Posted on 07/18/2010 5:51:15 AM PDT by jazminerose
Whaaatt? All of that brilliance spewing forth from Michael Moore is not original? Of course not; the Left never has any original ideas. Everything oozing out of them is recycled twaddle from the happy Halcyon Stalin Days and again during the 1960’s drug haze. The same burned out bunch of morons have repurposed themselves and taken over the government.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Big Journalism is reporting that Moore liberated an entire story from the Knoxville News Sentinel including video without bothering himself to credit the actual source.
"The article’s original author, the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Frank Munger, alerted Lail to the thievery prompting Lail to contact Moore demanding it all be removed. For several days Lail’s demand was ignored as Moore has been known to thumb his nose at copyright laws and intellectual property rights. Finally, though, by July 12, the Moore website removed the offending pages. (For a screen shot of Moore’s website, see the post at Random Mumblings.)"
Moore has taken a bold stand against copyright laws, claiming he doesn’t care if people download his movies for free–a surprising indicator that Moore does indeed recognize the value of his work.
"As a result, Moore apparently feels rather free to take anything he wants from other artists, writers, and photographers and use them for his own purposes. In 2009, independent Iraq war correspondent Michael Yon threatened to sue Moore for lifting one of Yon’s photos for a tirade against the Bush administration that Moore posted on his site."
Talented authors who pour their time, energy, talents and souls into producing their work beg to differ. Our work does have value and talent-free hacks like Moore does not, by virtue of being a pretend socialist, have license to steal.
The word is “plagiarist”
A few multi-million dollar copyright infringement suits might straighten Moore out. Some people who repeatedly lift and utilize others’ intellectual property have even spent some time in jail.
It doesn’t matter how much he shares his own work, but he has to respect the copyrights of others. Maybe at some point he’ll get an expensive lesson in that.
Provided of course that he actually hold those rights. Someone else may hold them, for instance, a publisher or executive producer (if not him).
“It doesn’t matter how much he shares his own work, but he has to respect the copyrights of others.”
He has no respect for anyone but himself. His massive ego won’t let him even consider that he may be hurting others through the theft of their work.
Look what he did with selective editing to Charleton Heston, just before Heston’s health got so compromised he could no longer appear in public. Moore gained entry with a film crew to Heston’s house on the premise of doing a pro NRA project, while claiming to be an NRA member. Heston graciously accommodated Moore’s unscheduled request, but soon found himself saying things that were totally contrived in Bowling for Columbine.
Agenda driven, ambush journalism is the last refuge of filmmakers who can’t make it in the highly competitive commercial film market.
Unfortunately, pursuing run-of-the-mill plagiarism is difficult and expensive. It’s a civil, not a criminal matter and it’s tough to show material harm. The best thing to do with a serial plagiarist is expose him repeatedly until he becomes a mockery.
We had a guy in my industry plagiarize everything he put out. I contacted the people he ripped off. The attitude ranges from bemusement to guys willing to join in a lawsuit as long as someone else did the heavy lifting.
I didn’t want to call too much attention to him in public because it would have given him free publicity. I did talk with the editors of all major trade magazines and showed each a side by side comparison of the work he claimed as his own and the original. I did this as a warning to the editors that they need to be careful about the potential for liability if any of them published this guy. Now, the only way he can get industry ink is by buying it.
Even exposure doesn’t seem to halt some plagiarists. Joe Biden is a serial plagiarist, having nearly been ejected from school over it and being forced to drop out of a presidential run after one of his democrat competitors identified that Biden’s stump speech was taken nearly word for word from a Brit labor leader. No one in the MSM even talks about it anymore.
Plagiarism is the perfect metaphor for the left. It marks the intellectually lazy, dishonest person, who would rather steal the labor of another than create his own.
Like Alex Haley and his Roots plagiarism - how many know about that one?
Michael Moore: Plagerist Michael Moore: Idiot Michael Moore: Liar Michael Moore: Hypocrite Michael Moore: Fat Ass
You say it’s not a criminal matter. Well, years ago while working for a law firm that was dealt with intellectual property law, there was a case of one guy who did do some jail time for passing off someone else’s copyrighted work as his own. The culprit, a home builder, repeatedly copied an architect’s drawings despite several lawsuits. I’m not exactly sure what the criminal charges were — possibly theft, I guess — the firm wasn’t directly involved in the criminal aspect of the case. Anyway, the jail time was brief, but I think that’s what finally got the home builder’s attention. As far as I know, he never copied the architect’s drawings anymore. Of course, he may have moved on to someone else’s work.
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