Plagiarism, Byline Replacement, and Other Tales of Ignoble Accomplishments

You can always rely on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/imdb.com

Nick, do you mean Plot Summary, or Plot Outline? The latter is the shorter one that shows when you click the title page (IF Plot Outline is missing, Plot Summary is showing instead).


I believe ”Sing” now has 4 different Plot Summaries:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3470600/pl...

Hello Eboy,

Someone replaced the byline in my plot summary with his name, resulting in crediting it to his total plot summaries contributions.

The first plot you see by "Kenneth Chisholm", is the plot outline.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for reaching out, the plot has been reset back to your name, please let us know if you encounter this again in the future. 

Suggestion: do not under any circumstances allow a user to edit someone else's byline.

I guess one reason would be bad grammar. Another could be if the outline/synopsis includes spoilers. Some people don’t fully understand what a ”spoiler” mean.

I mean it’s not that only ”great” outlines/synopsis are accepted. But if it ain’t broke, there’s no reason to fix it.

Despite this topic is tagged as "Solved", I seek the feedback of fellow contributors, with another pratical use case:

After seeing the film tonight, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044328/plotsummary needs some cosmeting editing, which would amount to this (in bold)

André Noblet, a 23-year-old French artist falls madly in love with Christiane, the mother of two children. He tells Chistiane he will tell all to her husband and demand her freedom. Christiane learns that her husband has been carrying on a romance of his own and they have a meeting. By the time André shows up, they have reconciled. He next moves on to Minouche, a divorcée, and takes her to a ski resort, where he breaks his leg on the very first day and this hampers his love making. They meet another couple, Evelyne and her aged escort, Gaston Lebridel, and the couples end up exchanging partners. Time passes and André has now cultivated an attachment with Denise Aubusson, a widow and patron of the arts and artists, and André soon replaces a musician in her life. Denise has in her employ, Alice, a reformed thief, who reveals to Andre that Denise is a whole lot more than slightly older than he is. André is now an unattached man and when he learns that 17-year-old Catherine Michaud, a neighbor's daughter whom he has always consider a child, has decided to elope, he goes after her, determined to save her from an unwise marriage, and ends up marrying her.

What do you think should be the fairest byline: keep it as it is, or add mine to it ?

I'd like to chime in on the whole issue of the policy of another user even touching someone else's bylined plot summary, and would like someone at IMDb to address this issue and why it seems so easy to "hijack" someone else's work either by inserting their own byline under text that is still substantially the original author's, or editing someone else's bylined summary so that it is totally unrecognizable from the submission by the original author. I have had both done to my plot summaries in the past, the most egregious one which I just discovered, which still had my byline, with text that I would never have written (in that I didn't consider the the summary of the "editor" a plot summary but rather background on the movie itself). I don't quite understand why anyone would do this rather than just submit their own work under their own byline as a separate summary.

I personally will only make changes to another contributor's plot summary or outline:

• to correct spelling errors, especially of given names
  
• to delete any item within the summary that is a major spoiler or that is totally inaccurate
  

and never will I insert my own byline in these circumstances (either replacing the byline completely with my own or as I have seen done by others "XX edited by YY" or some such addition).

And only if someone else's plot summary has too many spoilers to render it uneditable without maintaining the integrity of the original author's intention, or if the summary is completely inaccurate will I ask IMDb to delete it altogether. In the latter category, I remember coming across a plot summary for a documentary of a person that while accurate to that person the subject of the movie, had nothing to do with the documentary itself.

Generally I won't even read another contributor's plot summary if I am intending on submitting my own so as not even to unintentionally steal ideas from that other summary.

Again I'd like to hear from someone at IMDb if measures are taken to protect the original work of contributors, and why it seems so easy for someone to make changes to another contributor's work.

And finally, thank you Vincent for your above post about Wayback Machine (I had heard of it but didn't know how to access old webpages).  Just like Nick seems to do, I have kept the reference numbers to many of my plot summary submissions dating back to 2010, but couldn't seem to find the original summary I submitted for the movie with "egregious" edit mentioned above (it however being a movie that I have watched often enough to be able to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile!).