Channel Nine the home of plagiarism
June 10, 2010 in Perspective by Cameron
I was really impressed when I saw Nine’s new promo for ‘Rescue: Special Ops’.
I thought “for the first time Nine have created a gutsy new promo which doesn’t completely suck”.
This was completely squashed when I realised that Nine have just completely ripped off Sky’s Discovery Channel promo for ‘Bear Grylls: Born Survivor’, created by UK post-production house Envy.
I think it’s one thing to be inspired by another promo, but to blatantly copy a promo frame-for-frame is just stealing. It’s plagiarism!
See the similar plagiarised promo for yourself.
Alex said on June 10, 2010
how sad!! haha
Mandy said on June 10, 2010
this is nothing new. Nine did the same with Underbelly last year, taking the concept almost frame-for-frame from a promo for an American series, Heroes I think it was. Can’t remember.
Cameron said on June 10, 2010
Can’t they come up with anything original? Sheesh!
Adon said on June 11, 2010
“This was completely squashed when I realised that Nine have just completely ripped off Sky’s Discovery Channel promo for ‘Bear Grylls: Born Survivor’, created by UK post-production house Envy.”
I think you mean:
“This was completely squashed when I read on TV Tonight, who got the story from Mumbrella, that Nine have just completely ripped off Sky’s Discovery Channel promo for ‘Bear Grylls: Born Survivor’, created by UK post-production house Envy.”
It’s ironic that on a story in which you accused Nine of plagiarism, you not only fail to acknowledge the source for this story, but you consciously attempt to give the impression that this was a “realisation” that you just clicked in your mind: i.e. you have consciously attempted to hide where you go the story from.
The Australian media websites that I usually visit – TV Tonight, Mumbrella, The Spy Report and so on (I don’t visit TVAustcat very frequently) – write stories based on content which was first produced elsewhere. They have no problem acknowledging the provenance of those stories and giving a tip of the hat to their “rivals”; TVT adds links at the end of their stories, while Mumbrella and The Spy Report name their sources in-text. It’s similar at other sites.
So why do you have such a problem in acknowledging that your “realisation” was actually a “transplantation” from another source? Can’t you come up with anything original? Sheesh!
Cameron said on June 11, 2010
Um, maybe because I actually figured it out for myself.
I always post my sources when I get information from another site.
I posted this before TV Tonight and Mumbrella. So did you ever think that perhaps they copied their information from here without sourcing this site?
Peter said on June 11, 2010
Did you have all the capped images up in the original story?
Cameron said on June 11, 2010
Yes
Adon said on June 11, 2010
“Peter” just then was actually me. I’m glad you were truthful there, because it confirms the fact that you were telling an untruth in your previous comment.
When I first came to this page, the timestamp was “June 10th, 2010 4:31pm”, so you were actually well behind Mumbrella, which posted this story several hours earlier. The timestamp has now been changed to “June 10th, 2010 10:31 am”. Obviously I can’t backtrack the page to before the edit. So how do I show this? What I have been able to do are two things.
(1) The content management system that you use on this site generates HTML timestamps when you use strikethrough formatting for text, as you did when you pointedly struck out “similar” to emphasise the “plagiarised” descriptor. Specifically, it uses the del tag with a datetime attribute. The timestamp on that strikethrough “2010-06-10T05:44:38+00:00″. In other words, you wrote that section at 15:44:38 AEST (adjusted to UTC/GMT+10).
(2) But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you suddenly had a brainwave of wit, four hours after originally posting the article. Maybe you decided to go back to modify your original article, striking out “similar” and replacing it with “plagiarised”, hence the “del datetime” timestamp. You’re all clear, right? Well, no. Even when image files are uploaded, and the “date created/modified” properties are reset, the “date taken” attribute is actually preserved. And it turns out that the 16 captures of the two promos were taken on 10 June, between 4:02pm and and 4:11pm. I would guess that you then uploaded them and then posted the article about 20 minutes later. You say that those captures were contained in your original post. If so, then this post cannot have been posted in the morning.
Why did I do that perusal? Because in the course of my real-life profession, I’m the originator of regular, reasonably popular creative works. I have to do this sort of digging all the time to make sure that other people acknowledge my work. It might seem like a small thing, but it’s not small for me.
Again I ask: why do you have such a problem in acknowledging that your “realisation” was actually a “transplantation” from another source?
Cameron said on June 11, 2010
I reverted back to the original date, because I had changed it when I went back in to edit it later that day — to fix up some formatting and also strike out “similar” as you mentioned.
I originally posted separate screen caps from both promos, but later decided to put them side-by-side to show the similarities more effectively. So I had to re-upload images — hence the new image timestamps.
Look, I’m all for citing sources and if I had in fact seen that this was posted on another site, I would definitely have linked to it.
But the fact of the matter is, I hadn’t seen this posted anywhere before I posted so I had no source but myself.
Just go back and look at all the posts i’ve made over the past year and you’ll see I always cite my source.
Ben Tree said on June 16, 2010
Yeah Cam is not lying. He is the type to realise this little minor thing. He simply is. It was definitely up before tvtonight, i’m not positive about Mumbrella but why would he lie? He sources all his stories on here, if he seriously wanted to rip off all of tvtonights stories he could do so a hell of a lot more. He is also very particular about the editing of this site and how it looks, hence the different dates.