A damn interesting dollop of plagiarism
July 10, 2015 10:38 AM   Subscribe

Damn Interesting, a regular feature here on the blue, has publicly called out comedy/history podcast The Dollop for using its articles without permission or attribution. The Dollop with its hosts, comedians Dave Anthony and Gary Gareth Reynolds, has seen its share of attention here as well. The Dollop has gone into damage control mode, deleting comments and banning people from its subReddit and Facebook pages.
posted by the christopher hundreds (44 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Direct Link to post by Alan Bellows of DI
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:42 AM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


They have responded on Reddit, claiming it is Fair Use, which I don't think means what they think it means.
posted by maxsparber at 10:49 AM on July 10, 2015 [13 favorites]


A statement from the Dollop on reddit.
posted by nubs at 10:50 AM on July 10, 2015


Statement from the Dollop
The format of The Dollop is me reading a factual and historical story, and then Gary and I doing our best to crack wise about it. I assemble these stories from many sources each week. One of our rarely used sources, an online author, has publicly stated that The Dollop plagiarized their work and violated their copyright.

I will admit to making a mistake here that has led to this situation. And it’s a Dollop worthy mistake. While every story is sourced, I have not posted them because we have had no official website. I now have one and am putting up all the sources and creating links of the episodes. I apologize for this. But The Dollop isn’t plagiarism, and it isn’t copyright infringement. Listeners of The Dollop understand that I do no original research on the historical facts we tell jokes about. It’s clear that I’m reading the words of other people, through my tone of voice, my constant referring to reading something, and my endless mispronunciations. Plagiarism would be me representing those words as my own, and I’ve never done that.
posted by rtha at 10:51 AM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Jinx!
posted by rtha at 10:52 AM on July 10, 2015


X3. Perhaps someone should check reddit and see if they've made a statement?
posted by nubs at 10:52 AM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


That response is pretty weak. It's not plagiarism, it's fair use/uncopyrightable facts/satire/commentary/just like The Daily Show! We sourced it, we just didn't publish those sources! Plagiarism isn't illegal!
posted by almostmanda at 10:53 AM on July 10, 2015 [9 favorites]


I'm always slightly sickened in these situations at the lengths that plagiarizers and their fans will go to excuse this behavior.

Furthermore, facts aren't copyright protected but the way they are written and presented absolutely is. I can't republish David McCullough's 1776 and then claim that facts aren't protected. FFS, now that I've read that response I hope they get the pants sued off of them.
posted by muddgirl at 10:54 AM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, they seem to have been really unpleasant and unrepentant all the way through this. I've only listened to one episode, about the race riot in Omaha in 1919, since I wrote a play about that, and now I am wondering how much of that episode was just lifted, without attribution, in entirety, from other, uncredited sources.
posted by maxsparber at 10:56 AM on July 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Ah, there's the mistake: they didn't shout "NO COPYRIGHT INTENDED" at the top of their podcasts.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:00 AM on July 10, 2015 [18 favorites]


The arguments against DI posting this publically take the same shape as the arguments against elevating sexual harassment to concoms. Be "classy," do things in private, it's messy, how dare you, now I can't take you seriously, you're responsible now for any and all negative outcomes that might result.

Odd.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:55 AM on July 10, 2015 [14 favorites]


They keep saying that they are doing what the Daily Show does, but I'm pretty sure anytime TDS or any other tv show airs a clip from another show there is a watermark or "courtesy of" line somewhere on the screen.

I don't listen to many fact-based podcasts, but I'm trying to think of how this is handled by other shows. I think Hardcore History leaves the references for the show page, but whenever Carlin does a direct quote, he always says who he is quoting from. Not citing their source for the facts is relatively common, but when you are directly quoting someone's writing, then it doesn't matter whether the content is factual or fictional - it's still plagiarism.
posted by Think_Long at 11:55 AM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


For somebody who's consistently railed against certain shows because they don't treat their writers very well, it's a really disappointing stance from Dave. Plus "my researcher" is not code word for "article I'm basically reading verbatim without attribution."
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:02 PM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was going to post this last night but waited to see what The Dollop's response would be. Seeing none by lunch, I put this together. Of course the response comes at basically that exact moment. In a way I'm glad I didn't see if first, as the urge to editorialize would have been great. I mean not only does he get it all wrong, he still doesn't credit Damn Interesting until down in the comments!

I'm a fan of both players in this fracas, but I can say that I've become less of fan of Dave Anthony as I've seen how he's responded. He's a professional writer (currently with Maron). How can he not see what's wrong with this?

Alan Bellows' call out (which I intended to link but apparently botched) is pretty gentle in its tone given what is obviously happening.

I guess I'd never thought about where The Dollop's content was coming from. I did find it weird that there were no writing credits and knew there was no way Dave was putting together two episodes a week worth of material on his own. I thought maybe some comic groupies/underemployed writer friends were putting it together. Now I know.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 12:04 PM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Their response and those of their fans in the facebook and reddit posts are really, really clueless.
posted by signal at 12:10 PM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Included people accusing Damn Interesting of not sourcing their articles. Which, aside from the extensive list of sources and related articles at the bottom of every article, could be true.
posted by Think_Long at 12:13 PM on July 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


I wish that every time someone ignorantly cited fair use as a defense in swiping someone else's IP they'd be punched square in the nose. And I'd be happy to do the punching.
posted by photoslob at 12:17 PM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Man, I just discovered The Dollop pretty recently (from here, a couple weeks ago) and listened to the Three Christs episode last week. Yes, it seemed obvious to me from Anthony's speaking style that he was reading the account from another published source. So, yeah, he's right there. He also really, really, really needed to say what that source was. That's insane that they haven't been doing that and they absolutely should have known better (also, what possibly would there have been to lose?)
posted by Navelgazer at 12:19 PM on July 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


Dave needs to watch Fair Use Won't Save You from Andy Baio's Creative Mornings talk.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:27 PM on July 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


It's funny that, in the comment thread to their posted statement, they're like "All stories probably came from the place damn interesting sources theirs from," as if that's not still plagiarism.
posted by almostmanda at 12:31 PM on July 10, 2015


So the thing about facts not being copywritable is from a specific court ruling after the creators of Trivial Pursuit were sued after being caught copying facts from a couple of books, including typos and deliberately false answers. It sounds like they were doing a lot more than just single-sentence questions, though, and the court of public opinion is more important than actual courts for these guys.
posted by Space Coyote at 12:35 PM on July 10, 2015


Hi everybody, Alan Bellows here. I am working on a follow-up to post on Damn Interesting, but the short version is that Dave and I seem to have reached an understanding through email. He recognizes that there was real harm done to DI, but he's convinced me that it was a dark comedy of errors rather than intentional. He's planning to take some steps to set things right. Perhaps I'm being manipulated, perhaps not. Time will tell.

Some people have been saying I should not have "gone public" in this way, that I should have conducted this in private. Part of me agrees with them, because the way I did it has amplified the sadness caused by the initial discovery of the infringement. But incidents of podcasters cribbing our work has been increasing alarmingly, and it's slowly bleeding us dry. There needs to open discourse about it. The infringing podcasters have a huge advantage because they can skip the long researching and writing cycle, freeing up time for luxuries like marketing, live shows, and frequent episodes. And their episodes obviously come out after ours do, so theirs also benefit from being more recent. They amass huge audiences fueled by our content while we monthly wonder if we'll be able to afford to stay online. It's unsustainable.

Dave cannot say so, of course, but I am pretty sure he knows that his official response would not withstand legal scrutiny. But he can't not reply, and fully owning up to this kind of mistake exposes him to some dicey scenarios. Regardless, it was not my intention to destroy anyone's career or credibility, I just want people to stop crushing us with our own material. And in this case it seems to have worked, Dave and I have had a difficult but civil conversation via email and emerged on something resembling friendly terms . The whole incident is oddly reminiscent of grade school, when I got in a fist fight with another kid, and the next day we became friends.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 12:52 PM on July 10, 2015 [84 favorites]


I think Hardcore History leaves the references for the show page, but whenever Carlin does a direct quote, he always says who he is quoting from.

Not only is Carlin quite good about this (as he ought to be, coming from a long career in radio) but he's also managed to fit part of his business model around it, with his most common sponsor being Audible, and him reading his ads for them based on related books or source material depending on the subject at hand.

Sawbones, from what I can tell, is another cast I love that needs to beef up it's citations and show-notes though. It's not doing the direct-reading thing that The Dollop does, but it's obviously not, like, original research either. And I'd like to see everybody doing this right, you know?
posted by Navelgazer at 1:59 PM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well now I'm donating to DI. Thanks for the interesting podcast, Hot Pastrami!
posted by boo_radley at 2:00 PM on July 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


> Dave cannot say so, of course, but I am pretty sure he knows that his official response would not withstand legal scrutiny. But he can't not reply, and fully owning up to this kind of mistake exposes him to some dicey scenarios.

The thing is, the way he's replied make him look one of two ways: he's lying; or he's stupid. Neither of those is a good look either, you know?

I'm glad you went public with this.
posted by rtha at 2:09 PM on July 10, 2015 [10 favorites]


As someone who writes publicly (occasionally for pay), this kind of thing infuriates me to no end. I'm not really into the whole Scarlet Letter thing, but plagiarists should 100% be called out publicly--especially when the offense was committed in the public sphere.

What, Dave thinks Alan should have emailed him before going public? Dave stole someone else's work in a very public way--this wasn't a high school book report. Alan owes Dave zero professional courtesy, and for Dave to even suggest otherwise just shows how weirdly out of touch he is.
posted by toofuture at 2:36 PM on July 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm a pretty big podcast consumer, and I'm pretty infuriated by the whole field of source referral in general.

Mike Duncan of History of Rome and Revolutions tells amazing, beautiful stories. But I never know if he's reading from a book he got, writing based on several books, writing based on wikipedia, writing based on original research into primary sources, or what.

Alex Blumberg's Start Up, at the other end of the spectrum, is just as annoying, because they disrupt the narrative flow to describe who is talking when. So I listen to Alex, in a single voice, say: "(r)So Jennifer, when did you know you would be a start up? (s)This is me, talking to Jennifer, a start up founder. (r)I mean, when did you really feel it starting up? (r)Jennifer told me that she really knew it in September"

This back-and-forth between recording, and studio, is really jarring. Additionally, they frequently will summarize what people in the recording say. Pretty standard on NPR format, but when you have one person doing both the interview, the narration, and the translation, it's pretty tough to listen to.
posted by rebent at 3:08 PM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Update finally posted as promised. I'm afraid it's not not very satisfactory, but neither is the situation.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 3:55 PM on July 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


@Hot Pastrami! one good thing to come of this, for me at least (since it's all about me after all), is that of the many times I've stumbled on Damn Interesting and loved it I had never bookmarked it to my Daily Favorites folder until today. Thanks, and keep doing what you do.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 4:11 PM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sounds like the Dollop is not so much doing like the Daily Show, but more like MST3K.
posted by klarck at 4:44 PM on July 10, 2015


Only, of course, MST3K lists its source, and Dollop has not.
posted by graventy at 5:00 PM on July 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


I listened to a few episodes of the Dollop since it seemed well in my areas of interest (Podcast! History! Humor!), but pretty quickly ditched it from my podcast queue. They say they "do no original research" and it really really really shows. I had wondered about where they got the script they riffed off of. Before today I would have described the show as "two fratbros try to be funny while reading a wikipedia article," though I suppose I will need to append that to failing to be funny while plagiarizing someone else's work.

As for sourcing things, I host the AskHistorians Podcast, which is basically a podcast by and for history nerds. We have a guest cover a subject in about an hour long interview, which often involves a great deal of synthesizing information from a variety of primary and secondary sources. And yet, not an episode goes by without direct citation, because... why would you not? In addition, it's become customary for the guest to throw up a reading list in the discussion post, or to have me plug the books they themselves have written.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:25 PM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]


I wrote out a lengthy, rambling analysis, which didn't take, but my (professional-ish) opinion is that The Dollop would probably (though not certainly) satisfy the Fair Use doctrine if that mattered here, but that it probably doesn't, really. If they had cited Bellows and DI and been told not to use that material, and The Dollop had kept on doing so, sure, it would likely qualify as a derivative work. The issue here though is the plagiarism (i.e. non-attribution), and that is, thankfully, something that can be easily fixed, shitty as it was for them to have acted this way.

I'm glad the parties settled this the way they did, and I hope this turns out well for DI.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:42 PM on July 10, 2015


I just listened to some of the audio sample on Exhibit A, and think Alan Bellows should be troubled not just over the plagiarism by a commercial enterprise, but the inexpert and mocking reading of his text. Ick.

(Gratuitous Dollop Patreon link.)
posted by Scram at 6:10 PM on July 10, 2015


And MST3K got the rights to the films. (Where there were rights to get; some were public domain, but... well, DI isn't PD.)
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 6:43 PM on July 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


I first heard of The Dollop sometime last month, after seeing a link to their Action Park episode #87, which cracked me up. I've been doing a lot of inputting at work, so, downloaded every episode, and I'm up to #49 today. Despite the boyzone territory (the Carrie Nation episode was the worst so far, ugh), I've really been enjoying it. I did wonder what Anthony was reading from sometimes, not sure why I didn't give it more thought.

Disappointing, though not really surprising, that their initial response was stonewalling and mockery, given how ridiculously huffy some comics behave when called out for shitty behavior.

I hadn't heard of Damn Interesting before this post, missed the previous Mefi mentions. I've downloaded the podcast episodes now though, looking forward to giving them a listen.

Some people have been saying I should not have "gone public" in this way, that I should have conducted this in private.

I think you were right to go public, Hot Pastrami -- I'm guessing that if you'd started privately you would have gotten the runaround and had to go public eventually anyway, only with a lot more bad blood which would make it much harder to swallow Anthony's flimsy excuses.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:24 PM on July 10, 2015 [7 favorites]


TDS doesn't always have watermarks on the clips, sometimes they license clips, and sometimes they are protected by Fair Use, but TDS is also a categorized as news which affords the show more protection. Part of Fair Use is using only the minimum amount of material to make your point--in this case, they used far more and with not permission and no credit.
They should apologize and not do it again.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:49 AM on July 11, 2015


Update finally posted as promised.

Well that was definitely a dollop. A dollop of hot, steaming shit.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 11:36 AM on July 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


Alan owes Dave zero professional courtesy

Exactly. DI is the class act in this equation.
posted by Lyme Drop at 4:52 PM on July 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


Huh, went to college with Gareth. So that's what he's up to.
posted by nathancaswell at 5:08 PM on July 11, 2015


From the Dolloprtha: "While every story is sourced, I have not posted them because we have had no official website. "

I keep going back to this. There's no reason that the sources would have to be on "an official website". You could add them to a podcast's description tag which is pretty much unlimited in length. You could read them out loud at the end of the show. You could put them on your podcast's "unofficial website" or facebook page or tumblr account or etc, etc, etc.

How lazy.
posted by boo_radley at 8:30 AM on July 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


How lazy.

Yeah, that is a 'the dog ate my homework' level of excuse. Anthony didn't bother crediting anyone because he chose not to. And, while I can imagine how he could rationalize it away by the point of the show not being about history so much as the comedic torture of Gareth, it's still plagiarism.

Huh, went to college with Gareth. So that's what he's up to.

Ha! Ok, my mind boggles at the idea of Gareth in college. Clearly he wasn't a history major, but, what classes did he take? Or did he just party his way through? (I still get a giggle out of his reaction to in the live "The Cereal Men" episode that the Dr. Kellogg Dave had been talking about for the past hour was the Frosted Flakes/Froot Loops/Rice Krispies Kellogg.)
posted by oh yeah! at 5:50 PM on July 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Plagiarism Today, a plagiarism consultancy (is there a Rule #34 about consultants?) has a blog post on this topic.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 2:03 PM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


Clearly he wasn't a history major, but, what classes did he take? Or did he just party his way through?

Performing Arts major (we went to a school known primarily for Film, Acting and Journalism). He was in a popular sketch comedy troupe on campus, but I forget what it was called. Something Monkeys? He was the "funny kid", one of those people that everyone kind of knows.
posted by nathancaswell at 8:12 AM on July 22, 2015


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