How much LP footage did Anita Sarkeesian "steal", exactly?

BarbaricGoose

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Let's just think for a minute on how profoundly stupid the concept of stealing Let's Play footage is.

... ... ... ... ... Mmmmm... yeah, that was good. Was it good for you?

Now then, LP footage without the LP commentary is just gameplay footage, which any asshole is free to record. She didn't steal anything.

And I don't know who this thunderf00t person is, but he must have some kinda bizarre obsession with her if he honestly watched "40 or so" LPs just to "Prove" she used other people's recorded gameplay. (I can't even make it through one--that's some dedication.) Even if she did, and I'm not saying she did, what's the big fuckin' deal? You think anybody would be able to tell who's gameplay footage it is without the original LP commentary? No? Then no harm was done.
 

Nukekitten

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The_Kodu said:
Actually under creative commons law you are required to in some form.
... Huh? Creative Commons is, as far as I'm aware, an organisation that administrates a specific set of licenses. I might be wrong, but I don't remember those licenses being entrenched in statute any more than any other license is.
 

Zykmiester

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I wouldn't say she stole the footage. I would call it plagiarism. The real problem at hand is that she tries to pass her videos off at the academic level. If I was writing an academic paper, any pictures used I would have to give credit to the creator, the same goes for video. If credit is not given I am essentially taking credit for the work of someone else. If her videos were handed in for making at pretty much any university as is, she would fail her class and possibly be kicked out.
 

RedEyesBlackGamer

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The question I have is why anyone would look up 40 LPs to prove a point about anyone else. A person made some videos on Youtube that another person may or may not agree with. Oh no.
OP: Yes, most people are just going to focus on the mission in a Hitman game a majority of the time, but half the fun in a game that drops you in a sandbox area is to just save then go commit acts of utter chaos to your heart's content. So they are both kind of right, just not to the extent that either is saying.
I know nothing about any dispute over the game footage that she uses and I'm not looking it up. So I refrain from comment on that matter.
 

Abomination

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RedEyesBlackGamer said:
The question I have is why anyone would look up 40 LPs to prove a point about anyone else.
Let's not discredit the veracity of his work, let's discredit that he actually did the work.

Anita is perhaps the loudest hyper-feminist in the gaming community. She doesn't engage in any actual debate so the only way to debunk many of her baseless claims is to release ones own video on the same medium.
 

RedEyesBlackGamer

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Abomination said:
RedEyesBlackGamer said:
The question I have is why anyone would look up 40 LPs to prove a point about anyone else.
Let's not discredit the veracity of his work, let's discredit that he actually did the work.

Anita is perhaps the loudest hyper-feminist in the gaming community. She doesn't engage in any actual debate so the only way to debunk many of her baseless claims is to release ones own video on the same medium.
He could have just said "As everyone knows, the Hitman series punishes you heavily for killing non-targets. So she is stretching so far here that she is in danger of snapping in two". He basically spent hours confirming what everyone already knew: people who play Hitman don't want to do badly at playing Hitman. I was making a comment on my disbelief that anyone cares about her enough to actually do that.
 

Irick

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Okay, so, first off, OP presented a false dichotomy.
I'm pretty sure we can all see that at this point, but I'm going to engage on the topic because the issue of attribution is a pretty valid concern going forward.

MarsAtlas said:
The_Kodu said:
Actually under creative commons law you are required to in some form. You can't just take something and claim it's you made it.
Which she never did claim. Additionally, none of her videos are monetized. Nothing wrong has occured. If it had, you can sure bet that people all over the internet would've actually taken this case against her to get a strike against her Youtube account.
It doesn't really matter that her videos are not being monetized. There are really two arguments that can be levied that put the action of not attributing to the sources of her gameplay that have nothing to do with compensation. The first is simply common courtesy. I can understand not wanting to have to spend the time to capture specific scenes after an initial preview, and LPs provide a good source of stock footage. However, it's common courtesy to attribute your sources. Think of the footage like the performance of a play. It's rude not to give the name of the performance or actors when you are using it as part of your video critique.

The other is an academic argument. Consider the concept of the video essay, which is a relatively novel thing. When you use a source of video footage in a video essay, you are effectively quoting from another work. Without referencing that work we do not know the context of the quotation. This failure to attribute, outside of being plagiarism, also makes it difficult to evaluate the video essay's academic rigor by making it difficult to check over the sources for internal context.


MarsAtlas said:
She didn't credit LPs, though she was under no obligation to do so.
This is arguable, but regardless of the legal theory, what she did is pretty much violating the principles of the creative commons.
MarsAtlas said:
Would've been nice, nonetheless. People who say that this is "stealing" obviously are unfamilar with copyright law, as you're skirting copyright law more by recording and monetizing game footage than taking somebody's LP footage and putting commentary over it.
The intent to monetize is actually not taken into consideration in terms of the actual violation of copyright. It is taken into account when considering fair use of copyrighted work. Remember, fair use doesn't mean you didn't violate copyright, it means that you are _allowed_ to violate copyright. There is no such thing as stealing when it comes to copyright, but in terms of equating this to say, piracy, what she did is equally against the law but easier to claim fair use for.

MarsAtlas said:
Another facet of it is that because she used somebody else's footage, they jump to the conclusion that she did not play the games in question at all, which is kinda horseshit for a few reasons. Its totally within reason for somebody to not film hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours of gameplay footage and then sift through all of that just for twenty-to-thirty second clips. If its a scripted event, one could've been easily averted all those hours by simply taking notes as to what part of the game the event takes place during, and finding an LP video that contains that point in the game. For non-scripted events, I think you really need some directed player input, which you can actually see in the latest of her videos with her choosing not to act in Assassin's Creed II, Red Dead Redemption, and Watch_Dogs.
This is a valid point. The argument that she uses other people's lets plays rather than her own some how cheapening the value of her video critique is not very well grounded. There are various reasons that it is easier to use existing LP footage, but in the end, she should be attributing her sources.

Supdupadog said:
Considering LP footage is taken and re-used all the time, if we're going to open this can of worms for Anita, we should open this cab of worms for everyone.
I agree, double standards are bullshit. We should hold people to crediting their sources regardless of who they are.

Supdupadog said:
Also Anita's point about using the prostitute to distract guards still stands because it's a valid option for completing a task. That some people don't use it doesn't change the fact the game developers decided to implement it in the first place.
Well, this depends on the degree of importance that you assign author intent. I mean, coming at this from the perspective of Roland Barthes the intent of the author is but a single portion of the text, and the fact that people can have an experience of the game that does not include this element is a legitimate point.

It doesn't undermine her criticism, but it does speak to the nature of the game as a medium of social critique. The implication that Hitman is sexist because it allows this move (in game parlance) is somewhat ludicrous because it also allows the decision not to take this move. It gives the player the option to spin a different narrative.

Consider the often pointed to 'killing strippers' scene. It is clearly the author's intent that killing strippers is an action that is penalized. It is still a valid move in the game, but it must be calculated for the rewards against the penalty. This is not an uncommon component in games.

In hockey, for instance, the choice to take a player out of the game can be made in exchange for a penalty. It is not against the rules of hockey to use the system of penalty in order to gain an in game advantage. In Quake III, a similar trade off is made with rocket jumping. You take damage, but you gain mobility. So it is not against the rules of hitman to kill the strippers, but it does induce a penalty.

The question is, what advantage does it give? The action is clearly penalized, but does it give anything to you in the game? It doesn't seem to have any tangible beneficial effects, and as far as i can tell, killing a stripper is treated no differently than killing any other bystander.

So, the question becomes, what does the choice to kill the stripper represent? What does the player gain from the interaction? It isn't so much a question of the game allowing the interaction at that point as the introspection the game can trigger. Like any art.

The player controls the narrative in this situation as much as any other party, so while it is possible for her to criticize the possibility of this narrative, it leaves it still rather open to the point that this is only valid of her own narrative. Her feminist criticism is... of the story she made.

Or, as has been suggested, of the youtuber she used the footage for. Which brings us full round to the issue of attribution again. While the interpretive nature of art prevents definitive statements, each person's interpretation brings something to the text of a piece. By not attributing the clips she sources, she leaves large gaps and holes in the text making it difficult to derive more critique and text from her work.
 

BarbaricGoose

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The_Kodu said:
BarbaricGoose said:
Let's just think for a minute on how profoundly stupid the concept of stealing Let's Play footage is.

... ... ... ... ... Mmmmm... yeah, that was good. Was it good for you?

Now then, LP footage without the LP commentary is just gameplay footage, which any asshole is free to record. She didn't steal anything.

And I don't know who this thunderf00t person is, but he must have some kinda bizarre obsession with her if he honestly watched "40 or so" LPs just to "Prove" she used other people's recorded gameplay. (I can't even make it through one--that's some dedication.) Even if she did, and I'm not saying she did, what's the big fuckin' deal? You think anybody would be able to tell who's gameplay footage it is without the original LP commentary? No? Then no harm was done.
So weird Al singing different lyrics over the original song track means that Weird Al isn't making a transformative work ?

Sorry but "anyone could do it" well yes and $158,000 was part of the reason Anita probably should have done it or should have credited the person who did record it.
That is in no way the same thing.

LPers record commentary over a video game. They add NOTHING except the commentary. If you take away the commentary, it's just a recording of someone's work on a video game--ALL TRACES of the LP disappear when you remove the commentary, because that's all an LP is. No one is hurt by using someone's "LP footage" without the commentary. In fact, the only valid claim of ownership on the footage found in LPs is not with the LPers, but the developer that made the game, or the publisher.

What Weird Al is doing is COMPLETELY different than what Anita is doing. Like... it's so different I can't even think how to possibly connect the two, and it blows me away that you were able to. Their process is vaguely similar, but when you think about it--even just a little bit--it all breaks down, because what they're doing is fundamentally different.

Let me try to explain. Weird Al is taking a popular song and, with the artist's permission, parodying it. An LPer is taking a video game and recording commentary over the game's footage. And a ton of other LPers record their own footage with the same game. Now here's the key: if you strip away Weird Al's lyrics, you're still left with the song by the original artist (that isn't free to use.) If, however, you strip away the commentary of an LP, you're left with blank gameplay footage, that any asshole is free to use, and TONS of other people are using. What she did--IF she did it--is completely harmless.

Does that answer that? Did I explain that adequately? I really wracked my brain trying to figure out that explanation. I dun't thik gud no mor.
 

direkiller

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Supdupadog said:
Considering LP footage is taken and re-used all the time, if we're going to open this can of worms for Anita, we should open this cab of worms for everyone.

Also Anita's point about using the prostitute to distract guards still stands because it's a valid option for completing a task. That some people don't use it doesn't change the fact the game developers decided to implement it in the first place.
I fell like im in the middle ground on this.

I don't care if she uses the footage to make a point, it's just like someone using a movie clip to make a point, but site your source.
even a youtube link would do, give people advertising for using there content and so people can see it in full context.
if your going to state it your stuff is from an academic perspective, avoiding plagerzim should be one of your top priories
 

deathbydeath

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Who gives a shit? Smudboy's infamous Mass Effect 2 videos [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL67454ADAC2BDA8AA] used borrowed LP footage without using Turabian citation or whatever and where's his lynch mob (other than the Bioware fanboys because I ignore them on general principle)?

Instead of rape-threatening her over pedantic details such as her gamer cred or where she got her footage from, can't we go after, you know, the arguments she makes in her videos? She doesn't even make it that hard. Instead of supporting the image of gam3rz being a giant elitist, inbred circlejerk that scrubs like Anita are ascribing to her "critics", why can't we just curbstomp her with logic? Oh right, this is the internet which means every argument has to be 96% more hostile and stupid than it needs to be.

It always bugs me when people bring things like this up. This sort of approach seems to me like someone complaining about the undercooked food on the Hindenberg. Sure they have a point, but at the same time they're not addressing the real problem.
 

BarbaricGoose

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The_Kodu said:
Except if you take the player out there are no choices, no motion, no combos nothing.

It is the act of playing that makes it transformative otherwise riff tracks would be allowed over the films. The reality is Riff Tracks tell you where to start the film and they are separate and don't show the film as they legally can't.

If it were just the audio track that made it distinct Riff Tracks would be fine. They are however not fine on youtube unless you have just the Riff on it's own without the film playing or with a still image or something.

Riff tracks not also showing the film proves my point that it is the act of playing not the audio alone which makes it transformative
I'm sorry... how does this relate in any way to what I said?

I'll say it again, I guess: if you remove the commentary from a Let's Play, there is NO WAY to tell who is playing, or differentiate it from any of the other Let's Plays featuring that particular game, barring one those face cams that pops up in the corner. Anita could've recorded her own LP, and if someone stripped out the commentary, no one would know it was her who recorded it. And thus, no harm is done in using someone else's LP footage.

Refresh me on what exactly your argument is?
 

NuclearKangaroo

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IceForce said:
Definitely not all of it, and allow me to explain why.

First of all, I encourage you to watch the following Thunderf00t video:


If you don't want to watch all of it, that's fine. The relevant parts are 3:10 and 5:40

At 3:10, Thunderf00t claims that he watched "about 40 or so" LPs on Youtube, and concludes that none of the LPs he watched showed the strippers being attacked (like they are in Anita's video).

At 5:40, Thunderf00t says "she then presumably goes and kills the dancers herself".

So okay, if we are to believe Thunderf00t, he's saying that he looked through "40 or so" different playthroughs of the mission in question, and found NONE of them played it the way Anita played it.
He then concludes that Anita must have "killed the dancers herself".

But hold on a sec. I thought all of Anita's footage was "stolen" from let's plays on Youtube?

So which is it? Either she's playing the game(s) wrong (but definitely still playing them herself), OR she's NOT playing them and "stealing" the footage instead.

It can't be both.
yes it can be both, she USED to steal LPs footage, as well as art for her banner, she was caught in both cases and was forced to play the games, and about the banner, i dont know if she settled the issue or made some new art
 

NuclearKangaroo

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dunam said:
IceForce said:
So which is it? Either she's playing the game(s) wrong (but definitely still playing them herself), OR she's NOT playing them and "stealing" the footage instead.

It can't be both.
You are conflating two seperate nuggets of criticism people have had about anita sarkeesian.

1. The fact that she doesn't consider herself a gamer, while later saying she's always been a gamer.
2. That she uses let's play footage from other youtubers

I had to google for it, but here's a collection of footage that's she used from other people:
http://victorsopinion.blogspot.be/2013/07/anitas-sources.html

23 examples (I'm excluding the 2 that the author isn't sure about)

---

And if you're wondering about the criticism of her being a game or not, it's in this video, in her own words:

what truthly baffles me is that she got 150k dollars for her "research" and didnt even play the damn games