Plagiarism in the Lostverse

We've heard lots of people commenting about this, so many of us administrators agreed that a blog post on the subject was in order. As some of you may be aware, DocArzt recently broke a story about a Lost video blogger who has been plagiarizing content from other blogs for his own. The blogger in question is known as "Seanie B" and you can see Doc's blog about him here, or simply watch the following video:



After hearing about this, we did a little digging here at Lostpedia and noted that we too had been plagiarized - parts of our article on The Monster had been completely ripped, in many instances word for word, in one of Seanie B's posts. On the surface of things, one might say "well so what, he doesn't have to post a video with 100% his own observations" - and in part I think most of us would agree with this. Many Lost sites use information from one another. For instance, Lostpedia has editors worldwide who add easter egg observations, theories, etc. Even popular Lost blogger DarkUFO was quoted as saying he uses Lostpedia to see if there's any easter eggs or what not he's missed, and then adds them to his own blog. And there's nothing wrong with that. Someone like Dark will only take the principle observation, and even then would attribute to Lostpedia as a source. What is different in the Seanie B case is that he has taken other peoples' ideas, and verbally copied and pasted their work. This, in our opinion, is a step over the mark - especially when it's an individual's personal blog and ideas they've researched (as an encyclopedia, Lostpedia is a little more hazey with it being the ideas of a collective). Thus, we think people should appreciate that this kind of copying is a little bit unfair, and to be honest... how hard is it to watch a TV show episode and come up with your own observations? Why word-for-word steal other peoples' thoughts on the subject? Such action implies that the blogger has little care about LOST at all even... but let's try and keep a shred of objectivity and not go down that road.

The moral of the story? Well there isn't one really. No doubt commentary such as this will ironically give a blogger perhaps not so widely known much more attention and site hits. Moreover, a lot of his watchers probably won't care how the guy gets his sources, as long as the videos are entertaining and insightful. But we do think not exposing stuff like this would be wrong - as it's unfair on individual bloggers especially when someone rips off their ideas to promote his own blog. We'll let Smokie be the judge on this guy.

What do you guys think? Should this guy apologize? Or do people care too much over their own work, and should expect a bit of plagiarism when posting on the Internet? A contentious topic, perhaps almost as volatile as the "spoilers are good/bad" debates we've had in the past... Let us know your opinions!