Why do people rip off the vids of others?

[Arigatomina]

I don't think I'd be as generous about it as you seem to have been but it's at least understandable.

Ah, I was only generous when I first contacted her. I still turned her in and hounded the subject till the videos were removed.

It was the presentation that really annoyed me most. Comments like "this might seem a little random, but I put a lot of thought into the order" - when the order was entirely done by me, and only appeared random because she changed the song. And comments like "the quality of this one is much better than my last, I really worked hard to clean up the footage" - when the 'last one' was bad because I hadn't learned to encode properly with the vid she used, and the 'new one' was better because I read the guides and experimented till I got it right. It's a snub to see someone bragging about how hard they worked when all they did was copy and paste your video. I really got angry with her about the last ones - when I realized she'd moved onto my latest vids, and raised the 'bragging' to an all-time high.

Once they start making changes, claiming it for their own, then it's like WTF? Sure, it's not like we own the intellectual property rights to this stuff or anything, but it's a common convention that the person that put it together essentially is the 'creator' of the new form. Even people that have never seen amv's before know that.

I think it's an "amv thing". We don't have that issue in the fanfic world. Plagiarism is taken very serious, with an actual PPP group that stomps down on people caught doing it, going so far as to write to the website providers and shut down personal sites if the theifs refuse to remove the story. They also police fanart. With music videos, there's no such control, with editors actually complaining when people complain - that "you don't own the original, so you can't complain if we use your fanwork" riff. Try saying that on deviantart.com or fanfiction.net and you get banned. Do it here, and you get people agreeing with you, making those who complain look like whiners. That's the problem when the fanwork depends on physical things like clips, instead of intellectual property like words and character designs.

[jade_eyed_angel]

true basically.. i've mostly seen people stealing a few clips from a lot of vids and puttint hem all together and they looked like crap.. but at least once i've seen a completely stolen video on a different site from here with a girl tryin to pass it off as her own.. actually it wasnt even a good video to begin wit, which really confused me but.. i just think people do it either for lack of footage, cause they're lazy.. or in terms of whol vid, definitely because they want to be praised for it.. and honestly it's pretty stupid.. i wuldnt want people to praise me for something i didnt make myself. i'd just feel guilty. i dun c wat they can get out of it.
wat really annoys me about vid stealin is when people steal edits n effects... if its just the footage, still wrong but watever. but if ur going into editing then its just wrong... thats where people put their actual work in.
yest i saw a vid and it was really annoyin watchin it because as i watched i was thinkin 'o that scenes stolen.. that scene's stolen.. that too...' and it had clips from some of my faves vids.. clips wit lots of edits n effects so i just told the original makers.. one of them anway. thats wat i generally do wen i c ppl stealin amvs

like some ppl say 'imitation is the best form of flattery' but i dun think outrite stealin of a whole vid qualifies and therefore amv stealers completely piss me off.

[FallenMarvel]

It obvious that reason why ppl is due to the fact that ppl are in fact to lazy to come up with a origianl concept of their own or just too lazy to learn, just like what was said before. It's one thing to use a clip or two from another video, but to just steal an entire amv shows the lack of appreciation for what it is we do. Personally, the reason I make AMVs is for the fun of it. Plus, I spend a lot of time doing them to make sure I do the best that I'm able so ppl can see my effort. In a way it's sorta flattering, but then again it's disrespectful. Cuz when it all comes down to it, you're being robbed and it's like all your hard work was all for nothing. That's how I look at it anyway.