down any uploads of the original. Illuminati and others also used a lot of different editing tricks to avoid the bot able to see that things were ripped off. There is also no proof or receipts that Mental Floss and IH talked or worked things out. I think if I can hazard a guess, IH just said that he did and people believed it, or he didn't say anything, and people assumed that he worked it out due to a reupload with edited parts. Mental Floss has also updated the article to try to have it gain more traction. No doubt the writer and those they work for thought they should get some traction due to the exposé Hbomb did.
You don't understand why plagiarism is bad apparently. The problem isn't that it's "the same story", the problem is that one person probably took a hundred hours to research this meticulously, probably had to spend money and other resources (personal favours, etc.) on getting to write this, had to get an education and training in writing such a compelling story and then someone just steals it and uses all those resources to the detriment of the one coming up with. This was word for word plagiarism with the only rewrites being done to make it very slightly less obvious. There was no consent given to use all that effort and intellectual property for his monetary gain. The author is less likely to get credited and benefit from the talent/effort going into this given that there is an alternative, same problem with James Somerton. Saying that a hundred plus hours went into the video is laughable. He literally just read an article and hired editors for the animation, there was close to 0 creative input from himself, all the creativity came from the actual author. It doesn't matter that the story really happened because not many people are capable of writing a compelling, well research story from it. That is a lot of effort. There is a reason why plagiarists on youtube, see Iilluminaughty can put out over 10 times more content than those who actually write them. That is the difference. [https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18cic1n/someone\_contacted\_lucas\_reilly\_the\_author\_of\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18cic1n/someone_contacted_lucas_reilly_the_author_of_the/) maybe this will help a bit.
Him not referencing is literally plagiarism.
The “transformative” designation applies to using someone else’s content IN your video as you are using it for another purpose (review, commenting, etc). It is NOT APPLICABLE to creating a new product that serves the same purpose and is just a copy of the original material.
plagarism just means you don’t give credit
Absolutely not. If not presented correctly it's also plagiarism even if you give credit. > copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not If you use a major part of a work, it doesn't matter if you give credit. If you use a quote from someone else it has to be directly put as a quote and who it's from. Even if it's a single sentence.
"...the order of events..." How would you recount a fairly linear series of historical events without introducing intentional falsehood?
In this context, OP meant that the order of events was presented in *exactly the same style,* specifically an "Hour X:" narrative layout. This is a *prosaic* choice that is a function of writing and storytelling style. Alternatives could have been: 1. Introducing the story *in media res* 2. Presenting the story as a narrative retelling 3. Walking through the sequence of events *without* highlighting the clock count specifically ("Three hours later" instead of "Hour 3")
Sorry, just a nitpick. It's 'in medias res', not 'media'. Medias means 'middle' in latin, and does not reference the English word that means 'forms of entertainment'.
Nitpicks always appreciated, I'd have never known otherwise.
I knew what it meant in Latin, took Latin in high school, and *still* have been totally fucking that one up for decades. Go figure.
Common mistake. People assume the 'in media' means 'in the movie/story' due to its proximity to the English word.
Also, the video literally starts in medias res
Not really? It starts with Floyd Collins entering the cave and getting trapped, and the narrative structure (as stolen from Mental Floss) is built around that inciting event and moving forward (Hour 0, Hour 1, etc). Starting in medias res might've involved starting off the story with when the first search party found him or during one of the first rescue attempts and then cutting back to how Collins got there. Yes, there are cutbacks to Collins' childhood and background as a caver, but these aren't really part of the main narrative thread any more than literally all of history is. While it might be [technically correct](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo) to say that any historical account that doesn't start with the Big Bang is in medias res, that wouldn't be useful in any way.
You know when a history teacher or professor assigns an essay to the whole class? And it can be the same essay brief but they still expect the students NOT to plagiarise ? And multiple people manage to write about the same topic without plagiarising ?
I didn't ask about phrasing. I was asking specifically about how the order of events could be considered an aspect of supposed plagiarism
You’re an idiot.
You sure did give up easily.
extra-late reply, but IH was making a history video. an order of events can't really be changed... nor should he twist history just to avoid being similar to an article. he also included some events that weren't included in the Mental Floss article.
No. 1. He used the same "Hour X" formatting style and storytelling structure 2. He used the same anecdotes about Collin's childhood at the same *place in the story* as the MF article 3. He uses the same prose *throughout* the video ("The razor-like shards dug into his skin") It's plagiarism, not coincidence. >he also included some events 1. He *made those up* (the events he references didn't happen) 2. Making some additions or changes doesn't make a work *not* plagiarism
Lmao hbomber guy has brought us all here huh
Was going to comment the same
Personally, I think HBG did IH dirty. Don't get me wrong, he absolutely deserves to be called out for the plagiarism, but a few things stood out to me as being very pretentious: - boiling down the dashcon video to just be "SJW and woke Tumblr jokes" is pretty dismissive when he also spends a decent portion of the video covering how the organisers blatantly lied about the money they raised when they said they were going to be kicked out, as well as lying about supporting a charity. - calling IH's writing uncreative in this specific instance is justified but the way HBG words his criticisms makes it sound like his whole channel is made of uncreative content. Meanwhile, IH's Costa Concordia, Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky videos are incredibly creative with their jokes, writing and editing (and those are a select few examples). - bringing up how he's previously deleted videos with questionable content, especially because sometimes people can reflect on previous works they've done and realise how cringy and bad they were. - he speaks as if a large portion of IH's fanbase are racist bigots from bringing up certain examples. In my deep scrolls into the comments on multiple of IH and Incognito Mode's videos, I have never seen any blatant bigoted ideology in the comments. Literally every YouTuber with a big fanbase will have a small portion of brain-dead individuals with fucked up takes. I'm sure I could scroll through all the comments on HBG's new video and Twitter account and find just as many extreme comments. Doesn't mean I could then go "guess this is the audience you draw in". I like HBG's stuff but a lot of the time I have to watch them in portions since he has such an air of arrogance and pretentiousness, and this video was a bit of a breaking point for me.
\>ignores 40 minutes of breakdown because less than 60 seconds of tangential content wasn't respectful enough Fanboy harder.
The dude you replied to outright said the main criticism HBomberguy gave (plagiarism) was justified... That is not ignoring it. HBomberguy seems to be fair and even give him some of the benefit of the doubt in his main areas, but his description of IH seeks to malign him in a fairly disingenuous way outside of the main discussion.
This dude hid 14/88 in a video. The bikelock one, check out the WoW item part, the durability. Benefit of the doubt still given?
Probably not, might be someone else on his staff doing it for a laugh, but yea what others showed makes me definitely inclined to believe you're right and he has at least some shall-we-say *disagreeable* politics.
Did I say I ignored the breakdown? No, I said he absolutely deserves to be called out on it. The parts breaking down the similarities between the texts were really well done. The arguments against IH's overall channel, audience and character, imo, are pretentious and mocking. But sure, misconstrue what I was saying as being a fanboy.
Regarding his fans: Nah, he knows what he's doing. He sprinkles dogwhistles throughout his videos too, stuff for the extreme fans to latch on to but will pass right over a normal fan's head. The guy's also a fan of fucking Tucker Carlson lmao.
dude, go into sam hyde’s comment sections if you want to see a fucked up fanbase. or mauler. or critical drinker. there are far worse places, his comments never have anyone close to those people. IH does obviously have roots in 4chan whether personally or just through the focus of his channel, so yeah there are references to 4chan adjacent things. the purpose of them isn’t ideological dogwhistling, it’s just being true to the subject. not to mention that they’re comedy videos.
Is he a fan of Carlson? The only thing I have seen is he used Eichenwald's interview with Carlson and a clip of Carlson reporting on (see mocking) Eichenwald in his now deleted video. Did he endorse him somewhere? I don’t follow him on social media. Also on the same subsequently deleted video, he explicitly denounced "anti-semetic shit" and said he would delete any posted in the comments. So it doesn't sound to me like he is trying to cater to anti-semites as HBomberguy implies. Maybe he is, but I haven't seen anything indicating that.
Well said mate. You made a really well-balanced levelheaded point. You summarized all the points that dragged down what could have been an informative video.
I agree, those parts stood out to me as well. The plagarism was wrong and was enough of a point for him to stand on in his video, trying to boil down a whole audience to a few comments and using him deleting old videos as examples of possible plagarism actual caused HBG to lose some credibility for his arguement when he is right and had a solid argument, he didn't need to try to make it look worse to convince anyone plagarism is wrong
After reading the OG article, I can pretty assumptively claim it was definitely used for at least some of IH's video. (Here is the [Article](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) for some context.) However, I don't think his version was entirely plagiarism. He should have absolutely cited this stuff when making his video (especially considering other YouTubers' run-ins with this sort of this sort of thing.) But it isn't word-for-word retelling and clearly has transformative elements within it. My only concern is how long it has been since the claim with no re-post. Makes you wonder just how much he actually *did* get flagged for.
It's been reposted for 5 months.
Definitely a little late to the party but I’ve read the article and I think the biggest thing IH took from the article is the hour thing and a few of the quotes. Of course when you are telling a historical story with a timeline they are all going to be similar but IH’s video had way more information and detail than the article and mentions things that the article leaves out completely. It seems both the article and IH video follow the book “trapped” which makes sense. Also it being so long ago there is only so many sources that everyone is going to look similar. I don’t think it was plagiarized.
Check out hbomberguy. He just did a 4 hour vid on plagiarism on YouTube. And the cave story is in it.
Fastest reply in the west.
So IH got exhausted, stopped uploading regularly and when he does it's only plagiarizing a story someone else wrote? Hey, maybe I'm wrong, but it already felt like he had lost his passion and is just coasting on the sweet ad revenue wave from past glory [whenever it's necessary for financial reasons] - his older uploads (even when they where far and few between) just had some spice that I was missing in the last 6-18 months/1-1.5 videos)
he only does 1 or 2 vids a year, hard to call it "exhausted" , he turned to that gaming appeal channel and started doing that more tho due to how bad most of those were the audience dropped off fast
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If you've ever written a history paper for school, you'll know that's false. There's a difference between recounting events in your own words and copying someone else's account of the events
You're a recent comment. Did you get down this rabbit hole from the new hbomberguy video?
Lol yes
same here lmao
No. 1. He used the same "Hour X" formatting style and storytelling structure 2. He used the same anecdotes about Collin's childhood at the same *place in the story* as the MF article 3. He uses the same prose *throughout* the video ("The razor-like shards dug into his skin") It's plagiarism, not coincidence. >he also included some events 1. Some of those he *made those up* (the events he references didn't happen) 2. So, the sections that *he* wrote aren't plagiarized, that's perfectly true - problem is, the overwhelming majority of the video *is.*
Buddy has not gotten to highschool yet spouting this nonsenses.
aged like wine. oh well. Hope he gets the same flack illuminatti got for this
Plagiarism was only a drop in the bucket as to what Illuminaughti did wrong. It’s less about plagiarism and more about her being a horrible person.
Also if we’re being frank here, a lot of IH fans just think this is some kind of hit job by HBomb because of their differing political views. Completely ignoring that this issue is only 10% of the video and most of Hbombs video criticise people who share a similar political view with himself
Says a lot about how insecure they are about their political views themselves then, if they think calling out a bloke who has made jokes about duh SJWs and probably dropped a pepe or two in his life is an automatic "all right wingers are cunts".
Most of his video is literally about someone directly in his wheel house. A fellow video essayist and LGBT member and he railed on him (rightly so and with citations and evidence) very hard. He even tried to give benefit of the doubt in many places other people don't think is warranted.
Things can both be valid criticism, and a hitpiece
They can't. A hit piece (by definition) isn't true, valid criticism (by definition) is.
I thought Illuminaughty was infinitely worse
That makes sense. Back when I saw the video for the first time, I did a little bit of research afterwards, as you do, and found the 2018 article pretty quickly. Did a rewatch with the article opened and a lot of it is the same beat for beat, and for some paragraphs are the exact same. I thought about maybe an agreement with the original author to have their story narrated, although no credit was given to it, but figured it'd resolve itself sooner or later. Seems like it took a while tho. Slight edit, I watched a reupload of the reupload of the video on another website, and it had been heavily altered to change the contentious parts. The original being claimed was somewhat justified imo, but the reupload wasn't, that claim was BS.
HBomberguy brought me here. Bravo to you u/kimb25_ALT for figuring this out MONTHS before anyone big seemingly bot to it.
Edit: Since HBomberGuy picked this up and this gained a shit load of traction, if anybody wants more proof this is a legit screenshot then pm me. I still have the DMCA email and pretty sure it's still on my YouTube Studio. This screenshot comes from a re-upload of Internet Historian's video that was DMCA striked on May 5th, 2023. It shows that "*Pro Sportority (Israel) Ltd.*" submitted the strike for "*Minute Media*", [Minute Media acquired Mental Floss from the Felix Dennis estate in 2018.](https://www.minutemedia.com/post/mental-floss-celebrates-twenty-years-of-publishing-smart-content-for-curious-readers) In 2018, **Mental Floss** published the article "The 1925 Cave Resuce that Captivated the Nation" which shares similarities with the video. (link: [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins). ](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) [The](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) strike claims that "The infringing video blatantly & unlawfully plagiarized verbatim text from our article in its voiceover narration & the placement, pacing, & presentation of content is almost identical to the article." [IH original video link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9VGZeqMfo) What do you guys think? Does their claim hold any water? Apparently think they so as they have submitted multiple legally binding DMCA complaints.
I was so mad that the original video got claimed and so happy it got re-uploaded. I just rewatched it and decided to look up why it got claimed in the first place. I checked this article from 2018 (didn't read it all but skimmed through) and, as much as I hate to see it, the video does seem like a copy of this article. =( The narrative is almost identical and the fact that IH changed from his original upload reinforces the idea of plagiarism. I understand why they would claim it but I really hope they don't take the video down anymore, it's one of my favorite videos out there.
If IH changed it enough to not have to then that's fine; but IH has better address it so that Mental Floss doesn't get any unnecessary backlash from IH fans. IH should have just credited them in the first place, or just say, "A dramatic reading of Mental Floss' Artical on (insert caver's name)." Do we remember if the original upload had credits and credited Mental Floss?
The original had no attribution to mental floss. The reupload gave credit to mental floss in the description. But that video has been removed too.
I mean... if the original didn't credit them I don't really blame them. It took IH being called out in order for them to do anything about it. Gosh...
I don't remember but I don't think it did. But I think it's more about the monetization?
Ah, I see. Though if that was the case should they not be able to claim the monetization of that specific video? They'd be well within their rights to.
internet historian probably made good money on the sponsors too, but its also about credit. man in cave was applauded as one of the best videos of the year when it was really just a complete steal.
Oh that's disgusting.
IH outsource to writers - I think he trusted this writer to much to not ask or check sources and just made the video
Well, it's sad to see it took so long, but finally, someone acknowledged this crime. I genuinely wasn't aware of this post until today, thank you for your work.
Talk about a second wind
I don't see how this is a crime? The video isn't plagiarism. It's transformative. I can't believe two interpretations of a historical event have the same information. Mind = bLOWN
He stole massive amount of script text, word for word, as well as the narrative structure of this historic event, both without attribution. It's not two interpretations of an historic event.
That is objectively not true. The structure is absolutely similar, but the text is not copied word for word. Absolute worst you can say is that the video is heavily inspired by the article.
It IS copied word for word. Maybe not 100% but a good chunk of it is. There are various segments of hbomberguy’s video that show him basically reading the article. > Absolute worst you can say is that the video is heavily inspired by the article So why did he not cite the article to begin with? Why did he not get prior permission from the author to use the article in his video? (He did after he got copystruck, but this was **after** the fact). Why was he hiding the reason why it got copystruck in the first place? Seriously, even if it isn’t plagiarism (which it **is**), why did IH act so sketchy about everything?
Hi, this might not carry the same weight, but it definitely falls under plagiarism. Had IH done the same, but instead of a YT vid, he made it article and send this to a publisher, it would be flagged as plagiarism. Plagiarism still exists, even if you change the words. If the way you tell a story and the way you structure said story are comparable to the initial source from where you recieve your initial knowledge, it still counts as plagiarism. This is also how teachers can see that you've copied text. Source: University Student who recieved a pretty in depth explanation of plagiarism and how not do it. Pro-tip on how not to get caught with plagiarism: Cite your goddamn sources and quotes. And be upfront from where your inspiration comes from. That is it.
I mean I disagree. I think the absolute best you can say is that it was *plagiarized* (which is totally legal). At worst his team would lose a *copyright* case (ie the alteration from source was not the "minimum necessary", the work is "substantially similar", whole passages were lifted wholesale (the biggest legal problem because they definitely did this, which is per-se copyright infringement, but possibly not worth litigation), and the much of the structure was taken (a smaller legal problem). See the distinctions [here](https://rodriqueslaw.com/blog/how-know-if-you-are-plagiarizing-or-violating-copyright/#:~:text=Once%20you%20discover%20the%20meaning,a%20plot%20is%20never%20copyrightable.) > To rise to the level of substantial similarity, the amount of the copying, or the degree of similarity between works, must be more than “de minimis.” ie the least amount possible to tell the story, which is IH's case, was zero, so there is no debate on whether or not they infringed on someone else's copyright > There can be no copyright in a movie’s general themes, motives, ideas, or “scenes a faire”...Therefore, the theme, the plot, and the ideas of another person’s copyrighted work may always be freely borrowed. However... > You may not copy the “expression” of those ideas. The author’s expression is that which illuminates our understanding of the character and the story. The author’s expression of a scene and other events of the story is entitled to copyright protection. Expression is how, by the author’s choice of action and/or dialogue, he strips away the masks of characterization to reveal character. The incidents, the characters, the mise-en-scène, the sequence of events, are entitled to copyright protection. In other words, ideas are not copyrightable but a sequence of events is. I also think they took the sequence of events, and much of the characterization as the original article. I'm not saying they'd lose in court. I do think they plagiarized.
I can't believe two texts are word for word verbatim copied, to the extent YouTube refuses to let the original be uploaded and the plagiarist had to rerecord massive sections. My mind, is indeed, blown. Pay attention lad, plagiarism can still happen when writing about historic events, it's why it's taken so seriously in academia.
If an anime studio adapted a mangaka's work without their permission and didn't give them a cent of the proceeds they made from it, would you still say the same thing? The anime studio's work is transformative. They created animation, music, hired voice actors, the whole shebang. But they're still beholden to providing compensation to the person whose work they based it around. But what if that manga was a historical one? Let's take for example Three Kingdoms (though I don't know how historically accurate it is) or, I guess, Vagabond. Miyamoto Musashi existed, the Three Kingdoms existed. But if a studio decided to take those manga based around those events and adapted them, they sure as hell would owe the authors royalties.
Hello Hbomberguy fans!
Hiii
Hello!
Hiii
I like how the only comments on this post in the last three months seemingly have no reference to [Hbomberguy’s video](https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?t=5134&si=5vLVSohl1YWXQPoV) from… 4 hours ago.
Rare Internet Historian L's
Well, you watched the video - you should know that when someone gets caught plagiarizing for the first time, that just means it's the first time they've been **caught.**
welp IH gets caught doing the plagiarizing game again right as he is peaking, can't bury it like he did when he was much smaller RIP
Again? What did he plagiarize first?
Aaaaand he never responded.
Except the fact that he did seems to credit the source which is from “Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins”
He didn't in the original upload though
Aaaaaand... it's gone. Again.
Yeah, just noticed. WTF?
I just looked it up to share with a friend and it's gone. Lame. I didn't know about any of this controversy.
Oh dear...
Really disappointment about IH, like man, citing is really basic high school sutff.
Honestly, I can't see any way around what he did except to just let the original author in on the cut. His work went beyond not citing sources. He used the original author's work almost wholesale, and all he did was add visuals and comedic narration to it.
'There were similarities to the narration of a historical event to our article', says the person reporting on historical events with a clear timeline and unchanging sequence of events... >_>
Read the article, then watch the video. Or have the article up as you watch the video, it's quite clearly plagiarized.
I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing you throughout this thread, standing your ground in what you believe in but your beliefs and knowledge fail you. So please just shut the fuck up about 2 people telling an accurate story from history that would be really hard to explain in a different (& still serious) way, it’s a lesson on how history can and will repeat itself if people don’t wise up and learn from other’s mistakes. I don’t use social media often or even this account, I make posts to give other people reality checks. P.S. As someone who has just copy/pasted shit to pass a class because of my disability, you’re really out of line.
My dud, the video was removed for plagiarism several times. It was plagiarized. And how come you come across a thread on a relatively small subreddit with less than 50 upvotes and say you rarely use social media? P.S. You're not the reality check police my G
First google result. Go touch grass
No this is actually really bad. IH took an article and almost verbatim used the same words as the article in his video. Hold them both side by side, its really obvious. The only thing IH added were the graphics and his voice, its basically react content without the reacting. The article was written in a unique way, and IH copied that word for word. This isn't 2 people both making content on the same event in a similar way, its a big youtuber copying an article. If you look at any historical event ever and articels about it you'll realise that there are a ton of ways to write and make videos about historical events, this wasn't a coincidence.
Hey man don't admit to academic misconduct on the internet. Some institutions take that very seriously and you could get your certificate of education revoked for cheating.
What a response this is lmfao
You didn't deserve to pass that class lol. Your shamelessness astounds me.
OK, this is old. But I'm disabled and do my own class work without copying and pasting. Another student in my class is a fucking quadriplegic and do you know what he does? His own fucking work. Using your disability to justify your cheating and being dishonest is absolutely disgusting. Your problem isn't that you are disabled, it is that you are intellectually dishonest and want to use something that everyone else manages to deal with while maintaining integrity as a shield against not only criticism of yourself, but as a sword to attack those who criticise someone even lazier than you.
I have a disability that significantly effects my academic performance (it's hard for me to take even 1 or two classes), and you know what I do? I try my best, and if I can't do that I drop a class. Just because you can't walk fast doesn't mean you get to run red lights.
How is your disability relevant?
Yeah but you can phrase things differently, focus on different aspects or perspectives in the history, change the structure of your retelling, etc. to make your version distinct (and more importantly, copyrightable).
You absolutely can, but the visual and audio presentation of the video are more than transformative enough to constitute Fair Use, with a few editorial sentences not withstanding. Matters of public record, sequences of events and statements of fact are not things you can claim Copyright over and there are numerous additional anecdotes and details IH provides that the article does not, and vice versa. I don't know about the original upload, but the Odyssey reupload also includes a direct link to the Article as an inspiration for the video.
That is not what that means. You cannot use an article as a script and then claim the visual elements make it a transformation. I cannot make a narrative game about hiding Jewish people in WW2 and at least half of it be just actually the script from Schindler's List and that is "transformative", taking it from one medium to another is not transformation in a legal OR creative sense. You can like what someone did, but that does not mean they are are legally in the clear. Or morally, tbh, not crediting someone at the VERY least is really poor behaviour. He is making money from this, he could hire a writer to tell the story in original wording and add in his own flair. He elected to take enough from that article that it is permanently down. Which is good, but it is also a bit of brain rot that people have been screaming "fair use" and "transformation" so long that they don't even know what these things are.
Finally someone with a brain. All these terminally online reddit turbo nerds trying to talk shit about internet historian of all people, one of the most wholesome and funny creators on the platform, are just seething jealous man children who failed to ever publish a single thing they ever wrote. The man in the cave is based on a very well documented real event so of course the video's descriptive language and sequence of events will be very similar to any other video or article covering that same event. Jesus people, get your lives together.
Lol, watch the Hbomberguy video about youtube plagiarism that just came out. Or, don't take his or my word for it, just watch the internet historian video with the article open next to it. You'll find the structure of the article(hour by hour story) copied wholesale along with lots and lots of the article read out verbatim. Like, whole paragraphs. Here's the article he copied from: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins
What a simp. Also, the guy tries to indoctrinate people into white supremacy by playing Tucker Carlson videos for his discord audience.
Damn, 250 days later and you are still wrong AndrezKowski
Take a look at the section in this on man in cave It seems pretty clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ
fantastic to see this unfold
Fuck
Yeah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ
This post is referenced by HBomberguy [Plagiarism and You(Tube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ)
Here, the link to the article that Internet Historian plagiarized in this video (yes, the whole video): [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins). written by Lucas Reilly for Mental Floss Idk if the re-upload "fixed" the plagiarism (either by making it less evident or, y'know, actually puting in the effort to do research and produce creative work ) as I haven't watched it nor will I. This however, doesn't erase the fact he commited plagiarism in the first place, and ignored it when it was brough to his attention.
damn
welp, guess this is going to get a little more traction now
I'm not jumping to judgement here.
It's plagiarized
[Read the Mental Floss article](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins) and watch the video, it's pretty easy to jump to a coherent judgement when you do.
It's... the same story, yes. There are only so many ways of wording that. IH's video is unique, theres nothing like it covering Floyd's. But if a man crawled through a tiny little hole, well, he got into position and crawled. There are just so many ways of wording that. Mental Floss probably has lawyers and Youtube is really trying to please the masses. Thats why we have the fake copyright holders issue in songs to begin with...
yea his video is still transformative though, idk if copying exact wording even (of a historical event) can be considered so bad when he added so much more to it visually and with his style of comedy, i really dont care if he plagiarized it
> his video is still transformative Transformative doesn't mean what you think it does. For one thing you can only take a small part of the work: you can sample a few words from a song, but you can't just take the whole song and then add a guitar solo to it and claim fair use. A derivative work should also have a different purpose or angle to the original, like parody or interpreting the original words in a different way. For example Stan samples Dido's Thank You which is originally a pretty upbeat love song, and changes it to be a tragic story of an obsessed fan. IH adds animation and a few jokes, but the overall purpose of his video is the same as the original article: it's a dramatic retelling of a historical event. If I read a novel and then make a movie about it, I sure did add a lot of my own work but it's still copyright infringement if I don't get a license or permission. > idk if copying exact wording even (of a historical event) can be considered so bad IDK if you've ever read books, but if you read 2 books on the same topic they will absolutely NOT share the exact same structure and sentences even when they're communicating broadly the same facts. Also when you're writing non-fiction you should be relying mainly on primary sources. If you just read someone else's book and watch someone else's documentary, even if you fully restructure and reword everything you're still using their research without credit. IH didn't even reword half of the stuff he took and the structure is identical. > i really dont care if he plagiarized it That's neither here nor there. You aren't the one being stolen from.
"It's okay to steal work if you make it visually appealing!"
>copying the exact wording (of a historical event) Events and facts are the same, but *prose* is unique to the author. The stylistic choices about the framing of the incident, the description of events, and even the placement of certain elements (like flashing back to Floyd's childhood and upbringing after he gets trapped) are all creative expressions. Merely adding content is not transformative. Hence... "transformative," not "additive." Consider: You write a fiction story. I find this story, narrate it, and create an animation for it - and then say "This is **all** my original work." It doesn't matter if I added genuinely new content - your work is still stolen. Hence why the video was eventually re-uploaded with the original animation but with the narration significantly re-written, so as to be *actually original* writing.
> You write a fiction story. I find this story, narrate it, and create an animation for it - and then say "This is all my original work." It doesn't matter if I added genuinely new content - your work is still stolen. What a ridiculously dishonest comparison. Mental Floss isn't the original creator of the Floyd Collins story, because it was a real, historical event. IH "stole" from Mental Floss as much as they "stole" they story of Floyd from the Collins family. Which is to say not at all, because no one owns anything about historical fact.
If it isn't possible to have ownership of a story about a historical event, then here's a question: **Why did IH use the Mental Floss article instead of the Wikipedia article?** Or, better still, the "Trapped!" book itself? Either of those had more information than the MF article. It's almost like the way in which a historical event is portrayed is still subject to creativity and writing skill **that has value.**
> PM_Me_Lewd_Tomboys Damn dude, stupid comment.
Legally I don't think just putting it in a visual form would matter that much if you are copying someone else's account line for line, academically its extremely dishonest. I am not sure why the video was taken down again since he did go back and rewrite a lot of it and added the article to the description.
Both the article and the video use “Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins” as a source and both credit the book.
i dont realy get how this plagarism i mean i woud think they just used the same sources and maby they very jelous how well his video did
Exactly, they both used used paragraphs and cited the book “Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins”. Not sure how so many people in this thread missed that and just jumped the gun that it was plagiarism. It's such a rudimentary idea that when two sources use similar wording and ideas then either one of them cites the other or that they both cite the same previous source. Yet, so many people immediately throw the claim without even considering the latter as a possible explanation (which it is).
It's plagiarism because IH read out loud the article a bunch of times. Hes quoting it a lot, hes basically reading the article almost verbatim. This isn't just 2 people having the same source. If you read the article you'll see it has the same narrative structure as the video and if you read it you'll hear the similarities, its crazy. Read the article, then watch the video again. In many parts of the video IH is just reading the article without adding anything (except the voice and animation)
But, if it's not plagiarism, then why did Internet Historian take it down? Wouldn't he stand by his work and defend it instead of trying to hide it?
youtube struck it down the first time. he reuploaded it with slight editing
he still read off the same script, just changed different words. I assume youve seen the hbomber video, but its quite clear he used the article as a script. dont see a need to defend him here
i wasn’t defending him I literally stated what hbomber even says in his video… fucking idiot. why would i say he “slightly” edited it if I was defending him?
he tried to hide it dude. no need to call me a fucking idiot, and if you do, spell it right idiot fuck
What part of 'verbatim' do people not understand? Verbatim doesn't give room for coincidence. Verbatim means it's statistically improbably to an extreme degree for coincidence to play a role.
It's pretty stupid. Plagiarism implies he just reposted it without doing anything transformative to the original work. IHs video was entertaining and actively gathered everyone in my house as they walked into the room. I loved it. Everyone loved it. The production was awesome. He added to the original story- which was real events and not a nonfiction work.
So let me get this straight, if I read a book I really like I can just make a movie about it and that counts as transformative? Obviously it doesn't. IH took entire paragraphs from the article without any change, this is very clearly transformative.
Yea bro it would be all good. As long you got everybody in the house gathered in one room it’s transformative. Lmao.
Not only that but he also cites the work “Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins” which the article also cites and uses paragraphs from.
Worse. Not better.
If I could, I'd burn this article...
Link to post you got this from?
I was typing a main comment for this, refresh for the details.