Tiny Tower, if you’re not one of the only eight million who downloaded it, is a popular iPhone game developed by a three-man team at indie start-up NimbleBit. Dream Heights is an iPhone game launched in the last few days by Zynga and, true to form, is another stunning example of Zynga ripping off a competitor.

If you doubted Zynga was the last word in creatively bankrupt, lazy, ideas-free game development (hey, they said so themselves), Dream Heights closes the case. As in Tiny Tower, it asks players to add floors of shops and apartments to an ever-rising tower block. And, if you haven’t already noticed the screenshot comparisons around this page, the resemblance is uncanny. Not as uncanny as this, admittedly, but close. It’s pretty much a clone, gameplay-wise.

Of course, Zynga’s sheer power and wealth means it can afford killer lawyers, so nobody does a thing about their relentless copying of ideas. So what did the three little guys behind NimbleBit do? Simple: they wrote an open letter to Zynga and provoked INTERNET VIGILANTE JUSTICE.

NimbleBit’s full open letter (which you can see below) begins with the line, “Dear Zynga, (all 2,789 of you),” then continues:

“We noticed you are about to launch a new iPhone game called Dream Heights! Congratulations! We wanted to thank all you guys for being such big fans of our iPhone game of the year Tiny Tower! Good luck with your game, we are looking forward to inspiring you with our future games! Sincerely, (all 3 of us), NimbleBit.”

The letter features numerous screenshot comparisons that don’t look good for Zynga. It didn’t take long before this was posted to Reddit and dozens of sites and blogs.

But as great as that letter is, it’s not even the most interesting part of the story. NimbleBit co-founder David Marsh also revealed on his Twitter account that Zynga had previously attempted to buy NimbleBit out. When NimbleBit refused to sell up, Zynga simply copied their target’s prize game. As Marsh tweeted:

“Even when you refuse to go work for Zynga, sometimes you end up doing work for Zynga anyway. They did go the honest route and try to acquire us first.”

Burn. Here’s the full letter:

[Via Eurogamer]

Tiny Tower Game Ruthlessly Copied by Zynga is a post from: The Inquisitr

Bob Dylan recently placed paintings from his journeys across Asia on display at New York’s Gagosian gallery and now it turns out “The Asia Series” may actually contain line-by-line mimicry of photos from other photographers.

While the series had been billed as a “visual journey” that wording has now been changed to a “visual reflection.”

The painting rip-offs were uncovered by Dylan fan site Expecting Rain which says in some instances line-for-line mimicry was found from high and low brow photographers including  Leon Busy, Henri Cartier Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and one Flickr user, Okinawa Soba

It’s not the first time the Gagosian gallery has fallen prey to such blatant photo-to-painting intellectual theft, Richard Price who supplied paintings to the gallery was eventually found guilty in a court of law, it turns out he’s the same guy who provided text for Bob Dylan’s Asia Series catalogues.

Do you think Bob Dylan’s reputation will be hurt because of this scandal? I personally place the blame on Gagosian for accepting paintings from an unproven artists without doing any of their homework first, even if it is Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan Gagosian Gallery Paintings Said To Be Plagiarized From Photographs is a post from: The Inquisitr

An anchor for ESPNEWS has been suspended for an undisclosed period of time and has issued an apology after he says he accidentally forgot to add his own content to the words he lifted “virtually verbatim” from an Orange County Register column.

Will Selva, who has been an anchor for the network for three years, said that in his research, he cut and pasted a column by Kevin Ding into his script but somehow neglected to actually write anything to summarize the content. Selva apologized for the incident Wednesday, saying:

“I made a horrible mistake and I’m deeply sorry. I did not live up to my high standards or ESPN’s,” Selva said in the statement. “I sincerely apologize for my sloppiness, especially to Kevin Ding, viewers and colleagues. In my 15 years in broadcast journalism, nothing like this has ever happened and I will make every effort to ensure it won’t happen again.”

Josh Krulewitz, a spokesman for ESPN, said the plagiarism was not a case of Selva deliberately trying to lift the content:

“This is something we take extremely seriously and we’ve taken appropriate action. We looked into how it happened and found that this very bad mistake was made because he should have been more thorough, even on deadline, not because he was intentionally trying to claim someone else’s work as his own.”

ESPN declined to say whether Selva had been disciplined for the incident.

ESPNEWS anchor Will Selva suspended for plagiarism is a post from: The Inquisitr

The overly “emotional” Mr Smith is filmed on a set of steps writing a story about the Obama victory.  Obviously hammered he then admits to plagiarisng his take on the historic US election, yelling “thank God for the BBC becuse I am cutting and pasting it all, baby!”

The video is a 4 minute embarrassment, and is therefore hilarious.  The Birmingham Mail is refusing to comment on what it calls an “internal matter”.

Adam Smith has got to be regretting his F*&k You resignation which he didn’t even remember the next day.  The worst I have ever done when a little inebriated is drunk dialled an ex.  Tell us your humiliating drunk story in the comments. Go on, it won’t be as embarrassing as Adam Smith’s.

British journalist gets rolling drunk and resigns on Youtube after Obama victory is a post from: The Inquisitr

The whole thing started when Jody Rosen over at Slate discovered an article of his reproduced nearly verbatim in a weekly newspaper from Montgomery County, Texas. The Bulletin, he explains, made some minor modifications — but largely just lifted his copy and put it under its own staff member’s byline.

Rosen investigated further and found chunks of content from two other publications within the same story — and it didn’t stop there. Some creative Googling uncovered article after article in the Bulletin matching previously published stories, almost word-for-word.

The ordeal gets more interesting as it goes on. Rosen ended up having a couple of conversations with the publisher, but never got a real answer. The publisher, he says, stopped returning his calls — and now, the Bulletin‘s web site has mysteriously disappeared.

In his engaging, funny, and well-written account, Rosen takes us through his mixed emotions: Could this have been a big joke? Could such a paper — one purporting to have been around since 1969 — actually have built itself on such journalism practices? Or are those practices, Rosen suggests, perhaps not as evil as they seem? Maybe, he suggests, the Bulletin is “bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media.”

The Inquisitr has certainly seen its share of discussions about the line between 2.0-style blogging and good old-fashioned splogging. This is the first time, though, I’ve seen the same kind of argument come up in the world of print. Sure, at a glance, any journalist would label the Bulletin as a plagiarist based on Rosen’s discoveries — but could it, in fact, be doing the same thing sometimes argued as acceptable within web publishing? Maybe it’s just a step ahead of the rest of the newspaper publishing industry. Where does one draw the line?

The case does raise some interesting questions. In the end, though, I think most would agree to call it content theft. The Web may have loosened some rules and opened some opportunities for sharing, but there’s a difference between excerpting with due credit and downright ripping off. Lifting someone else’s words and passing them off as your own is plain ol’ plagiarism, no matter how you spin it — or how many different sources you combine.

That’s my take, and you can quote me on it…though you’d better properly attribute the words.

Aggregation vs. Plagiarism: A Modern Problem Hits an Old Medium is a post from: The Inquisitr