like, i’ve said this before – remember when the big cultural event was the hbomberguy james somerton video? – that’s like, in the imagination of anyone who thinks that copyright law “‘protects creators”’, surely the most clear-cut use case imaginable, where a guy straightforwardly and blatantly plagiarised people and made huge amounts of money off it. and did copyright law stop him? no! people knew he’d been plagiarising them for years and the only thing that made him stop was a youtuber with a bigger audience dropping a vigilante video essay on his head
several people who he was shown to be–again, very unequivocally and shamelessly!–plagiarising from were asked 'hey, are you planning to sue’ and they all said something along the lines of 'no, i don’t have the money and even if i did the rights to that article belong to the website that i wrote it for that went under five years ago’