There seems to be a lot of ignorance about plagiarism in terms of graphics. A lot of people seem to think that you can copy something that another person made and as long as there are some differences and/or you did some work, then it's not plagiarism. However, it IS.

Just a few days ago, someone on another site (who I will call Caleb) posted a cover in an art critique thread. The title of the cover was "Aloha" and in his description of the cover, he said that all of the elements, including the text (except for the author name) had come from a bundle that he'd gotten off Creative Market.

I instantly recognized the design of his cover, however, as the design for the bundle that he'd gotten. He had completely copied it down to every element he used in the cover (there were small changes in terms of placement and the addition of his author name, but that was it). This user had plagiarized graphics before--some times he even took an entire design, cropped off the original author name and added his own. There had been a huge thing about this, where a couple people had brought this up to him and he tried to justify it and shit--saying stuff like how they were "recreations" and that he had digitally painted the covers or something like that.

So this wasn't new. He had stolen stuff before.

So I brought it up with the owner of the group (who I will call Darren) in which the cover had been posted. I figured he'd revoke some of Caleb's privileges in the group (like he claimed he would in the rules). But did he do that? Nope. His response to me was basically him telling me that what Caleb had done was not plagiarism because he had taken the time to place all the elements on his cover and because their were a few differences and because had had purchased the bundle (and actually, he DIDN'T purchase the bundle; when Caleb posted his cover he said that it had been a freebie but because Darren couldn't find the free version--because it was only free for a week--he stupidly assumed that Caleb had bought, despite Caleb saying he hadn't).

Darren couldn't seem to understand that their was a difference between having the right to use the elements in the bundle and having the right to OUTRIGHT COPY someone else's design. Even if Caleb had bought the bundle, he would only have bought the individual elements, not the design for the bundle.

And Darren said that as long as Caleb didn't violate the license (although common sense says that copying someone else's design IS a violation of the license) then it wasn't plagiarism and yet he never even bothered to look at the license. If he had, he would have found that Caleb was indeed violating the license, which specified that "an End Product must be a unique implementation of the Item." Obviously, Caleb's cover was not a "unique implementation" of the items he used.

I'm trying to explain this to Darren. We'll see what happens. Hopefully, I won't need to post another rant, but I'm not going to hold my breath because this is the same person who thought it was totally acceptable for someone to outright copy a tutorial (including the pictures) and enter it into a contest, without even crediting the tutorial, so...

And for anyone who's curious, here's a comparison of the designs (with Caleb's name whited out):

Also note that the bundle had "over 50 elements" and yet Caleb used the exact same one's used in the bundle's design. He could have at the very least used different ones, but he didn't even do that. Plus, he could have changed the title, too. :/

And Caleb tried to claim it took him two hours to make the cover because of the all the "resizing, rotating, contemplating placement, copying, pasting, and et cetera" that he did. Please. There is no way it took you two hours to copy someone else's design using PNGs. That is obviously a heaping pile of bullshit.