Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Andy Summers: He's Back!

This is topic Andy Summers: He's Back! in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Michael Coate (Member # 757) on 05-16-2006, 10:05 PM:

Everyone's favorite ex-Film-Tech member has resurfaced. I found him posting over at the Home Theater Forum. Looks like he's posting under the name "andySu" but it wasn't obvious to me until I started reading some of his trademark rambling, enthusiastic "I want my DVDs to include the original six-track-baby boom-thx-megasound-deep bass-split surround-roadshow mix" nonsense.

So head on over there if you want to be entertained. But...I'd also like to ask for help in helping me determine if Andy is being a clueless twit, or if he's being an unethical prick. Either way, he's definitely on my Shit List right now. The reason: he's been copy-and-pasting sections of articles and things I've written and posting them on the forums without any courtesy links, author citation or anything!!! We're not talking about a single sentence or piece of info; we're talking a 5,000+ word article. And in another post he pasted in a list of several hundred films that I and a couple others had compiled. The real pisser here is that I called him on it and, guess what, the HTF moderators deleted my post thinking I'm the "villain" in this scenario. Unbelievable! Of course, they also deleted Andy's reply post which, unfortunately, I never had a chance to read.

I predict that some of you will think I'm overreacting and feel that this is simply the way the Internet is and that I should get used to it. Whatever. If you ask me, this is the Internet culture at its worst. Why do some people, particularly young people, think information on the Internet is "owned" by everyone and no one? Maybe I'm simply old school about this sort of thing, but sources really ought to be identified. The whole footnote concept was beat into me in school as I'm sure it was with many of you. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, what I'm observing amounts to plagiarism.

At any rate I'm curious to get your thoughts on the matter.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 05-16-2006, 11:11 PM:

Sorry to say this, but you may have to get used to it Michael. As a part-time college professor I see this kind of behavior all the time now. Kids today seem to think nothing of copying existing on-line materials and passing them off as their own. Unfortunately, most of the students I deal with do not write very well - professionally written and edited stuff really stands out when compared to the typical lower-division college student writing I have to look at these days. The upside is this makes plagiarism rather easy to detect. Fortunately, college faculty also have access to some pretty powerful tools that help identify where a given document, or even a string of text, may have come from. Plagiarism, especially of on-line material, has become a major hot-button issue with college faculty everywhere these days.

Don't know what to suggest. Internet technology just makes it too easy to do this sort of thing. Maybe someday we'll have widespread digital watermarking of documents. In the mean time, don't publish on-line? Doesn't sound like a very viable option does it?

As far as that git Summers is concerned, there's no legal requirement for him to footnote or attribute anything he writes since he's not writing for money or publishing or academic credit. His actions are still annoying though. If he won't take the polite hint you've given him, you may have to resort to some sort of legal Cease & Desist order. Given that he's in the UK that may not be very simple to carry out. You may also consider going after the Home Theater Forum since they are allowing this activity to happen on their site (in effect they are publishing his writing) even though you've notified them of your concerns. It seems that you will have to take the initiative in any case though. Good luck!

Posted by Mike Heenan (Member # 392) on 05-17-2006, 12:12 AM:

Ahh yes, it's those darn rootin tootin young whippersnappers who are the fault of everything... [uhoh]

Famous Plagiarizers

As you can see from this link, plaigiarism isn't strictly limited to the young.

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 05-17-2006, 12:50 AM:

I agree with you Mike. It seems like many people mistakenly think "Money is the root of all evil" and that "Youth is wasted on the young."

You can quote me on that! [thumbsup]

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 05-17-2006, 07:01 AM:

I stopped reading HTF a number of years ago after seeing too many tedious discussions about aspect ratios and "censorship", which many there defined as any change in a film for any reason. Some good information was buried there, but too much chatter to fight through.

Mike, you might want to check into the Creative Commons License This is a copyright alternative that gives the author control over how a work is used. One of the choice is that the user can copy and distribute the information but proper credit must be used. This page offers an explanation of the licenses. It looks like this license does apply to Great Britain.

Posted by Greg Anderson (Member # 235) on 05-17-2006, 11:24 AM:

I'm not trying to kiss up to you, Mike, but you've been around for a while as a well-respected voice regarding Home Theatre issues... going all the way back to the olden days of laserdiscs when Widescreen Review was the one-and-only ultimate authority on the subject. I would think that those who are serious about Home Theatre have heard of you. So if the moderators at the Home Theatre Forum lack respect for your credentials and think you're the bad guy for raising a flag in this case, then that says a lot about the Home Theatre Forum.

Posted by Steve Scott (Member # 630) on 05-17-2006, 01:21 PM:

"Home" theatre? There's a respectable term. Every year more & more HTIB's (& their owners) ruin that "industry" I used to think everyone deserved Dolby Digital from the DVD format, but there are plenty of loudmouth kids and ignorant adults to taint technically good ideas with their retail store "high end" crap.

All home theatre links should deliver you to the screening rooms pictured here, in a perfect world

Posted by Bob Maar (Member # 763) on 05-17-2006, 04:13 PM:

I agree with you Mike. It seems like many people mistakenly think "Money is the root of all evil" and that "Youth is wasted on the young."

You can quote me on that! [thumbsup]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-17-2006, 04:41 PM:

quote: Paul Mayer
Sorry to say this, but you may have to get used to it Michael. As a part-time college professor I see this kind of behavior all the time now. Kids today seem to think nothing of copying existing on-line materials and passing them off as their own. Unfortunately, most of the students I deal with do not write very well - professionally written and edited stuff really stands out when compared to the typical lower-division college student writing I have to look at these days. The upside is this makes plagiarism rather easy to detect.

As someone who also teaches undergrads as part of my job, agreed with all of the above. It's sad to say that among students at the lower end of the attainment scale, there are some telltale warning signs of plagiarism in assessed coursework:

Possessive and plural apostrophes are used correctly;
Each sentence has a subject and a predicate;
The absence of rambling sentences which contain incoherently linked subordinate clauses, sometimes without any conjunction;
A rational argument, coherently set out, backed up with evidence, etc. etc.

Some of the plagiarism from web pages I've seen even includes the cut-and-pasted sections in a different font, character size and/or line spacing from the text written by the student - I'm not joking!
The British higher education system is its own worst enemy, though. It has steadily watered down its approach to plagiarism over the last few years. As recently as the mid-90s, any proven case of plagiarism in any assessed work would get you kicked out of any reputable university or HE college - no ifs or buts. Now there is barely any sanction, and many institutions now apply no meaningful sanction for plagiarised work in years 1 and 2. So of course the less motivated students are trying it on more and more, and the bottom line is that there's nothing much we can do about it.

quote: Paul Mayer
As far as that git Summers is concerned, there's no legal requirement for him to footnote or attribute anything he writes since he's not writing for money or publishing or academic credit. His actions are still annoying though. If he won't take the polite hint you've given him, you may have to resort to some sort of legal Cease & Desist order. Given that he's in the UK that may not be very simple to carry out.

For starters you'd have to convince a judge that it was actually him who had deliberately tried to publish your writing as his own. Given that HTF might not make any meaningful attempt to check the identity of registrants and that Andy Summers could be an alias anyway, that could be more easily said than done. Even if you did manage to track down and identify him and got an injunction, a UK court has no jurisdiction over a website hosted in the US (incidentally, Prince Charles found this out the hard way when an Italian newspaper published rumours that he was bisexual and had shagged his butler - his injunction didn't extend to the paper's Rome-based web server).

quote: Paul Mayer
You may also consider going after the Home Theater Forum since they are allowing this activity to happen on their site (in effect they are publishing his writing) even though you've notified them of your concerns.

That would be where I'd start. Email the owner or moderator with links to the pages containing the ripped off content, links to the original content attributed to you and a request that your content be removed from their site or a credit added. If that doesn't work, then depending on how strongly you feel about the issue and how difficult and/or expensive it would be, I guess that a bolshy lawyer's letter would be the next step.
Incidentally, I once had a photo from my archive's website ripped off and published in a magazine (ironically, the house mag of the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries - which should know a thing or two about doing rights clearance properly!). I wrote to the editor and promptly got a very apologetic reply, which was also printed in the following issue. My experience is that 9 times out of 10, editors and website owners don't want to be implicated in plagiarism or breaches of copyright, and are only too willing to set the record straight if asked.

Posted by Ben Wales (Member # 92) on 05-17-2006, 05:34 PM:

So the Andy Summers is Back out there, How can anyone take him serious after the Bull [bs]

last year and as we suspect (without any doubt) we can reveal his real Identity as a Ashley Carpenter - see below of when he was famous.

I'M SO SORRY

From the Echo, first published Thursday 5th Aug 2004.

THE most prolific tyre slasher in British criminal history has apologised to his victims in an exclusive interview with the Echo.

Car hater Ashley Carpenter was jailed for 16 months in April for puncturing more than 2,000 tyres in 10 days.

He waged a one-man vendetta on "inconsiderate" motorists by prowling the streets of Bournemouth, Boscombe and Christchurch armed with a sharpened screwdriver.

The cost of replacing the tyres totalled £97,000 but with ancillary costs added the final figure for the damage was estimated to be around £250,000.

After being released from prison four months into his sentence under a curfew, Mr Carpenter has spoken out about what made him crack.

Mr Carpenter, 37, previously of Walpole Road, Boscombe, is now living in the Bournemouth area and hopes to return to his studies in September.

He said: "It was all due to the incompetence of the people on the roads. I was nearly knocked off my bike, abused and swerved towards.

Speaking of the incident that threw him over the edge, Mr Carpenter said: "I was walking home from my friends and I could see the cars driving slowly because of the poor visibility.

"I could hear a car speeding up and ahead I saw a puddle that was about 10ft wide. He went flying past and totally drenched me. That was the last straw."

He added that some months later something just "cracked" inside him.

"That's when it started. I went out and went down the road and deflated the tyres. I was out for a few hours the first night, just walking around. I have never worked out how many tyres it was. I was just so frustrated.

"But when the inconsiderate driving was still happening around me I just thought I might as well go on another night.

"I didn't feel proud about doing it. I just thought: Why not target the whole town to make it look like a ghost town for a whole day? That was my only intention. I didn't want to endanger anyone and thought the tyres would deflate immediately."

Mr Carpenter said he only realised the enormity of what he had done when he read a headline in the Echo detailing the extent of the damage and revealing that many motorists had driven on the motorway before their tyres deflated.

"The whole thing got out of proportion. It was wrong and it was shameful to go out at night and sabotage car tyres. I am so sorry.

"If I won the lottery I would take a big fat cheque down to the police station and say: Here, share it out.

"This has totally screwed my life up. Now all I can do is start afresh."

Posted by Mark Hajducki (Member # 1732) on 05-17-2006, 08:23 PM:

quote:
As someone who also teaches undergrads as part of my job, agreed with all of the above. It's sad to say that among students at the lower end of the attainment scale, there are some telltale warning signs of plagiarism in assessed coursework:

There is now an online service that claims to be able to detect plagerisism (details at http://www.submit.ac.uk/)

quote:
So the Andy Summers is Back out there, How can anyone take him serious after the Bull [bs] last year and as we suspect (without any doubt) we can reveal his real Identity as a Ashley Carpenter - see below of when he was famous.

Possibly there it is a result of living in Bournemouth

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 05-17-2006, 08:44 PM:

YAWN...

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-18-2006, 04:36 AM:

quote: Mark Hajducki
Possibly there it is a result of living in Bournemouth

On that principle he'd be a serial killer if he lived in Middlesbrough...

Posted by Pravin Ratnam (Member # 1417) on 05-18-2006, 11:51 PM:

What exactly got him kicked him out of here? I looked up his history very briefly and he seems to have had some loopy postings, but no specific post being more outrageous than the others. Was it just eople getting tired of him or did he go too far in one post?

Posted by Michael Coate (Member # 757) on 05-22-2006, 08:49 PM:

quote: Paul Mayer
Sorry to say this, but you may have to get used to it Michael.

Easier said than done.

quote: Paul Mayer
As far as that git Summers is concerned, there's no legal requirement for him to footnote or attribute anything he writes since he's not writing for money or publishing or academic credit. His actions are still annoying though. If he won't take the polite hint you've given him, you may have to resort to some sort of legal Cease & Desist order.

I was willing to give Summers the benefit of the doubt as I really didn't think his intention was to post without a notation or link of some kind denoting where the material came from. But once it became known that a reply of his had been deleted by a forum moderator, it made me think he disagreed with my request that he acknowledge my work or that he said something nasty about me. In which case, I have no reason to take him off my Shit List.

quote: Mark Lensenmayer
Mike, you might want to check into the Creative Commons License This is a copyright alternative that gives the author control over how a work is used. One of the choice is that the user can copy and distribute the information but proper credit must be used.

And how does one actually ensure proper credit is given? I don't see how this improves or changes anything.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 05-22-2006, 09:57 PM:

quote: Pravin Ratnam
What exactly got him kicked him out of here?

Go here and read #15.

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 05-23-2006, 02:12 PM:

Adam...You're such a BRUTE!