I mentioned in passing in the "Things I Hate" thread on the forums about a certain person I admired, who I found out to be a fraud.

The story got worse today.

I finally confronted tumblr user "rionzanes" about this fraudulent piano pieces that he ripped off of YouTube. He replied back refusing to admit his wrongs and stubbornly claiming that they were absolutely his works and he 'doesn't know why' they sound exactly like the other pieces.

It sickens me. It really does. I gave him the chance to come clean and he still denies it, so I took it upon myself to out him: http://amako-chan.tumblr.com/post/61513 ... piano-week

Believe it or not, he sent me ANOTHER message where he goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs with excuses for why he plays 'different pianos' all the time and that he can't help it if his works 'seem' like others. EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE 100% IDENTICAL. EVEN WITH BACKGROUND NOISE. He even said others had accused him of this before.

Yeah, this grinds my gears, as you can probably tell. He doesn't even appear to feel any shame for what he obviously did. Whether it's art, writing, music, or whatever, I do not advocate stealing and taking credit for anyone else's works. And rest assured that in cases like this, the truth will come out.

It will always come out.

Hah, even the background noise is the same, now that is hard evidence.

People do love to take the easy road, especially when there's no "real" consequences for their actions. I've dealt with art theft once before on my non-kink account, I'd done an image of a Pokémon that some little kid thought they should claim as their own. (they took a really low-resolution copy of it though.) Claimed they'd painted it themselves in exact copy of mine, I guess not realizing that they were defending their theft by saying they'd done something nearly as bad? I ended up just leaving it after a while, since it was on some tiny little website and half the comments were people calling them out on it.

So long as people aren't making a profit off of someone else's work, one could argue that it's not actually hurting anyone... it's frustrating and should always be called out when it's spotted, but it tends to just come with the territory when someone does a good job on something. In a way it's publicity for the original work, since some people will spot that it's stolen (and the rest wouldn't have seen the original in the first place). It's bad when the thief gets away with it, but unless they're really good and subtle about it - which they rarely are, they wouldn't be stealing good art if they wanted to be subtle - they usually get caught, and it often ends up providing publicity for the original artist in a roundabout way. Even stolen clouds have a silver lining.

I will never understand people...
Of course I can get that receiving good comments is satisfying, but if you know that you're congratulated for something you haven't done, how can you possibly feel good about yourself?

learner wrote:I will never understand people...
Of course I can get that receiving good comments is satisfying, but if you know that you're congratulated for something you haven't done, how can you possibly feel good about yourself?

I don't think it's necessarily the feeling of achievement that they're after, but the feeling of getting attention. Having never created anything on that level before, themselves, they likely don't know how it feels to be praised for something they've done themselves; all they know is that it feels good to get a lot of favorites on something and have people tell you your work looks awesome.

Saftkeur wrote:

learner wrote:I will never understand people...
Of course I can get that receiving good comments is satisfying, but if you know that you're congratulated for something you haven't done, how can you possibly feel good about yourself?

I don't think it's necessarily the feeling of achievement that they're after, but the feeling of getting attention. Having never created anything on that level before, themselves, they likely don't know how it feels to be praised for something they've done themselves; all they know is that it feels good to get a lot of favorites on something and have people tell you your work looks awesome.

Yeah, I understand the feeling they are looking for, but what I cannot understand is how they can possibly like this knowing they don't really deserve it... I mean, I like attention, everyone does... But being praised for something I didn't do? even if I was sure to not get caught, I couldn't enjoy it... That's the point I don't understand^^ people who do that must have a very low self-esteem...

After all of this, he finally came out with his lies. BUT--he insisted that it was 'only for one week' and begged sympathy and understanding with his listening base for 'having that one busy week'.

I didn't believe him, so I looked up one of his other pieces---and first one that I looked up was also ripped off of YouTube. I called him out on it again.

He deleted his blog. lol

Haha, nice. Well, all's well that ends well; his blog is deleted, he maybe sent one or two new folks in the direction of the stuff he ripped off, and hopefully he doesn't rush to try the same thing again.