Editorial: Have I been a victim of plagiarism?

May 8, 2016 | 34

Hey everyone. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed a bit of drama earlier this week where I publicly called out this random UK site, The Palace of Wisdom (don’t click unless you have to. Don’t want them gaining any traffic) for using and manipulating photos from my Black Panther Pursuit review in their own review without my permission OR any credit given to this site.

I’ve been quiet for a few days because I’ve had some time to think this post through, as well as do a bit of fact-checking to ensure that everything I write here is as accurate as possible. So, I’m finally ready to talk about this entire ordeal in detail.

OH… and because they threatened legal action against me (I know right?), I would like to preface this entire post by saying that I am NOT MAKING ANY SORT OF CONCLUSIVE STATEMENT OR CLAIM. I’m just asking questions and pointing out some interesting things I’ve managed to observe & discover.

Would also like to say that all opinions, questions and observations here are completely my own.

We’re all intelligent individuals here (I hope), so I’ll leave it to you to arrive at your own conclusions.

UPDATE: Looks like they’ve removed all the bits which sound the same as my review. Small victories!

Grab some popcorn, put some Michael Jackson in the background, cause I wanna be startin’ somethin’.

This is going to be a chronological account of my what I’ve discovered, how things escalated and some pretty bizarre things I’ve discovered. I have screenshots of nearly everything, so you can check out the content that I’m making references to by looking at the images. I really don’t want to be sending traffic to an unscrupulous site.

The four main sections of this editorial are:

1.  Black Panther Pursuit photos used without my permission

2. Is it me or are there too many similarities in the review text?

3. Have they been plagiarising Brickset too?

4. Create or Credit: Why plagiarism is a big deal.

1.  Black Panther Pursuit photos used without my permission

This happened almost serendipitously. I occasionally Google my content as I’m always curious about how my content is ranking on Google, as well as see which photos of mine have been indexed by Google’s Image Search. I’ve had photos of mine lifted and used by other sites previously, so it’s always piques my curiosity to see where they end up. Mostly, they often get copied by Image Scrapers or eBay sellers, which I’m not too fussed by.

When people scrape images, they normally take the whole image as-is, so my watermark is usually very visible and I give it a pass because these usually aren’t trying to pass them off as their own.

As I was scrolling through Google Images, I stumbled upon this Black Panther Pursuit review (don’t click and give them traffic unless you must) which used 4 of my photos from my own review of 76047 Black Panther Pursuit. I like to think that I have a specific style of photography, and because I took these photos, I was absolutely sure that these were mine.

The review mostly used official LEGO product photos to supplement the text, but I was curious how my images ended up in the mix.

I took a closer look at the photos and yup, they were 100% mine. I’m not a professional photographer, so I don’t bother photoshopping flaws out of my images. It was pretty easy to notice things like my fingerprint on Captain America’s leg, random dust specks all over Winter Soldier and even things like the light reflections on Black Panther to ascertain that these were in fact mine.

The worst part is that my watermark was completely removed and they were cropped and manipulated without permission OR credit.

So I naturally flipped out online. I posted on Facebook, and Twitter, publicly naming and shaming The Palace of Wisdom (and the writer) for using AND manipulating my photos for their review without my permission.

I was absolutely livid and used some pretty salty language on Twitter to express my displeasure. I mocked their professionalism and called them “shits” on Twitter. I’ve since deleted those tweets, which I’ll explain in a bit.

In hindsight, I should’ve been a little more chill and taken the high road, but I was incredibly upset at the time. Using images without permission is one thing but manipulating them and cropping out the watermark is incredibly damning behaviour in my book and reeked of theft. I’ll elaborate more about why I was so fired up about this in Section 4.

Anyway, publicly calling people out on Twitter actually works. The author of the article (and the site) swiftly blocked me. The author then reached out to me via the Jay’s Brick Blog Facebook Page and we talked it out.

Of course, this is when he threatened legal action. The conversation eventually became quite civil and he claimed that “Those images were provided to us by our usual source for the products themselves”.

So I thought, hmm. He did have a point there and I could be blaming the wrong party for this entire issue. He also pointed out that I was publicly slamming his personal Twitter account (it’s linked to his author profile) so was worried that it might put his children at risk.

I then relented, and saw his point of view and apologised for being a dick online and deleted the tweets. I was being a little harsh in the heat of the moment and realised that I was making claims without much evidence.

In return, the writer took down those 2 images and replaced them with official product photos. All good right? Glad it was settled amicably, and I learned something about not being an ass online.

This bit here jumps a little bit in the timeline, but since section 1 is about the images, I’ll talk about it now.

Of course, I was still curious how they my photos were “provided to them”. That just sounded extremely odd since I was wondering why other parties were sending out my photos in place of official product shots.

To get all my facts straight, I then contacted the PR Agency that supplied The Palace of Wisdom with this review set to find out if it was indeed true that they were distributing my photos. After a few emails, and follow up calls to the UK, I got my confirmation – they didn’t send out any of my photos and only sent out official LEGO images.

That made complete sense and it assured me that it wasn’t a third party that was sending out my photos without my knowledge.

The sad thing is that if they had been nice enough to ask permission to use my photos or at the very least credited my blog as the source of those images, I would’ve been perfectly fine. There have been plenty of cases where people have wrote in to request permission to use my images and 99% of the time, I’ll probably agree.

So… if one of LEGO’s PR Agencies didn’t send out my images, who is the “usual source of the product” that has been sending out my photos? Hmmm.

2. Is it me or are there too many similarities in the review text?

I was in a slightly better mood once I thought the issue with the images was resolved until one of my readers, Michael Kontoudis (thank you so much man, I really owe you on this) pointed out a very interesting observation on Facebook – that they were ALLEGEDLY copying my reviews as well and ALLEGEDLY paraphrasing plenty of my text. 

This certainly got my attention as I am even more protective of the written component of my reviews as they are a direct reflection of my thoughts and perspectives on LEGO sets. Also, because I spend a lot of time writing and pour in so much effort to meticulously review sets.

You might have to zoom in on this screenshot but I did manage to find plenty of similarities in both of our reviews. Excuse the shitty MS Paint job. Odd isn’t it? It was really odd.

Do you think the wording, syntax, phrases and general thought behind these areas that I highlighted are eerily similar? 

Let’s look at some examples:

Jay: The printing on his torso is crisp and sharp, and combines futuristic armour definition, with an old school leather belt and shoulder straps

TPOW: combining futuristic armour definition, with an old school leather belt and shoulder straps

Jay: The printing on the back continues the detail from the front and has a metal clasp for his leather harnesses.

TPOW: The printing continues on to the back of the torso, which is similar in detail to the front but also including a metal clasp for his leather harnesses

Jay:  sleek, mostly black outfit with what seems to be plenty of kevlar armour and straps

TPOW: sleek, black and gray outfit with what seems to be plenty of kevlar armour and straps

Jay: Like the polybag version, the Winter Soldier minifig has his silver cybernetic left arm, which is slightly updated with more silvery details across the different segments. The red star is also slightly faded, perhaps to indicate him growing further apart from his origins as a Soviet agent.

I’m really pleased with his choice of weaponry, we get an uzi machine gun which hasn’t shown up in too many sets and looks really realistic. Hurray for no stud blasters or kiddy-looking guns.

TPOW: Compared to his last outing, the cybernetic arm detail has had considerable improvements made to it, featuring an extra layer of detail lines and the faded red star, signifying his soviet past. The Winter Soldier’s weapon of choice here is an uzi, a reasonably rare weapon these days with LEGO opting more for the stud-launcher style guns.

Jay: mostly black with several geometric silver and dark grey markings that extend across his torso

TPOW:  almost entirely black with several geometric silver and dark gray markings that extend across his torso.

Jay: The jet also has a really sleek design, with a strong and rigid fuselage that acts as the aircraft’s backbone and the beautiful wings that erupt both sides at an acute angle.

TPOW: The jet has an impressively sleek design and yet an extremely strong and rigid fuselage that acts as the aircraft’s backbone

This is topped off nicely by the beautiful wings that erupt both sides at an acute angle.

My, my, my. Would you look at that. What do you think? Are there merely a happy coincidence or do they suggest plagiarism and lazy paraphrasing? 

Of course, once the topic of discussion on Facebook turned to the content, the author once again messaged me. Here are his direct quotes:

“Taking 10 choice words and accurate descriptions from a 2000 word review and calling it plagiarism is laughable at best.”

“I know exactly what I did, I wrote reviews which contained a couple of words the same as yours and you cry havoc.”

“But this is pathetic, picking out a word here and there and calling it plagiarism. The lego is a tiny part of our site, it’s a bit of fun but I still work hard on the stuff I do. Maybe you’d like to go through all of my reviews, pick out a few words in each and say I’ve copied your whole site?”

It was at this point, I kinda stopped responding to him. After all, I didn’t want my own words used against me. *wink*

Is it me or are there too many similarities in the review text?

This says otherwise.

3. Have they been plagiarising Brickset too?

The discovery of The Palace of Wisdom’s unique style of writing made me even more curious. What if I was not the only one that had content that had so many seemingly coincidental similarities?

I dug through a few reviews and was pleasantly surprised to find yet another example! I struck gold with their review of Super Hero Airport Battle, which of course, I pointed out on the Facebook comment thread to those that were following this saga.

I found quite a number of (surely) coincidental similarities with Brickset’s Super Hero Airport Battle Review (Part 1 & Part 2). I’ve highlighted some similarities from Part 1 and the TPOW review above.

Oh and they also used and manipulated Brickset’s photo of the Ant-Man nanofigure in their review as well. I reached out to Brickset to see if they had granted permission to use or edit that image and spoiler warning, they weren’t aware as well. 

So, after realising that I had insinuated that there were some odd similarities with Brickset’s review on my Facebook page (which they of course refuted)… something interesting happened. Plenty of text from The Palace of Wisdom’s review (the ones that sounded awfully like Brickset’s) AND the Ant-Man nanofigure photo mysteriously vanished from their review! Vanished! Like the morning mist!

THANKFULLY… Google (oh what would we do without you) managed to cache their old review, of which I managed to grab a screenshot above. You know the old adage, what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. Feel free to peruse the older version and see if you can spot any other similarities with Brickset’s 2-part review.

Isn’t it odd that so many changes and edits were made to The Palace of Wisdom’s review just as I raised it up on Facebook? Why would they do that? 

4. Create or Credit: Why plagiarism is a big deal.

Fake LEGO in a Manila Market

Gonna cut down on the snark and start with the #realtalk. Why did I write more than 2000 words on this and go through all this effort?

As a blogger, writer and LEGO photographer, I put in tremendous amounts of effort, time and most importantly passion into Jay’s Brick Blog. This blog, and every single sentence I write in this is a labour of love. 

I have poured so much of myself into this project, simply because I love what I do and I take pride in what I do. Every review, every news piece, every joke article in this blog contains a tiny bit of me.

Reviews aren’t easy. I easily spend days working on one, from photography, editing to writing them. I do all of that because I want my reviews to be as excellent as possible.

When anyone comes along, and disrespects what I do by stealing my content and tries to pass it off as their own, it honestly hurts. It hurts because it trivialises all the effort that I put into this blog and is just lazy. As a content creator, plagiarism is a cardinal sin and the most heinous of creative crimes.

I’m not entirely faultless, as I’m pretty sure I’ve been guilty of this in the past, but I now always, always make it a point to request permission before referencing or using the work of others, or crediting them at the very least.

Every other writer, blogger, designer and photographer I’ve spoken about this to has empathised with me, because it has happened to them before, and as content creators, they know how easy it is is to be plagiarised. If you’re a content creator, you most likely have experienced something like this before. 

Catherine Grace, an Australian creative and lawyer started a movement in 2014 called #createorcredit to address the copyright and plagiarism issues that were rife in the Instagram community. Her post (it’s a fantastic read) addresses photos on Instagram that were being used and not credited could easily be applied to this scenario and the written word.

All I want to say that is that plagiarism should not be tolerated in any form or way. If you see content from sites or bloggers or photographers that you follow being wrongly used on other sites, speak up and call out blatant cases of plagiarism. Alert the original creators of the content – I can tell you that they will be grateful for your help as it’s almost impossible to police the entire internet for copyright infringment.

To all those that have been extremely supportive and have sent messages of solidarity, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. 

So there’s that – time to put this issue to rest and continue with more LEGO content. Thanks for reading!