Plagiarism and You(Tube)

As someone who had no idea who Somerton was before watching this, I kept thinking every mention of "James" I kept seeing was referring to James Rolfe of AVGN especially with Cinemassacre having a whole section in the video. Pretty relieved that wasn't the case.

Every one turns out to be a jerk at some point. fun

Well damn...I was never so disappointed with a creator that I am now with James. I loved his videos and valued "his" perspective on media. Wow.

If the pixel would focus half of its efforts into the ecosystem over advertisement they would have a good product

The Melania speech was something else. It was bait for the media, who you should think aren't dumb enough to call a Michelle Obama speech distateful and racist - but they did. I know you don't like that the "wrong guys" scored an ace on that one, but the way you describe it is just completely wrong (and cynical as hell).

I really hope IH addresses this.

Update on the Man in Cave (reupload): It's no longer unlisted so it shows up in searches again

James Somerton, in light of the first major plagiarism accusation, literally acted like people on RP Tumblr would after, like, getting called out for shipping incest or something, by weaponizing a nebulous concept of Death Threats without any concrete examples. "i know i did bad thing but people are sending me death threats so be nice me :( what were we talking about again?"

Like, yeah, you can't prove he never received any death threats before in his life--he's a gay man on the internet, of course he would--but implicating some rando with 150 followers on Twitter in single-handedly spearheading a targeted harassment campaign towards you by politely asking you to do a better job citing sources, and then siccing your own internet microcelebrity's worth of followers on them to browbeat them into giving their internet presence the scorched earth treatment is a little bit far-gone.

holy shit i thought james was always so deadpanned creepy looking i had no idea the extent to which he has based his entire career off plagiarism

LegalEagle itself once got plagiarized by gametheory of all things funnily enough lol

Wait, torn paper is a thing you can claim is your idea? I used words written in highlighter on torn pieces of paper for section headings instead of plain text on a website I made in the late 90s, what do I win?

Jame's behaver towards women reminds me a lot of incel behavior, almost makes me question if he's even gay. If not, it partially explains the mass plagiarism about all his topics, because he legit has no connection or feels towards anything Queer. Feels like he's just a businessman who figured LGBTQ+ content would be easier to pass off as his own due to the size of the community, as well as get into a niche community to do content for and quickly take over with his volume of videos. It's also a community that's more likely to group together and support each other, like on Patreon. He simply calculated the best return on his low investment, like a businessman would.

James has a remarkably smooth neck pouch.

I’ve watched a lot of James Somerton videos throughout the years, but for some reason I couldn’t articulate I never really liked what he made. Maybe I sensed in some way that he wasn’t being genuine.

I’ve watched Man in Cave 4 times, I cannot believe I had no idea any of this was happening. This video is nearly revolutionary

hello mr. bomberguy, i've been a fan of yours for a while now and consider you to be my favourite video essayist on the whole wide web. i don't know if you read the comments under your videos nowadays but i wanted to tell you what i thought about this one.
until i watched this i thought i didn't mind whatever concept you use for a video because you can make anything entertaining - turns out i was wrong, unfortunately. though as far as positives go, everything up until the twist is pretty great! you spend a bit of time going from plagiarist to plagiarist so the subject matter doesn't overstay its welcome and your writing is entertaining as always. the ending's great too, going over people like spoony and things like chatGPT and tying everything up with why you think people plagiarize. i really liked those parts!
i'm not sure why you put a few very aggressively gay jokes in the part of the video which had nothing to do with anything queer, though - seriously, seeing a dude's picture and calling him the "most fuckable twink you've ever seen" made me rewind the video because i thought there was no way you actually said that. i know it's just a joke but it feels like the type of joke you'd condemn and called cringe if internet historian made it. that's not much more than a nit-pick though, seeing the length of your essay.

after your "twist" the video got really boring for me. i think the format worked with tallarico because nobody clicking on a roblox video expected the hit piece it turned into - but this is just you going over a guy's stolen scripts for a solid *2 hours*. after the 5th example you gave your brilliant writing or comedic timing just couldn't carry it for me anymore. your tallarico impact grenade worked because you (partially ironically but still effectively) foreshadowed everything you'd expose as a lie earlier in the video and then jumped from topic to topic while you were doing it - from 3 different scams the man pulled, to his house he was showing on "cribs" to the way guinness is an illegitimate record-keeping company. you also frame the video as being about being something entirely different before taking aim at a small-time videogame audio celebrity and wiping him off the face of the internet (literally!).

this, though? this is just you making the same point for hours on end with different examples, over and over... it doesn't help that james has the personality of a wet sponge, either. me not really caring about any of the subjects he covers sucks - and while i understand that your channel is your personal venture and you absolutely should make your videos about whatever topic you want, i wish you had branded the video as plagiarism in the LGBT creator space so i'd know it's nothing i'm interested in and could've skipped it.

i'm sorry if my comment comes off as harsh, i hold you to a really high standard and wanted to share my disappointment with what you've made. it's a solid video i could slap on my 2nd screen for background audio but i gave you 4 hours of my full, undivided attention and i kept watching because i was hoping it wouldn't just be you comparing a script to an article or documentary all video... but it pretty much was.
i'm still looking forward to what you make next, though! i just hope it's maybe about a videogame or something this time, that might be fun

you used an old serfstv tweet like blair wasnt already kicked off the leftist mafia podcast with theserfstv

Honestly, I feel kind of violated and betrayed, myself- and I am just a (former, I really can't stress that part enough) fan of Somerton's. I watched and liked quite a few James Somerton videos- but I was under the impression that I was watching original works and that the occasional unusual word choice was just natural error. It turns out, my viewership was supporting somebody stealing from people doing real queer analysis, and those slips of the tongue were down to James being unable to steal their work well enough. It is astounding. It is upsetting. It is sickening.

christ

After seeing this video, I now know with great confidence that I'm not making anything good enough to be stolen by a content miller

Oof, that Steamed Ham video is pretty good. Can recommend

trying to recall everything up to now....i counted at least 10 things that have came out about Illuminaughti this year..

(THIS BIT IS ALLEGED, SPECULATION, MY PERSONAL OPINION PLZ DO NOT SUE ME)

this one (while it was alleged back in April but now there's more context to it) and the recent interview with one of her former employees that came out against is just mind boggling.

the reason why I bring up that interview with the former ex employee is because in that interview they stated that Blair has writers writing her scripts and she's just basically reading them off.
after watching this and seeing how blatant the plagiarism is. wouldn't that mean she's literally paying people to steal other people's content? and if that's the case, Like with the pastebin citations as mentioned in this video. wouldn't that mean that the people she hired to write her scripts be her shields that she could easily throw under the bus?

Btw for gay people who care about Disney- Disney's Andi Mack has a canon gay character with a canon gay pairing. Also 3 amazing coming out scenes which were very comforting, honestly one of the few good modern disney shows (live action, that is).

To add to the recommendations, Laura Crone has a great video about the way She's The Man comments on masculinity, as well as one that compares and contrasts the feminist messaging in the book vs. the movie version of Ella Enchanted. Go give her some love!

My god I almost wish this was 2 different videos. I want to focus on all of the people in the first half they are all blown away by James.

So James Somerton has done the mature thing and...
... shut down comments on his videos.
Videos that had thousands of comments each.

This video is an inspiring reminder that writing is a skill that shouldn't be taken for granted. In the age of ChatGPT, it's nice to know that writing something original is still difficult to do and should hold value.

NOOOO NOT INTERNET HISTORIAN
Damn it, that video had so much effort into the editing, yet ZERO effort into the writing and research.
Man.... that's depressing.

While I found this video to be eye opening, I did find your passive aggressive shade towards internet historian's audience, especially when compared to the gentle hand you gave avgn and how you did not mention the audience at all for the other channels, to be a bit uncalled for.
It feels like you are casting a somewhat insulting generalization, i can understand not liking it but if you want his fans to listen to you, insinuating that they're dogmatic doesn't seem like a proper way to go about it.
Thank you for the info, but while you may find it morally wrong, I would rather stay a IH fan than follow your channel.

Just starting the vid. Each time I hear Keegan, I see Brian David Gilbert. How many hours in do we learn who BDG plagiarized or who plagiarized them?

Fuck. Those last lines focusing on the struggle to find meaning when you desperately claw to be someone else hit hard

If I find success in my future work I’ll give you all my money and maybe a kiss idk

james talks with the swagger of a middling highschool english class video essay

Thank you for taking the time and effort to produce such high quality and well-researched content!!

Honestly seeing this after commenting a few weeks ago on someone's video about fallout new vegas that several parts of their video was taken from your "fallout new vegas is great and here's why" almost word for word makes this all pretty apt.

great work like usual, but man is this video ever depressing

Shudder to think of how much of James' University work was plagiarized

The fact that even the TITLE of evil queens is stolen is just….i have no words

I didn't catch it with Blair until now but I did notice it when I tried to watch a video by James Somerton. They have such an odd pattern of speech. And I'm pretty sure it's because they are reading someone else's words and don't seem used to what they are reading.

This is a really nicely studied, well thought out video. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to create my own video on pagarism and use very similar wording without crediting this video directly as a source.

Dislike for suggesting that stealing form lgbt people is worse than stealing from anyone else

can't wait for the donut sequel!