About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Erwinwatch - Plagiarism

So, you may recall that back in October of last year, I suggested that when he's not making it up he goes along, Erwin is just plagiarising other people. I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true, and while I think I gave examples at the time, since then it's become clearer that he loves a bit of copying!

On the 8th of July last year he was off to his favourite platform for straight-out plagiarism - Forum Gratuit de 1:32; although recent pontification on Stad's Stuff has involved the wholesale copying - and some dodgy translations - of recently published Italian works, he's been loading the Bable-fish processed material on FG1:32 just as keenly; where he started a thread on Rojas e Malaret with the words . . .

"I will do small historical recount of this figures ,makers and else ." (note the 'and else' again, from the wholly defamatory, slanderous 'quote' of me on Paul Stadinger's 17th December 2016 post) and "Base and extracted from various Spaniards blogs and friends from Spain that had help me."

Wow! You might think; such an unusual company, and this guy no one had heard of 18-months earlier is going to give us the benefit of his wisdom - and that of his friends from Spain? Fantastic!

Except, if you've been following the Erwin saga, you will know by now that it's not going to end well.

The alarm-bells ring as soon as you see that he's mentioned "friends from Spain" after the "extracted from various Spaniards blogs", when you then realise he's not going to credit either the extracted blogs or his friends by name - but take any praise on his own sturdy shoulders - the scene is set for an act of the worst plagiarism the hobby has ever seen, and I'm not being hyperbolic.

I don't know, actually - his getting away with photographing a whole German-figure specialist-guide on the same forum comes a close second! For another day.

No - what his post actually consists of is the relevant information and images from ONE blog, no other blogs have contributed, Spanish or otherwise; no other 'friends' - Spanish or otherwise - have contributed.

He has stolen the work of Jose Ignacio Alfonso, author of http://grandesbatallasdelmundo.blogspot.com  (GBM - Great Battles of the World), a blog which went on-line the same month I started blogging and where you will find all-original research, presented in real time, as Mr. Alfonso discovered it. All the connections between Rojas/GBM and Waddington's, Elastolin and others, all the versions of all the games, all the accessory sets, all the figure versions and variants, the boxes, rules - everything; including the museum exhibitions mounted by Mr. Alfonso.

Don't believe me? Won't believe that Erwin Sell would do such a thing? Or can't believe that the moderators/Administrators of Forum Gratuit 1:32 would let him?

Let's have a look;

Using screencaptures, which are an acceptable reference tool vis-à-vis research, providing you credit the source - on the left of each collage is the Erwin image taken from a locked forum so links are pointless; they won't open! On the right is the image taken from the Blog linked to in the previous paragraph, which I recommend you to 'bookmark' if you have (or are likely to have) any interest in the subject.

"J'ai retrouvé ceci dans ma documentation"
says 'The Rock'! who now owes me another 10 images!


"J'ai trouvé ça sur le net"
says Th'iery B'astard!


"j'avais pourtant cette photo depuis quelques temps"
says Grande-turd Oudure

He even copies them in the same order in which they appear on the Blog he's stealing them from! Priceless!

Now, in Erwin's defence (WTF!???), I have an wider point to make in this post and while he stole 27 images and all his "small historical recount" information from Grandes Batallas del Mundo someone called 'GTO' (Grande-Turd Ordure?) has since stolen another 29 and put them on the same thread! That's 56 images stolen from one original Blog; while the 'administrators' . . . don't!

As well as the aforementioned thefts, there are on Forum Gratuit 1:32 literally reams of stuff taken from all over the place, from books and magazines in copyright, websites and Blogs including my own.

One guy, wanting a bit of fame for Hong Kong swoppets, photographed his ONE figure, then just took all the images from all my Airfix Blog pages he could find them on! It wasn't his post; it was my post, I just didn't know anything about it! Oh look - It's 'GTO' again.

Another guy, in trying to escape the charge of plagiarism, copied a Figuren Magazin web-page into a rich-text editor, printed it out in full colour, scanned the sheet of paper back on to his PC as a .jpg and then uploaded that image to FG1:32!

Dude; it doesn't matter how complicated you make arriving at the final image - it's still plagiarised!

It gets worse, people connected with the forum but having a web-presence outside of it (Mr. Frowny In-need-of-the-little-blue-pills Hussar), take and reuse those images, crediting not the original author, but FG1:32!

If you want to know about Rojas e Malaret? Check-out http://grandesbatallasdelmundo.blogspot.com it was one of the first Blogs I added to my Blog link-list, and as one of the moderators on FG1:32 was an early correspondent, there's no way they can pretend they don't know of its existence, nor can they pretend other things are out of copyright, or legitimately on their forum.

One has to ask why the rest of us bother with original research, original images or original copy, if it's all going to be stolen by the plagiarist-fuckers at Forum Gratuit?

Yet - if we didn't bother making the effort - there'd be nothing for the plagiarist-fuckers at Forum Gratuit to steal! They are quite literally - in our dust.

2 comments:

mathias said...

Hello Hugh,
it's Mathias aka Breizh44, administrator of Soldat Plastic 1/32 (forumgratuit); we have a lot of authorisations from several blogs to publish photos. I never had problems with you and you gave me some autorisations to plublish some stuff from your blog.
I have 200 members (with a bunch of 100 actives) and it's little bit hard to check everything everyday.
Regards

Hugh Walter said...

What? 'Several' have given you 'lots'? Sounds like flannel to me? One each would be enough! Publish the 'Authorisations' when you publish the work, that's the excepted way and has been for over a hundred years, the rules on research, plagiarism accreditation and acknowledgement aren't new.

And I'd be more likely to view your comment as contrition if you'd spent the intervening couple of weeks deleting the offending threads, you haven't.

I'd be more likely to view it as contrition if you weren't all encouraging Grand Turd Ordure to take the piss and run-about plagiarising more 'stuff' while joking about it

I'd be more likely to view it as contrition if you [yourself] hadn't consciously posted a link the other day from one Comansi thread to another - with plagiarised images from my blog on it! This isn't contrition, it's whitewash!

I gave you permission twice; to use images of 'Unknown figures' on the 1/8/13 - you never got back to me - and for one of your members to use the Cherilea crossbowman image (on 21/11/13), also I assume/accept a 'reciprocal' on the Lone Star king thing, but I don’t expect to then find the Vilco image on Limp-dick Hussar's site, credited to YOU.

And I certainly haven't given you permission to wholesale plunder my blog of hundreds of images, nor to allow your members to. I doubt many Blogs have, if any? By stealing other peoples work, you are sitting in their dust.

I have had a hundred people under me in the past, I knew what they were all doing, what they wanted, what they needed, what their concerns were at work and often at home, and I knew when they were going on holiday, or for lunch!

You only need to check a dozen or so posts per day, each of which is conveniently highlighted by the software!

This is a pathetic excuse for a lack of control, and if you'd exercised that control from day one it wouldn't be insurmountable, it would be 15-minutes a day. And by commenting here instead of eMailing me - you know it! But then you only ever email me when you want something - feeders take, that's what they do!

I'll be emailing you later today with a list of stuff [I know about] which needs removing, and if it's still there in 48hrs I'll be taking it to FG in the first instance with the threat of an invoice at Getty Image rates (do the math), after which there are bodies to approach if need be, as I had to - successfully - with Strelets*R.

You want to show someone elses images, you link to their Blog, Website of forum page, that's why it's called the 'INTER' - 'NET', it's not called the take-it-all-and-hide-it-in-a-locked-forum-net.

Don't flannel me Mathias.

H