These were cases where the Web helped show a chain of authorship and establish due credit, but grayer areas exist. In September a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about women who wear comically small hats unleashed a barrage of angry Twitter messages from viewers who said it ripped off the Adult Swim comedy “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,” which had ran a skit called — what else? — “Tiny Hats.”
And in November the producers of an online music video sued the “South Park” creators for parodying their video so closely that, these producers said, it constituted copyright infringement.
The Web has abetted both plagiarists and plagiarism fighters in many familiar ways, from term-paper writing to news reporting and beyond. But its effect on comedy has had its own special resonance.
For as long as there have been nubile farmers’ daughters and bars that serve priests and rabbis, plagiarism has been part of the humorists’ landscape, enabled by the distance between markets where traveling stand-ups performed and by an unspoken rule that if you could lift someone else’s punch line and get away with it, it was yours.
“There isn’t a comic who wasn’t worried or had heard that so-and-so stole his act,” said Peter Lassally, the executive producer of “Late Late Show,” and a veteran producer for late-night hosts like Johnny Carson and David Letterman. “They were all angry, all the time, about people stealing part of their act or their whole act. But it was hearsay mostly.”
Now some Web-based comedy groups expend considerable energy to avoid duplicating the work of others, whether deliberately or accidentally.
At CollegeHumor, a site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp that produces 12 original videos a week, no sketch gets posted without thorough Google searching, internal debate and second-guessing.
Some months ago, said Sam Reich, College Humor’s president for original content, the group contemplated a parody of the Lady Gaga video “Poker Face” to be called “Butter Face” only to discover that such a video had been created by someone else, but it had not been widely seen at the time.
“We’re in this conundrum of, while we did have the idea, there’s this other version that exists,” Mr. Reich said. “It’s not very popular. Do we do ours anyway? We ended up deciding not to.”
More recently, Mr. Reich said, College Humor scrapped a nearly finished video after friends from another sketch group, the Whitest Kids U’Know, advised that they were about to show a similar skit on their IFC television series.
But television comedies do not always pull their sketches when CollegeHumor gets to a premise first, Mr. Reich said, perhaps because television is not expected to move as rapidly as the Internet.
“There’s a comedy trough that we all feed from,” Mr. Reich said, adding that the Internet’s never-ending stream of humorous videos, pictures, blog posts and Twitter messages from professional and amateur comedians alike make a truly unique joke increasingly impossible.
“It’s a race these days,” he said. “A joke could be up the next day after something happens, and then where’s our recourse?”
Rich Juzwiak, who maintains the Web site Four Four and was one of the bloggers “The Tonight Show” credited for its video montage of Ms. Swift, also recently wrestled a correction out of NPR, which acknowledged that it had used one of Mr. Juzwiak’s Web videos as a basis for a “Morning Edition” report about cellphones in horror movies. And this month the entertainment news show “The Insider” broadcast a montage of Mariah Carey clips highly similar to one Mr. Juzwiak had posted a day earlier on his blog.
In an interview Mr. Juzwiak said that these incidents reflected a “media bias,” that broadcast media organizations did not treat Web competitors as legitimate peers and treated their content as if it was theirs for the taking.
“If I were to say, ‘There’s this magazine article that would make a great blog post, let me retype it,’ that’s not fair,” Mr. Juzwiak said. “But just because something hasn’t been verbalized, they think it’s O.K. to do so.”
Mark Stencel, NPR’s managing editor for digital news, said in an interview, “We made a mistake, but I don’t think there’s a pattern in it.”
He added: “I think having most of the content on the planet out there and highly Google-able shines a brighter light on that when it happens. And I think that’s a good thing.”
A press representative for “The Tonight Show” said in a statement that its initial failure to attribute Mr. Juzwiak’s work was “an administrative error, and when brought to the attention of the show it was immediately corrected.” “The Insider” did not acknowledge any wrongdoing but linked to Mr. Juzwiak’s blog on its Web site.
The only thing Mr. Juzwiak said he can do in these situations is to write angry blog posts taking his imitators to task, an outcome that did not seem to bother him entirely.
“I live in constant fear of not having ideas,” he said. “When something like this happens to me, and it gives me something to write about, I appreciate it for that.”
So far perhaps only the “Late Late Show” has figured out how to address its more exhaustive imitators without resorting to online name calling or threats of legal retribution. On his first show after Thanksgiving Mr. Ferguson invited the copycat host of “Ce Soir Avec Arthur,” a French comedian named Jacques Essebag, to appear on “Late Late Show” and perform an opening routine with him.
“What’s the point of making a case?” said Michael Naidus, a “Late Late Show” producer. “Maybe someone will pay us some money at the end of a long and pretty unhappy discussion. Instead we do what we always do here. Let’s make a show that’s fun.”
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου