A little while back, I offhandedly posted about coming across a press release for a certain game that directly lifted most of its copy from my SNS timeline; this sort of thing's happened to me a few times now, including as outer package text on a retail product, and I mostly regarded them as a source of blithe amusement... if they really felt they had to take that, then let em have it,, basically.
I guess someone must've shared my post in their group chat or whatever, because I was soon hit up here and elsewhere by a handful of people, mostly anons but also some very loose acquaintances, who all had stories about stumbling upon or being informed of words from their SNS, blogs, and other non-commercial public writings being lifted wholesale by or for commercial endeavours within their sphere of interest: PR/store copy, package text, artbook/guidebook content, even in-game text. I can't say I was terribly surprised by just how frequently this happens, but I was taken aback by the realisation that so many people were tolerant of having their words stolen because they didn't see a way to broach the topic that wouldn't be interpreted as dramamongery, or egotism, or just seen as gauche... hence why it keeps happening, I suppose, and why certain repeat offenders are able to continue to sell things back to the communities from which pilfer.
I wasn't quite sure whether to bring this up again in a public setting or to just let people vent in private, or if there was any way to allude to specific situations without outing those who'd confided their incidents, but I do want to try and contribute something halfway-useful before Cohost goes under, so I figured I'd bring it up in a generalised way—this isn't a callout post or a sub or a directive to anybody in particular, but if you've directly engaged in, or are party to, this specific form of plagiarism, then allow me to outline why it's both unethical and also just hacky:
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You're denying professional credits to people who might really need and appreciate them: I don't think I need to tell anyone that the professional landscape for writing of any kind, but particularly video game writing, is dire at best: traditional games media is on its last legs and has been completely hollowed out by the algorithm; translation/localisation pros are under siege from machine translation, endemically poor crediting practices by big loc vendors and the ever-looming threat of being harassed by a mob of deranged jerkoffs over nothing; and the atomised subscription/tipping model for individual writers has to give at some point (and let's not fail to acknowledge that there's virtually no money in serious games criticism anyhow). Under these circumstances, every writing opportunity that you as a dev/publisher can provide, no matter how small, might serve as a stepping stone to help that writer secure full-time work or otherwise establish a career, or just get by in that brief moment, and it gives you an opportunity to both show solidarity and, ideally, produce better work on your end.
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You're pushing people to retreat from public online spaces: Between the suffocating pressure on individuals to live their online lives as personal brand managers, the overwhelming toxicity of all the big SNS services, the refusal to acquiesce to being fed into an AI harvester and everything else, people are fuckin tired of being online, and finding out that even their most mundane contributions are being monetised is enough to want to push people to just stop sharing things with the public, or to log off completely. I'm writing all this under the assumption that one both has a personal stake in the community in which they operate and has a general concern for the current climate of the internet, of course, but even if one doesn't care either way, know this: if you're trying to work within a niche community whose public knowledge base has been cultivated and maintained by volunteer individuals (and let's be real, that's most of them) and you drive those individuals away via parasitic behaviour, they're going to leave, and not only will you not be able to continue to steal from them but they're going to cede that space to corporates, or problematic dumbasses or AI soylent or any number of awful alternatives whose presence will leave you with nothing worth stealing and nobody to sell it to.
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You're eroding support for your own products: People may not always notice when they're being plagiarised, nor do they all feel the need to air their grievances in public, but they do talk, so if you're stealing from your own community, word will spread and people are going to be less inclined to talk positively about you or whatever it is you're pushing. I'm not just talking professionals or aspirants, either—anyone's capable of noticing this stuff, and in my experience, non-invested folk tend to be the most willing to be vocal about what they've observed, too. Put simply: don't shit where you eat.
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If you're not writing it, you're probably not vetting it either: What most bewilders me about some of the copy people have "borrowed" from my own public writings is that a lot of it just... sucked: stuff I tossed off in five seconds, replete with typos and terrible early-AM syntax and generally lazy and/or straight-up incorrect statements, that nobody should even want to steal, and yet it happens. Now, just jacking stuff indiscriminately is obviously going to be most detrimental to those trying to present their wares as a source of knowledge or insight to a community of knowledgeable folk who'll immediately sniff their bullshit, or recognise whichever dubious wiki they scraped from the first page of Google, but even cutting corners with basic comms or other transient copy can bite you, too. Let's use the press release I referenced earlier as an example: the only reason I even twigged that they were taking copy from my timeline was because they copied all the typos, including an error on the release date for their upcoming game. Come the fuck on.
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This ain't a shakedown, I promise: The flipside to my "if they need to steal x*, they're welcome to it* attitude is that it bums me out to see projects I'm interested in, or people I respect, skimming stuff from people I know or resorting to AI art or MTL text or otherwise diminishing their work by cutting corners that they do not need to cut—I'm sympathetic to the fact that people may not have the money or the time to have someone else write or proof every last word they produce, or that they might lack the resources to properly attend to certain text-intensive projects, or that they may not be equipped to handle comms across multiple languages, and if anyone who cared enough to steal from me would just ask me for help, I'm sure I would have been quite amenable to helping them, quite possibly even for free. Like, this post ain't about trying to guilt indies into creating work for their writer friends: it's about helping all of us retain our dignity, and about drawing a line between those who truly give a fuck and those who don't.
