Veiled statement casually accusing a TV Network of plagiarism while at the same time expressing flattery.
Here’s an ad for HBO that blatantly rips off the joke of BriTANick’s brilliant Academy Award Winning Movie sketch.
I’m sure the theft wasn’t malicious, but people who create ads do this ALL THE FUCKING TIME. (Excuse my language.) At some level, they just because something is on the Internet that 1.) nobody’s seen it and 2.) they can use the idea as their own without any repercussions. I’m happy that the comments on this video say differently.
I’ve personally been wrongly accused of plagiarism before, and it’s one of the worst things to be called, in this business, so I really don’t take it lightly. I try not to throw it around, because I know how devastating and hurtful it can be. When you’ve spent days on something and then someone says “You totally ripped this off,” it’s really awful, so I almost never bring it out, even when the evidence is fairly damning.
That said, they totally stole this from BriTANicK. Everything Ben says about non-internet people thinking that the internet is a free pile of ideas that are completely up for grabs is totally true. When I was a very, very little kid, I would watch Comedy Central, when everyone else in my house was asleep. I imagined that I was the only fourth-grader sophisticated/clever enough to be interested in stand-up comedy, so I would steal bits and pass them off as my own among friends. Little ten-year-old Daniel, telling Steven Wright jokes to his friends at the playground. It honestly never felt like stealing. It seemed okay to me, at the time, because I didn’t think I would ever get caught. To a ten-year-old, a thing is only Wrong if you can get caught doing it; otherwise, it’s just Clever.
A lot of people look at internet content that way. They see something and say “Oh, this is so funny and great and sharp and original- I’mma go ahead and take it.” It doesn’t occur to them for a second that what they’re doing might be wrong, because they don’t think they’ll be caught. It doesn’t matter to them. It’s a thing that came from “the internet,” not a “Person,” or a “Team” and certainly not a “Writer” or “Filmmaker.”
This could have been a much shorter Tumblr post if I’d just replied with “It’s not TV. It’s The Internet.”
Reblogging this, because the BriTANicK version was so funny and original I felt ashamed for not being able to come up with something so funny and original.
