Plagiarism

Recently hbomberguy made a video titled “Plagiarism and You(Tube)” which seemed to have gotten a fair amount of attention. I’ve heard his name before and remember his video on vaccines and autism being recommended to me a couple of times, but I never bothered to watch it because I wasn’t interested in the topic. He seems to put out longer videos every now and then, but his most recent one is the first I ever watched. For the record this is the one I’m talking about.

It’s almost four hours long and about different people plagiarising other people’s works, but I’m really only interested about one of those people. The majority of the video is dedicated to one person, but since I didn’t even know who that guy was until I watched the video I don’t really care about him. At 1:25:34 hbomberguy starts to talk about Internet Historian and the video “Man in Cave”. It’s an over one hour long video about a guy that got stuck in a cave. I watched it when it first came out and I remember that it gained a lot of views very quickly. Looking at archive.org (which, despite the fact that it removes sites from their archives if people complain enough, is still a good source for everything else) the video had roughly 9.5 million views in March of 2023

It suffices to say that it was popular and probably made a decent amount of money. It tells an interesting story with good writing and combined it with animations and voice overs that work pretty well. The animation style isn’t trying to look professional, but that’s just the style that these videos always use. So while the video of hbomberguy was actually mainly focusing one someone else it seems like a lot of people took issue with him calling out Internet Historian. I have to say that at least I was surprised. I remember the original video being removed at some point but didn’t bother enough to look into it further.

So here’s roughly what happened

• original version goes up on September 29th 2022
• original version gets removed on March 7th and IH tweets about it saying “Man in Cave got claimed. No fret but have to make a few changes before can reupload so it’ll take a couple of weeks.”
• new version goes up with a short intro and changes in the description

Since the original man in cave video was popular I kept seeing it crop up in reactions and looked for it a while after I first watched it. That’s when I realized that it was gone. A while later I looked at IH’s channel again and saw that it was back. I watched the first few minutes trying to figure out what happened. The intro was changed which says the following:

That’s all we get in the new introduction. Roughly as much explanation as he gave on Twitt-, I mean X, when it was first removed. So not much of an explanation at all. So after watching the first few minutes and thinking that not much changed I just left it at that. I just assumed what almost everyone else probably thought: Someone abused the YouTube copyright system and claimed the video because IH used an audio sample, a song or photo that the claimant had or claimed to have the rights to. Anyone who’s been around for a while knows that the system is broken and that it is frequently abused, so whenever a claim happens I immediately assume that someone’s abusing it. Actual rightful claims are so few and far in between that I couldn’t name a single specific instance of this happening. Sure there are some channels that just re-upload other people’s videos, but that’s not what IH does and usually when there are more minor issues people come to an agreement without the video being removed.

So in this case I think it’s safe to assume that a large portion of the people that watched the old video and watch IH frequently were completely oblivious as to what actually happened. I’d like to claim that I’m usually decently observant, but in this case I definitely did not look any further into this. If I did I might have seen that the description of the new video looked like this:

Where as the original one looked like this:

I’ve removed some parts, but only links to YouTuber’s that helped in the video as well as a list of songs used. I’m not sure if I ever looked at the description or not, but even if I did, there would have been a high chance of me missing the newly added links, because I probably would’ve just assumed that they were there in the original version. I guess if I had seen the original Tweet I would’ve realized that there was a bigger issue than just a song or photo being used without having the rights. As the hbomberguy video covers the entire story and script is heavily based on an article written by Lucas Reilly. The article that was added as a link in the description of the re-upload. The video shows that on multiple occasions IH’s video directly takes phrases from the article. Sometimes the video gets some facts wrong, which is a bit strange, since the article gets them right, but the main point is that the video is basically entirely based on that article and sometimes directly quotes it without giving any attribution which I’d say is plagiarism.

To put it simply the video is made up of these parts

• visuals, animations
• voice over
• script and story

While the first two are obviously original and add a lot to the way the story is told, both of these parts rely on the script and the story. There’s the argument that if two people want to make a video or article telling the same story there’s bound to be some overlap, but as hbomberguy shows in his video that’s not really the case here. The video just uses the article for basically everything and the video demonstrates that very clearly. There’s also apparently a bunch of factual errors, like IH mixing up two different caves. This just makes me assume even more that the only source for this video was the article and not much more additional research was done which would make it easier for errors like this to slip by.

So here’s the issue I see with this:

• the video heavily uses and profits off of this one article
• the original video does not mention this article or its author anywhere
• after it gets taken down IH is vague about what happened
• the video gets re-uploaded with changes and a new intro
• the new intro is still vague about what happened and even edits the screenshot of the video being claimed to hide the name of the claimant
• new video has some sections removed or rewritten, seemingly to rely less on the article, but then still credit it, but only in the description

Apparently a lot of people do not see any issues with this, but I personally find it pretty scummy to base your video so heavily on someone else’s work, not credit him and then when you’re caught you just do your best to sweep it under the rug. The thing is that this is probably the first time this happened with IH. At least I assume that hbomberguy looked through some other videos and couldn’t find anything as egregious. So it shouldn’t be that hard to be honest about this and make things right. We obviously don’t know what exactly happened here, but here’s roughly how I would’ve handled this:

• when the video was first struck I would have been honest about it, i.e. admitting that the video used the article and that the author of the article filed the claim
• try to come to an agreement with the author so the original video can stay up
• be transparent about the agreement reached or if no agreement could be found be honest about what the re-upload is supposed to achieve

I don’t know who does the writing for IH so I guess he could just shift the blame to that person, but I’ll just assume he was aware of how the script of the video was heavily using the article. Ideally the video would’ve been made after contacting the author and asking for permission to turn it into a video, but that clearly didn’t happen.

So now all we got was the re-upload and no real explanation. We don’t even know if they reached any agreement, but it’s safe to assume that if they did reach one it wasn’t one where the original was allowed to stay up. Maybe IH did reimburse the original author and shared revenue of the original video with him or maybe IH refused to give the author anything and just changed the video enough where legal action against him would have a low chance of success. He did handle it pretty well in regards to his public image, since even now he seems to just wait and sit it out, which has proven to be a good way of handling these kind of issues.

Also just to make a few things clear: I hbomberguy doesn’t exactly strike me as someone I’d agree with on most things and as I said this is the first video of his that I’ve ever watched, but in this case to me it seems pretty clear that what he’s saying is correct and that IH is in the wrong. At the same time I have regularly watched IH’s videos and liked them. For a lot of people it seems to be hard to see what IH did for what it is and agree with someone like hbomberguy. I don’t really get that. Just because you don’t agree with someone on many things doesn’t mean you have to discard everything he has to say by default. At the same time just because I watch someones videos and like them doesn’t mean that I can’t criticise him at all. Doesn’t exactly sound like rocket science to me.

TL;DR: The way Internet Historian handled the problem with plagiarising an article for his video made the entire situation worse and makes me think that he’s fully aware of what he did and tries to hide it while making a lot of money off of it.