"This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work."

May 16, 2024 12:34 AM

As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.
posted by Grinder (19 comments total)

That's ... incroyable.
And low.
I wonder, just for curiosity's sake, if this plagiarist is actually translating the materials or just dumping them into "AI" for the quickest, most pathetickest euro.
posted by chavenet at 1:43 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

Wow. That's some cheek! I love 500 songs - it's so incredibly detailed and brilliantly paced. Makes you wonder how much of this goes on.
posted by freya_lamb at 2:21 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

Didn't Craig Ferguson discover someone did exactly the same thing with The Late Late Show? Also in French?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:20 AM on May 16

They’ve been doing it for two years, so I suspect that it was a bit more complicated than just “AI podcast pipeline dot exe”. The question is, are they the only one? Who is familiar enough with the world of French podcasts to answer?
posted by The River Ivel at 4:01 AM on May 16

Yeah, I wonder how often this kind of thing goes on. The language barrier is enough that audiences may never really overlap, so content could be copied bretty brazenly in many instances. But to copy a whole series is ballsy. For something like a podcast, there may be no realistic way to combat the practice.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:57 AM on May 16

Jacques Somerton, I presume?
posted by Ishbadiddle at 6:01 AM on May 16 [6 favorites]

Part 2 of the story is that the thief apologized badly, took down the plagiarized episodes, and nuked his Twitter account - so at least this is not an ongoing outrage.

(But I will take any excuse to say that yes, it's an extremely good podcast, and you should listen to the Janis Joplin episode and then become a paying backer and then listen to the paywalled Dusty Springfield episode, but then you will be sad forever, so maybe listen to the Ink Spots episode as a palate cleanser.)
posted by Jeanne at 6:34 AM on May 16 [5 favorites]

I work in online rights management and in my experience this kind of plagiarism is uncommon, but definitely out there. Most of the time, though, when a podcast or video series is appropriated by someone else, it's a fan trying to dub it or sub it into another language. Generally tends to be Spanish and Hindi.
posted by Captaintripps at 7:01 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

The guy is a marketing exec in his 50s who got laid off in the wake the COVID-19 pandemic. He loves music (played in bands when he was young etc.) so he decided to use his free time to pursue a "passion project" of his, which was setting up a vinyl record store as there was none in his region. As he already had a music blog, he decided to create a podcast to help with his store project. This is when he made his genuine, non-plagiarized podcasts. But he failed to make the record store a reality, became worried about money, and he got back to marketing a year ago. But by now his podcasts had been noticed by people (he gave interviews etc.) and he quickly found out that he could not keep creating them due to time constraints, having a full-time job again. So he stole Hickey's podcasts. Which was not just morally wrong but stupid: this is probably how he was caught, after some of his French listeners noticed that his podcasts were identical to those of the much more famous 500 Songs. It looks like his short brush with fame (interviews, a growing audience) got the better of him so he could not let go and turned to the Dark Side instead. There's an audio interview of him where he really sounds like a nice guy so it's sort of sad actually. Possibly he was relieved when he got caught, as there was no way this could end well.
posted by elgilito at 7:42 AM on May 16 [10 favorites]

Thanks for the reminder, been meaning to check this out.
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:08 AM on May 16

Well, at least this post about plagiarism turned me on to the original podcast, which I am checking out now!
posted by TedW at 8:53 AM on May 16

Yeah, about that French Craig Ferguson thing: there was a French talk show that was an almost-exact duplicate of Craig Ferguson's show.

The discovery ...

The aftermath.

Craig handled it differently, and because it's television, I think it worked out well. And like Arthur said "It's a homage ..."

Ripping off a podcast is not a homage.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:05 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

I think it worked out well. And like Arthur said "It's a homage ..."

That....was a scripted bit.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:35 AM on May 16

Saturdays at midnight on WWOZ Jamie Dell'apa plays proto-rock-and-roll records that never charted, not chronologically but sometimes with a theme, like teen tragedy songs, or tunes that rhyme "congo" with "bongo".
posted by credulous at 9:47 AM on May 16

I work in online rights management and in my experience this kind of plagiarism is uncommon, but definitely out there. Most of the time, though, when a podcast or video series is appropriated by someone else, it's a fan trying to dub it or sub it into another language. Generally tends to be Spanish and Hindi.

I've heard of this happening in the academic literature as well, a plagiarist stealing an entire English-language paper and submitting it to a small domestic journal that publishes titles and abstracts in the local language (Chinese, in the case of the guy I know whose paper got ripped off). This was the early 2010s, I'd imagine it's a harder scam to pull now in the age of competent machine translation and SciHub.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 10:32 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

See also, the state of youtube plagiarism as noted by youtuber HBomberGuy, previously.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:17 PM on May 16 [1 favorite]

I would love a history of rap that was put together like this. I basically missed out on the genre because of a combination of growing up in a music-less house, then subsequently some prejudice on my part. Once I realized how much I was missing out on I felt like I needed to go back thirty plus years to get the genre as a whole.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:08 PM on May 16 [1 favorite]

There's been a startling number (4 to date) of my websites cloned 100% by some marketing company in Reykjavik, including a Spanish-language site about workers' comp (so bizarre! do they even have workers' comp as Americans know it in Iceland?). I learned this because they copied my work so extensively that my own Facebook tracking pixels were firing on their websites, which is how I found the scrapers.

You can do some fun stuff with this, unlike a stolen podcast... for example: create a pop-up window when someone scrolls on the copied website that says "this website uses stolen content" then blacks out 100% of the site copy/interface, which makes it unusable.

For podcasts, I guess filing a lawsuit is your only option. You'd be surprised how many lawyers I've had to send takedown notices to for stolen content... even lawyers steal IP now and then.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:24 AM on May 17 [2 favorites]

My podcast has been repeatedly plagiarized, and it really doesn't feel good when you discover another offender. The perpetrators usually seem to think that plagiarism requires ill intent, so what they have done couldn't possibly be the dreaded P-word. They had reasons, so it is somehow a lesser violation.

Every plagiarizer has reasons, and it's almost always greed and laziness dressed up in ego-preserving language. Stinkers.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 3:37 PM on May 17 [1 favorite]