 |
THE DARK SIDE current count: 235 confirmed thefts |
|
|
EDITORIALS
DARK
DEALINGS - Editorial by Bart van der
Put
from Schokkend Nieuws #68, 2005 Recently
I paid my fourth visit to the Semana de
Cine Fantástico y de Terror in San Sebastián, Spain. The festival paid
extensive homage to the late Pedro Duque, who died in a diving accident and was
the editor of 2000 Maniacos, the Spanish counterpart of Schokkend Nieuws. The Semana
holds all forms of genre-film publishing in high regard, and stimulates young
writers with a fanzine competition, which rewards the audience favorite with
financial support. This does not create hateful competition or envy; a shared
love of fantastic films brings people together. This may seem unremarkable to
most of us, but in Great Britain it is an entirely different matter: the
genre-film community seems to have been caught in tribal infighting for years,
and sometimes it gets real ugly. Apparently
respect for kindred spirits is not a given there, as illustrated by what has
become a scandal of global proportions. The makers of the horror film magazine The
Dark Side turn out to have been guilty of plagiarism since 1997 at least.
The matter surfaced when the American Mirek Lipinski read a long Dark
Side article about the German Edgar Wallace films and discovered it had been
taken word for word from his Latarnia
website. On the forum of his website Lipinski keeps a record of the
investigation he started last summer, and which has yielded 127 confirmed and 45
suspected cases of plagiarism so far. The articles and reviews stolen from the
internet were published in the magazine under the byline of editor Allan Bryce
or attributed to young, unidentified writers. In DVD
World, also published by Bryce, Lipinski discovered another hundred stolen
reviews. The
disclosures forced Bryce to react, but the kleptomaniac refuses to answer the
charges in an adequately substantial way. When prompted in San Sebastián, his
right hand man Jay Slater also refused to go on record on the matter. Both
prefer to point to alleged wrongdoings of unnamed others on the internet, thus
expressing a certain contempt for genre-loving writers, who share their
enthusiasm, knowledge and opinion without getting paid. We at Schokkend
Nieuws have been doing that for 13 years now, with pleasure. We strive to
make the best genre-film magazine in the Dutch language, because we love
fantastic films and want to draw attention to the genre in a serious manner. Our
freely accessible web archive holds 1300 reviews, all containing a copyright
warning. The people behind The Dark Side don’t care about such warnings. Schokkend Nieuws did not become a victim of their copycat behavior,
perhaps due to the language barrier, but that doesn’t prevent us from joining
the ranks of Lipinski and other victimized parties. The
Dark Side sells stolen goods and taints global genre-film journalism. The
best articles it publishes are available freely and unchanged on the websites of
their real authors. People who buy the magazine are not just fences, they are
pilfering their own wallet. Bart
van der Put Amsterdam,
December 2005 Originally
published in Dutch in Schokkend Nieuws #68, currently available in stores in The
Netherlands and Belgium, visit www.schokkendnieuws.nl
for details. Copyright remains with the author, who has granted permission to
Latarnia / Mirek Lipinski for online publication only.
|
||
