Plagerism

Something really strange has happened with this brief and I don't really know how to react to it. My work has pretty much been directly copied by one of my peers - directly copied.

I don't even know if I should be blogging about it really, but I think it's one of those situations that catch you off guard and how you react is quite important. Granted this is on a much smaller scale but this could be something that happens when we're all released into the real world.

Do I confront them? Do I change my project so that it doesn't reflect badly on me when it comes to hand in? Do I go running to the tutors and tell tales? Or do I just sit back and hope for the best?

I have no idea.

At the minute I'm taking the moral high ground and hoping that it will be obvious when the projects are being marked. I've clearly detailed my plans from the beginning and I've stuck to them so technically I have nothing to worry about, and I'm confident that I've worked hard and to the best of my ability.

But petty, playground politics are niggling in the back of my mind. What if they get a high mark for an idea that initially wasn't theirs? My inner child is screaming "THAT'S NOT FUCKING FAIR!!!!" and is encouraging me to go over and kick them in the shins then run away.

More importantly, I'm genuinely hurt. This person is my friend, I've helped them to learn new techniques, showed them how to do things correctly when they were struggling, gave them suggestions and advice. This is either an extremely strange way of thanking me or they have seriously misinterpreted my helping hand. I honestly can't successfully vocalise the difficulty I'm having trying to comprehend how somebody can justify this to themselves.

This has really upset me and, I'm sorry to say, will definitely change the way I relate to them in the future, maybe even the way I relate to others? Hopefully not, I don't want to have to hide my work when I'm in the studio or refuse to help someone out. The dynamic we have established within our course is so, so good but now I'll always have this sort of thing at the back of my mind.

This has intrigued me as to what would happen when we graduate and there aren't tutors around to act as mediators anymore... It really is a dog eat dog world and unless you've copyrighted something what exactly can you do? I'll definitely be bringing this up at our next personal tutorials but for now I've come to the assumption that you just have to man up and fucking get on with it. If you sit around moaning then you're just wasting valuable time that could be better spent getting your new ideas out into the world first. It's a pretty cold realisation, but if someone's stealing your ideas then you clearly must have something worth stealing!