An Open Letter to Shia LaBeouf

Source: www.plagiarismtoday.com --- Thursday, January 09, 2014
Dear Shia LaBeouf, I am writing today as both a concerned citizen and as an angry citizen. Up until now I’ve been pretty quiet about your recent plagiarism follies. I try to keep the conversation here more about preventing and dealing with plagiarism than specific scandals. So, other than a post on the iThenticate blog last month and a brief mention in an article here , I’ve stayed quiet. But your recent actions, quite frankly, have made that impossible. At every step in your plagiarism scandal you have doubled down on your misdeeds and made them worse. You turned what should ahve been a fairly minor and boring plagiarism scandal into a circus and, while this has definitely come at your expense, it’s also come at the expense of those you’ve lifted from, in particular Daniel Clowes. Your ordeal has gone from being a humdrum Hollywood scandal, to being a joke, to being a bizarre piece of performance “art” and now, finally, being an insult to creators everywhere. So while I actually agree with Rachel Edidin at Wired that we should stop talking about you, I do have one thing I want to say before I (hopefully) say my last word on this publicly. The message is this: The joke is over, it’s not funny, it’s not creative and the time has come to start mending bridges letting everyone, including yourself, move on. A Quick Recap To quickly recap everything that happened to date, the trouble began last month when you released your short film, ...