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Remember when IGN, with their massive, 17-million subscriber YouTube channel and 94-million average monthly website visitors, plagiarized the much smaller, independent outlet Boomstick Gaming? The scandal made international news, even getting covered by the BBC, but this was far from an isolated incident.
This was the work of an individual writer at IGN, and it was even this writer’s first video review. There is a question of how much responsibility the IGN brand has for this incident. After all, it is highly unlikely that anyone else on IGN’s massive staff had any idea the review was plagiarized. The most they can do might be to apologize, take down the plagiarized review, and fire the plagiarist, which is exactly what ended up happening. One could make a case for IGN owing Boomstick Gaming some kind of recompense. One could also suggest a higher level of due diligence and scrutiny is needed by the editing staff to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future, but this is easier said than done.
It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to be able to cross reference every source and similar article on the internet to check for plagiarism. That’s why automated plagiarism detectors exist, but they aren’t all that reliable. They can give false positives on occasion, but the far more…
