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I HAVE BEEN PLAGIARISED... AND THE ONLY VICTIM WAS ME - by Mr Biffo

28/8/2018

23 Comments

 
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Just before I took my summer break, you may be aware that IGN was forced to fire its Nintendo editor Filip Miucin when it was alleged that he had copied the script for his video review of Dead Cells from a review by YouTuber Boomstick Gaming.

I won't recount it all, when plenty have already done so. I mean, I could just copy-and-paste what others have written, and change a few words here and there, which would be totes funny. But anyway.

Miucin posted an apology video in which he made excuses, and later added the mistake of daring people to find any further examples of his plagiarism. Presumably, intending to imply that they wouldn't.

They did.

Since then, many more examples of Miucin apparently slightly rewriting the work of others have come to light, with much hilarity ensuing when parts of his Linkedin profile seemed to have been cut-and-pasted from a sample template. IGN is now reviewing all of Miucin's work for the site, having taken it down at least temporarily. 

Many have been amazed at how little Miucin changed the pieces he allegedly cribbed from, but in my experience the plagiarist is blatant.

I've certainly had people rip off things I've done, and the worst time it happened was when I was a struggling screenwriter, and someone more successful, influential and powerful than me borrowed fairly liberally from a script Digitiser's Mr Hairs and I had written, and put elements of it into a broadcast pilot.

Years later I found out that said individual had a bit of a TV industry reputation for doing this, but - at a time when we were trying to get a career off the ground - we were fairly powerless to do anything about it. Similar things happened to me a further two times (that I know of) in the early days of my TV writing career, and always by people you would expect to know better. Each time I felt the same sort of impotent anger and frustration that Boomstick Gaming must've done.

In sort, it happens more often than you think it might, even though plagiarism is one of the worst creative and journalistic crimes a person can commit. And - hold onto your scandal-pants - it's a crime of which I too have been guilty...
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EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Many years back - and we're talking late-90s here - I did a fair bit of work for Empire magazine's video game pages.

I'd read Empire more or less since it began, and was quite excited when I got approached about working with them. I even hoped that I'd - perhaps - be able to move from writing about video games to, maybe if I was lucky, writing some film stuff.

Curiously, the Empire gig came about because of Leslie Bunder's then-girlfriend (now wife, I believe) Caroline Westbrook.

​You may remember Leslie as a short-lived Digitiser columnist, whom we discovered had been given a column by our bosses, because they planned to remove Mr Hairs and I from Digitiser and replace us with him. We even found a memo to Leslie from Teletext's editor asking him to "familiarise" himself with Digitiser's output.

​Caroline was an Empire staffer, and it was her who approached me with a view to writing for Empire. Which was nice of her.

To cut a long story short, I got a call one day from Caroline after they'd been contacted by a reader, claiming that one of my Empire pieces had been plagiarised by a local newspaper column - almost word-for-word in fact. I had to explain - with a chuckle - that no such thing had happened. It wasn't a problem at all, as I was the one who'd written the syndicated local newspaper column, having inherited it from Violet Berlin, who no longer had the time to do it.

I could tell two things from the silence on the other end of the phone. 1) This was a problem, and 2) I was never going to work for Empire again.
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PLAGARISE OF THE ROBOTS
Suffice to say, it was a mistake borne out of naivety. I was relatively young and inexperienced. I didn't stop to think that it might've mattered that I'd plagiarised myself. I didn't even think you could plagiarise yourself. I mean, I figured that I only have one set of opinions. If I was writing about the same thing for two different publications, what was the point of completely changing what I wrote for both? Right?!?

Ugh...

Obviously, now I realise how stupid of me that was. Even at the time I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of what happened. I realised almost immediately that it made me look sloppy, unprofessional and lazy. Indeed, the knock-on effect was that, as predicted, I never worked for Empire again. We hopefully learn from our mistakes however, and from that point onwards I was a lot more diligent. 

I'm well aware that my crime of plagiarism isn't in the same ballpark as Filip Miucin's, but I guess that because of my experience, I've got a little more empathy towards him than the majority seem to have. 

For somebody to plagiarise to the degree that Miucin is accused of doing - with such an apparent pattern of it - there has to be something fairly significantly broken in his head. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyse him, but whatever he saw as the potential rewards for doing what he did, it clearly outweighed the very real risks. And he's paying for that, just as I did.

BAD GUYS
There can be all sorts of reasons for why a person plagiarises, and it's never as simple as them being a "bad" person.

Whatever his reasons, Filip Miucin is unlikely ever to work in games journalism again. In fact, should any employer, regardless of the industry, choose to look him up online prior to a potential hire - as they all do these days - the online firestorm is going to severely impact his chances of being employed by anybody.

A lot of people are taking great delight in Miucin's fate, but I can't join them. I can't revel in how his life has potentially been ruined - yes, by his own actions, admittedly - and the knock-on effect for his young family. It's shocking, it's embarrassing for IGN, and damaging to the already beleaguered reputation of games journalism, but further laying into Filip Miucin - kicking somebody who is, believe me, paying for his errors and already beating himself up pretty robustly without needing yet another voice telling him how awful he is - isn't going to improve the situation any.

​All you're going to do is feel momentarily better about yourself, because you're not the one in the middle of that firestorm. But at what cost?

Overall, it's just really sad. 
23 Comments
Darren link
28/8/2018 10:42:07 am

This isn't really a plagiarism story, but a story about being a freelancer and signing a contract that means your work can be reprinted in perpetuity without you ever seeing another dime from each reprint. I was writing some stuff for a publisher one time and then I remember being on a plane sometime later and sitting behind someone coming back from the US who was reading a US magazine and a piece of my work was in said magazine. I was both proud and deeply annoyed. Proud that my work was being seen worldwide but also annoyed that I wasn't being paid for it.

It's a shit business...

Also, sorry for the shit anecdote.

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Dan Whitehead
28/8/2018 12:22:07 pm

I had a similar experience while working for an international publishing company. We were doing a games magazine for kids and it was doing really well - this was late 90s when lots of older kids were saving up for Dreamcasts and PS2s and handing off their old PlayStation to younger siblings. Anyway, one day we found out that there was a Spanish edition of our magazine, which was basically exactly the same text but in Spanish obviously. The weird part was that one of the key things in the mag was that I'd made sure everyone involved was a character - not outlandish, but that each writer and even the art editor had their own personality and daft running gags. (side note: this was me shamelessly plagiarising from Your Sinclair, I admit). What was odd was that the Spanish version of the mag had kept our photos but invented new names and personalities for us all - and also crudely Photoshopped in an additional member of staff, who was presumably the Spanish guy whose job was to take our rambling guff and translate it for his bosses. Same feeling: proud but also a little bit creepy and weird.

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Craig
28/8/2018 12:28:27 pm

That happens all the time to me. You know what you're in for when you sign on the dotted line, but it still grates when you see, say, a bookazine in the newsagent, which is 50 per cent stuff you've written for various mags, and the publisher doesn't even send you a copy.

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T
28/8/2018 11:08:07 am

Let he who has not blagged their way into a job they are unsuitable for, spent months living in absolute misery before everything came crashing down, cast the first stone.

I wasn't in a creative industry - and if a simple solution like nicking someone else's work had been available I would have grasped it.

This bloke might be an utter conman, gleefully stealing stuff for personal gain. He might also be vulnerable and way out of his depth - caught up in a lie that ran away from him.

Either way, he's better off not working - but I wouldn't take pleasure in someone else's life turning to shit. I've experienced it myself on a few occasions. Doing it in such a public way would have ruined me

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Spiney O’Sullivan
28/8/2018 12:41:05 pm

My main reaction to this debacle was simply to find myself wondering what was going through his head.

I could comprehend (though not agree with) someone in a likely terribly-paid job required to pump out a constant stream of content cracking and finding a dodgy way to make their job easier, but what I do not grasp at all is when he actually challenged one of Kotaku’s better journalists to find other examples of his plagiarism. Which of course, they did almost immediately, with the internet gleefully crowdsourcing examples.

Even if he didn’t consider stealing content wrong in the first place, did he genuinely forget that he had done it repeatedly, or had he somehow convinced himself that he actually hadn’t? Or was he just hoping that they wouldn’t call his bluff, despite the fact they were already after him?

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Mr Biffo
28/8/2018 12:47:51 pm

This is why I think there's something a bit bigger and more serious going on for him than simply having done something stupid and immoral. And why I think the pile-on might not be the best idea. The guy clearly has some sort of issue that needs addressing.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
28/8/2018 01:19:37 pm

There’s definitely something deeper there.

I ended up sort of thinking that his post-discovery behaviour is down to either: some kind of macho “never back down” thing, the insane clawing desperation of someone backed into a corner and just fighting back in any way they can because they know they’re dead otherwise, or actual psychopathy where he simply can’t concieve of himself as doing anything “wrong” since it’s all a means to end.

Regardless of the cause, I find my feelings on his punishment by social media mixed. On the one hand, his total lack of repentance is genuinely jarring to anyone with a sense of fairness. But on the other, there’s the terrifying awareness that internet mob justice is just the new socially acceptable witch hunting, and it’s not always going to be aimed at the “right” targets, so it’s best to be very careful which bandwagons you jump on in case one rolls up outside your house one day...

Col. Asdasd
28/8/2018 01:30:42 pm

Agreed on all counts. It's a tough one. I don't like to see a man kicked while he's down, but I do worry that to equivocate too much on his behalf is to further deny justice to the people whose work he ripped off.

The social media thing is another kettle of fish. People who believe 'there are no bad tactics, only bad targets' genuinely scare me. It seems to me that to be active and public on social media is to be operating in a world where at any moment the crowd may decide you're for the guillotine. It's like living through an online version of The Terror:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

Nikki
28/8/2018 12:57:47 pm

I three-quarters expected your Dead Cells review to open with the plagiarised text. And then when it didn't I half expected each subsequent paragraph to open with it. By the end, I seven-eights expected the last paragraph to open with it.

And it didn't. My expectations were dashed and it was even more amusing because it was as if you KNEW people would expect it!

That aside, it's tangent time.

Have you ever had a case of idea theft, where it turned out that two or more people came up with very similar ideas, so similar that it seemed like they were copies?

There was an episode of Buck Rogers (bear with me, it's relevant) where Buck is giving evidence in some sort of trial and he has a machine put on his head which projects his thoughts on to a screen, so the judges can see his memories as he thinks about them and find out if he did a naughty thing or not.

It made me wonder what would happen if they projected his _current_ thoughts, and he looked at the projection. Would it go into some kind of feedback loop and drive him crazy?

I presented that idea as a form of dark sci fi torture on Twitter, and was told that Charlie Brooker did it in a spoof TV guide. I wondered how many other people had come up with it too, perhaps CB had seen the same Buck Rogers episode I had and thought along similar lines.

Scott Adams wrote a joke about a fake opera singer called "Placebo Domingo" and felt very happy with the pun, until he saw another cartoonist had published the exact same joke, and Adams had to pull his comic before it went to print.

Can an idea be plagiarised? Are all ideas remixes? Is it really possible to come up with something truly original? Or is the execution of an idea all that matters?

Well?

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David W
28/8/2018 08:23:21 pm

I made the Harold Pinter knock knock joke before Radio 4.

Did Buck Rogers' memories include a malt loaf poo?

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Dominic
28/8/2018 09:54:52 pm

Well there’s the curious incident of two publications (one British, one American) both launching a comic strip called Dennis The Menice on the exact same day - completely unrelated.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_the_Menace

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Paul “Scarysheep3000”
28/8/2018 01:14:00 pm

Years ago, I wrote a consumer review of a Less than Jake CD on now-defunct site Alphabet Street, and a little later the NME reviewed same CD, signing off the review in a curiously similar way, as LTJ weeny a band often covered by NME, I wondered if they’d ripped me off. I’m now even more convinced they did.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
28/8/2018 01:21:19 pm

Was it Hello Rockview? I love that upbeat-yet-crushingly-depressing album.

Also I miss third wave ska in general...

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MENTALIST
28/8/2018 01:25:33 pm

Oh, I met Caroline Westbrook once. For some reason, they sent her out do a LARP with the University society I was a member of, in order to produce some sort of piece related to Dragonheart for Empire.

I can't say she made much of an impression, though. I got my photo in the magazine, but I was hidden behind a skull mask.

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Guru Larry link
28/8/2018 02:51:48 pm

I get a lot of my content stolen from the larger listicle youtube channels like WatchMojo, in fact the only way I got them to pull is was because I told them I made it up. as they always hide behind a veil of "muh fair use" for their shitty ways.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
28/8/2018 05:11:48 pm

If I remember correctly, their snotty reply was amazing.

"We borrowed some content from this guy who should really be grateful that a huge channel like us even noticed his stuff to steal it, but we have to get rid of it because of his lies. Maybe if he hadn't made things up LIKE A LIAR we could have come to a mutually beneficial deal where we steal his content but maybe acknowledge it a bit somewhere in the text nobody reads, but since we value accuracy so much due to the kind of journalistic integrity needed to make videos like "Top 10 foods they don't do at McDonalds anymore" we have to kill this video BECAUSE OF HIS LYING LIES".

Truly a class act from what some people who don't appreciate their sterling work might call an utterly soulless and unlikable filler channel whose very existence wastes not only the time of anyone who watches it, but also a fraction of the electricity used to power Youtube's servers, thereby killing our planet that little bit faster.

Personally I am looking forward to their upcoming video "Watchmojo's Top 10 Lists of Top 10 Lists That We Found While Googling Top 10 Lists".

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David W
28/8/2018 08:04:18 pm

Though it's not really plagiarism, this seems the right moment to ask if the piano jump scare noise in the first Chef Excellence Mystery was affectionately "borrowed" from Deadly Premonition.

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HdE
28/8/2018 05:32:42 pm

This was a really thought provoking read, Biffo.

I personally have very conflicted feelings about this whole episode. It's made Filip Miucin a figure of fun, that's for sure. I've joked about it with you on Twitter, so I'm as guilty of indulging in bashing the guy as anyone else. And we've seen the inevitable dogpiling that was always going to happen online. Some folks have almost predictably taken things too far, though.

But I think your summation of the situation is spot on. The guy's actions, and his actions since being found out, paint a picture of a deeply flawed individual at worst, or a man posessed of very poor reasoning ability at best. And given the pattern and scale of his plagiarism, it's certainly hard to reconcile his misdeeds with anything other than bad motive. But there IS a bigger picture here, I have no doubt.

I work as a freelance production guy in comics. In the past, part of that has entailed working on pitch packages by aspiring writers looking to secure publication deals. I seldom take on that kind of work now, for a number oof reasons. But one of them is that so many of the sample packages I've been sent to do my thing on have proved derivative to the point of blatant plagiarism.

On a few occasions, I've raised this as a concern with the clients, and the reactions have been varied. What I take from this is that there are a lot of folks out there with a fuzzy understanding of what plagiarism is, and that folks will engage in it for all sorts of different reasons. As you say, it doesn't necessarily equate to the plagiarist being a bad person.

Of the folks I've taken to task, some of them simply had no idea that plagiarism was a thing. That might seem inconceivable to folks in the business of creating written material for public consumption. But some people really are that naive. Others seem to view plagiarism as a simple form of re-packaging, claiming that 'there really are no new ideas under the sun' as a defence. And some folks simply like the idea of creating content and posting it for the world to see, but have no clue how to do it. So their rationale becomes 'what could be wrong with copying somebody else's stuff?' You do also get people who know full well what they're doing and won't bat an eyelid if you call them on it. But they're rare individuals, in my experience.

It's a sticky one, and no mistake. And it's the kind of thing I'll admit I struggle to keep an even handed point of view on, partlly due to past experiences. But really, piling on Filip Miucin now that he's been outed and his career is almost certainly finisshed accomplishes nothing of worth. The world keeps turning.

Classy article, sir. It cements my impression of you as somebody I'd like to grab a beer with one day.

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Mr Biffo
28/8/2018 07:19:07 pm

Cheers, HdE. Much appreciated!

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John Veness
28/8/2018 09:23:39 pm

I remember someone plagiarised some reviews from your Teletext successor, Game Central, and put them up as reader reviews on, I think, Gamefaqs, presumably just for "reputation points". I guess they thought no one would recognise the reviews from a relatively obscure (and at the time, not on the Internet) UK games magazine. But of course someone did, and they got found out. Cheaters never prosper!

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Mr. L. E. Phantintheroom
28/8/2018 11:21:09 pm

So do we want to talk about photo/image attribution at this point? 😬

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Adolph Lundgren
28/8/2018 11:36:00 pm

I'm a professional songwriter/ghostwriter/fixer of other people's stuff.
Sometimes my job entails rearranging a song that someone has and sometimes it entails writing something completely new. Regardless I've been really lucky to have made a nice living from it.
Now around 10 years ago I was asked to go and work with a girl who was talented but struggled with writing. Spent two weeks writing, trying things out etc. At the end of the two weeks we agreed it hadn't worked as well as we hoped and back to the drawing board so to speak.
Fast forward a year and a half and said girl is doing well for herself and 'setting the charts alight'.
Im driving along with the 'wireless' on and I have to pull over as what came out of the speakers was a note for note replica of a chorus I'd shared.
Eagerly I beavered through my junk mail folder thinking I'd just missed the publishing request email, I hadn't and to make it worse I already had a 'purple penis patch' so there was literally nothing of any use in that folder.
The song did very well, I got zero royalties and took it as an important lesson to do all my work in a studio with the record button pushed.
Long story short I could've chased her through court with a plagiarism case but I would've struggled to get work again.
Plus the next year I had the fortune to bump into her at an 'industry event' congratulate her on her success and ask her about her inspiration for the track.

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Bryan Langley link
29/8/2018 03:02:09 am

I think what makes this a tough sell for many people is passion and dedication; it has always seemed to me (as a wise old man of 33) that certain jobs require dedication above and beyond the salary.

It's difficult to imagine, regardless of creative "peaks and troughs", that someone could just copy-paste their work to such a degree in an industry that is fairly niche (in terms of the overall writing/journalism career) for such a large publication and believe it to be fine.

That said, the psychological reasons behind plagiarism might explain 40-50% of the case of Filip Mucin.

Bring back Matt Cassaminas (sp?) and Greg Kasavin plus Jeff Gerstmann and Brad Shoemaker. Get them to run a games site along with Ellie Gibson and Biffo. Winner, winner,chicken dinner!

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