Over the weekend, my friend Harry, also known at the YouTuber HBomberguy, sent me a Discord message saying that he was releasing a new video and that I made an appearance in it. He told me that I had been plagiarized. I didn’t know until later the depth of the plagiarism, and the sheer number of people who had been ripped off.
James Somerton is (was?) a YouTuber who covered queer issues in cinema. Due to the exhaustive research from Harry and his producer Kat Lo, we all now know that the majority of his work was plagiarized. He plagiarized me in a video about Attack on Titan, reading an article I wrote for Vice verbatim as if it was his own work, including the quotes from YouTubers and academics that I reached out to.
Many people who’ve watched the video have banded together in support of the people being plagiarized. One question I keep hearing from concerned viewers is: are you going to sue James Somerton? For me, the answer is no.
In my case, the best thing I can possibly do is move on with my life.
First of all, it’s not my place to sue Somerton. The work I produced for Vice is owned by Vice, which was outlined in the contract I signed when I took the job. The most I can do on a personal level is inform Vice’s legal team — or whatever is left of it after the company declared bankruptcy. This is the case for a lot of the writers affected here. Katelyn Burns, who says she was paid $700 for her article about JK Rowling that Somerton also plagiarized, likely signed a contract with Vox when she accepted this freelance assignment that says that her work is the property of Vox Media. There aren’t really grounds for Burns or me to sue. We don’t own what we wrote, and this is basically the case for any work that is done for major media companies.
I reached out to my father in law, who has worked in entertainment law and is now a mediator in the same field, and he confirmed my initial suspicions about taking legal action against Somerton. He said that the people who have written work on their own personal blogs absolutely have a legal case against Somerton, but also that cases like these are expensive and take a really long time. If you’re writing on a personal blog, you may not have the ability to hire a lawyer and invest time into this. It’s likely that people who fall under that description are pretty broke. It also doesn’t help that Somerton is Canadian and many of the people he ripped off are Americans, meaning that any lawsuit would have to straddle two different legal systems.
I feel that in my case, the best thing I can possibly do is move on with my life. I do not have the money or emotional fortitude to fight out a legal case with a Canadian dude who probably already spent his ill begotten funds on camera lenses and turtlenecks. But I’m also empathetic towards the people who want there to be greater punishment for someone who not only stole from a lot of people, but ripped off the queer community he belonged to.
That said, what should happen to Somerton? He has been exposed as a fraud in an extremely public way. He has deleted his Patreon, where people were donating enormous sums for money for his bad videos; he has all but disappeared from the Internet and is a massive laughingstock. His name is now synonymous with plagiarism and fraud. That sounds like punishment enough for a lifetime. I think the real issue is that people mistake the collective punishment they desire for justice.
The sad but unavoidable truth is that there is very little justice in cases like these.
I don’t think there is any justice to be found in going after Somerton through the legal system. What would feel like justice to me is if the writers and YouTubers that Somerton ripped off had their work elevated in Somerton’s absence. Harry has gone a long way to elevate queer YouTubers, and in my own social media I am definitely seeing people uplift my work. If you are a new subscriber to Aftermath who came from watching Harry’s video, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
The sad but unavoidable truth is that there is very little justice in cases like these. James Somerton has already stolen my work — the damage has already been done, and it cannot be undone. I have to move throughout the world knowing that an injustice has been done to me; that is just an unfortunate reality of being alive. Somerton makes himself an easy target for all the anger that people feel about similar injustices, like the way that queer history is disappeared or misrepresented or the way that women working in criticism are often ignored.
These are issues that cannot be solved by continuing to punish James Somerton. When I was the union rep for Kotaku, we often talked about the difference between cathartic actions and strategic actions. It is cathartic to point and laugh at Somerton, and cathartic release has its place. But as we move forward, we have to think about how we can change the material conditions that led to a James Somerton existing, or else it will happen over and over again.
