Hacker News Reader

Comment by devilmoon | Hacker News Reader

Apparently the motivation for the attack was that "KyoAni has stolen something from the attacker", unconfirmed reports that the something in question was a Light Novel the attacker wrote but got rejected by KyoAni, which apparently then got turned into an original work by the studio (possibly stealing here and there from the LN or anyhow drawing inspiration from it) without crediting the attacker or compensating him. I can see this happening in all honesty, I am sure that editors get to read a lot of stuff from applicants which can then be polished to produce something in-house, kind of like when bigger companies fish for start-ups tech to reimplement it in-house.

Anyhow, the article doesn't mention it but I just though I would write this down in case anyone was curious about the potential motivation.

View on HN

Japanese sources are reporting a eyewitness account of the suspect saying "パクりやがって", which could be translated as "they plagiarized" (and definitely not "I'm sorry" as Google Translate claims). See https://www.edrdg.org/jmdictdb/cgi-bin/entr.py?svc=jmdict&si...

https://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20190718-00000075-asahi-s...

And this is why most companies doing anything having to do with media will not ever even read/watch works that were sent to them unsolicited. There are so many ideas being in different states of development at any given time that there is a failry high risk of inadvertenly opening yourself up to being accused of plagiarism.

Well, not exactly this.

Intellectual property issues once again. People think they own ideas and glorify themselves as originators. In reality once an idea is communicated it is free. All people can really do is add value to an idea by promoting it, framing it, demonstrating it, aiding in its application, and so on. Yet here intellectual property has scaled beyond mere value into critical relevance and even a person's identity itself. An individual went way out of bounds here, but some unworkable ideas about intellectual property helped to define the path. Modern cultures really need to come to terms with the nature of intellectual property in the Internet era. It's not just about protecting a mouse anymore.

(I'm going to disagree with you in my comment, about your specific thoughts - but given the context of the thread we're talking in, let me be clear - this is a horrific attack that happened no matter what you think about IP, and nothing I'm saying below should in any way make it seem like I think otherwise. This kind of violence is horrible, and not the answer to anything).

> Yet here intellectual property has scaled beyond mere value into critical relevance and even a person's identity itself.

I mean, do you really think JK Rowling shouldn't consider "I wrote Harry Potter" to be part of her identity?

> In reality once an idea is communicated it is free.

If by "in reality" you mean "in nature, given that we don't have a government to change it", then, yes, of course, if I tell you an idea and you decide to use it, there is little I can do to stop you. But that's exactly why we have governments and laws - to not live only by nature, but to do things that we think makes more sense, both on a moral level, and a pure "what's better for society" level.

And say what you want, I think most people don't share your feeling that someone's work being copied without them getting any compensation for it is somehow more moral, and should be the way things work. I certainly don't share that intuition.

> I mean, do you really think JK Rowling shouldn't consider "I wrote Harry Potter" to be part of her identity?

Devil's advocate: sure, but that's different than considering "I am the originator of the concept of a story about a boy who goes to wizard school".

This isn't necessarily true in the field of artistic production, in my opinion. In this case this person presumably submitted their work for acceptance to a company, and the company rejected their work but then stole it. This is a massive violation of industry ethics, and still generates much fury to this day if it happens. (For example, if Tor published a novella under an editor's name, but the novella was actually written by an author who was told the work was not accepted into Tor, this would cause a massive uproar.)

Part of the issue is that the publishing party purchases first-publishing rights of the work submitted to them. By definition, they need to recieve unpublished, highly protected work that hasn't been shown to anyone else (or shown to an audience).

> Intellectual property issues once again. People think they own ideas and glorify themselves as originators.

A novel isn't an "idea", it's a work of art. Copyright law protects artists from having their work copied. You don't need to "glorify yourself" to believe that you should have that basic right.

Going on a killing spree because someone stole your idea is obviously insane, but I can understand the frustration. Someone can spend years of their life working on a single piece, and having it stolen is like someone stole those years from you. The incentives to steal work like this are huge which is why copyright law needs to exist, otherwise we'd have either more killing sprees or less art.

Based on my own reading of light and web novels, the amount of originality in a lot of them is less than you might imagine. It's not too hard to look at the landscape and read a novel that is virtually identical to another, only with slightly different names.

I'd also like to add that not only do people have too much confidence in their "ownership" of an idea, but people severely underestimate the extent to which their idea was influenced by the cultural zeitgeist (which frequently accounts for collisions and false charges of plagiarism).

That belief is promulgated by the media corporations fighting for strong copyright of "intellectual property." They have themselves drawn on the public domain culture, and use copyright as a tool to claim private ownership over it.

Hollywood deals with this by giving the originators of ideas story credit. There are fairly detailed rules about how much of the final product needs to derive from their contributions to the final product for the credit to apply.

Disney stole the entirety of The Lion King scene for scene from a Japanese anime while claiming it to be a 100% completely original Disney made story.

Both the Lion King and Kimba are based on Hamlet...

And the story of the Lion King has almost nothing in common with Kimba. Have you actually read the manga or watched the anime? The anime is about the cub growing up, which the movie entirely skips over. Kimbas life before the anime is completely different.

While minor scene elements and secondary characters were inspired by the anime they don't rise to the level of requiring credit.

There have been repeated accusations in Hollywood about just this sort of theft. It seems to be how two highly similar movies sometimes get made at around the same time. Studio 1 steals idea, studio 2 does the right thing and pays for it.

> In reality once an idea is communicated it is free.

No, it is not. It really depends on the "how".

Could not agree more.

That's half of it (if true). The other half is a mentally ill person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com