They say imitation is the best form of flattery. The same thing can’t be said for plagiarism. There’s a difference between copying what someone does and putting their work forward as your own.
I like to say I got my skills by looking at what other people do and trying to imitate it to see if it works for me, but I never took their works and claimed it as my own. There’s a difference between copying the style and copying the property. The former helps you improve; the latter just makes you a thief.
In the world of journalism, there’s an important rule pertaining to plagiarism. It’s the equivalent to a taboo for us. If you’re a writer out there for any kind of work you’d know just how heavy this rule is. You don’t even have to be a content creator to know that plagiarism is wrong. It’s just common sense and professional courtesy.
It’s important to give credit where it is due. A person shouldn’t be cheated out of his hard work by someone else taking credit for it as their own.
If you’ve been keeping up with the gaming media, then you’ve probably already heard about the controversy over at IGN. One of their editors, by the name of Filip Miucin, was accused of plagiarizing, with alarming evidence, a review of Dead Cells made by the content creator, Boomstick Gaming.
It didn’t take long for the whole thing to reach everyone’s ears and IGN was forced to take action. After an investigation made by their organization, Filip Miucin was shortly fired from IGN.
Apparently, Filip Miucin didn’t like how he was treated and believed he was innocent. So he posted a video speaking in his defense. That’s fair enough. He deserves a chance to defend himself. Unfortunately, this action only further condemned him in the eyes of everyone else.
In his video, Filip was strongly denying having anything to do with plagiarism. He challenged Kotaku to look at his other works from his time at IGN to see if they can find any other works of plagiarism.
Well, Filip definitely underestimated just how determined internet detectives can be, because it didn’t take long for evidence to pop up around the net about him plagiarizing other content for his own. It’s almost unbelievable how much plagiarism he is accused of during his year-long term at IGN.
Filip was not only accused of stealing content from other websites, he was also accused of stealing from his own coworkers at IGN. And judging from their posts on twitter, he didn’t exactly get permission. He also alarmingly parrots comments made by other word-for-word in his own videos without citing his sources. You would think that it wouldn’t go as far as copying his resume from a job template website, but it did.
If there was a term for a kleptomaniac who steals other people works online, then that term is probably best applied to Filip Miucin.
While I’d like to be the one to state out “Innocent until proven guilty” the evidence is too damning not to connect the dots. You would notice that I used the word accused than making anything with certainty. Unfortunately, there’s no judicial process or court system in place for this. It’s really just up to the people to decide.
The way he copied people almost word-for-word is too much of a coincidence. It happened one too many times in his career at IGN. I don’t like catering to crowd mentality, but my own assumptions of him match everyone else’s. He has definitely plagiarized.
I’ll never quite know what Filip Miucin’s experiences during his time at IGN. I don’t know what drove him to plagiarize other people’s works. But I myself am a game reviewer. And I have to wonder: how hard it can be to write down your own thoughts when you’re done playing a game?
Perhaps Filip doesn’t feel his own skills in making content to catch other people’s eye. Perhaps he really is a kleptomaniac. It doesn’t justify his actions in any way. Stealing content should always be wrong. But I want to take a second to offer some insight on why he did it. His actions were almost self-destructive. No sane person would do something like this.
Now I just feel sorry for him. Filip is never going to find a job with this little fiasco, especially now that he’s internet famous. And knowing just how ruthless the internet can be, even if he does turn over a new leaf people aren’t just going to let this go. This is something he’s going to be carrying his whole life. And seeing his actions in the past few weeks, one can’t help but think that he deserves it.
Even without the intent of plagiarism, people should be considerate of other’s works. There’s a difference between imitation and outright plagiarism. The latter will only ever cause trouble.