Venezuela United - Plagiarism

[Skilling Services]

Link the current Sythe account: @Venezuela United
Which violation you are reporting the user for: Plagiarism
Why you think they're violating Sythe rules: Copy/Pasted numerous sections of our Discord pricing menus to utilize as their own.

Typically I can look past most similarities between service discords because there's only so much variety that can be applied to make each Discord unique, but I cannot look past blatant plagiarism.

On April 21st we overhauled our ironman menu section to make them more user friendly and easier to navigate. Some of those menu breakouts included grouping ironman specific things together like crafting, smithing, farming, construction, herblore secondary gathering, food collection, and other miscellaneous tasks that don't really have a home.

https://i.imgur.com/SAJ5T4A.gif

A week later on April 28th, @Venezuela United updates their menu's as well. Surprisingly, they too have their menu's broken out with unique ironman specific sections. Ironically enough, they even have the same formatting, the same text errors, the same footnotes, even the layout of the service offerings are in the same exact order as my Discord. The only thing that changed? Some prices and less than a handful of additions.

https://i.imgur.com/AhevOtJ.gif

Like I said previously, I can look past most similarities... but these are not most similarities. They are copy/pasted, price tweaked, and pushed to their customers.

Exhibit A: https://i.imgur.com/D9NmloR.png

We had just revamped our entire misc section on April 21st. The image above outlines what remained in the misc section. @Venezuela United ironically follows the exact same order as us (and some pricing even stayed the same)

1. Agil pyramid
2. Eclectics
3. Daeyalt
4. Dragons: VU changed title to green/blue drags and added hides, followed the same order as us for the listing (wildy, myth guild, 70 agil req, w/o 70 agil req)
5. Air orbs
6. Chin catching: Even copied the same hyphen we use to highlight the private area footnote in red
7. Volcanic ash: Copied these to the same price and levels
8. Amethyst
9. True Blood Altar RC: This one is great, because they even copied the accidental parentheses that I placed around the first price point "2500gp/rune (with no outfit/blood ess)". I'm very particular about formatting and wouldn't put the parentheses around 1 price point and not the rest intentionally.

It's quite amusing VU is 9 for 9 (or 10 for 10 if you count the parentheses mistake) on having the same ironman misc section as us in the exact same order.

Exhibit B: https://i.imgur.com/onN9N5K.png

Ironman Smithing - Same order of activities, same hyphen like the chinchompa incident mentioned above used to highlight text, same pricing on cannonballs

Exhibit C: https://i.imgur.com/2ZETWT3.png

Ironman Herblore secondaries - Same menu title, same footnotes, same order of secondaries

1. Fungus
2. Spider Eggs
3. Blue dragon scales
4. Wines of zammy

Exhibit D: https://i.imgur.com/TGasg5G.png

Ironman Food - Same order of gathering, even has the capitalized "1k OFF" in the fish barrel footnote for karambwans. They changed menu title from "Food" to "Fishing"

Exhibit E: https://i.imgur.com/QCnKe4C.png

Ironman crafting - Same menu title, same foot notes, same parentheses around the pricing for making glass "(1.6k per bucket)", same order of gathering. Only thing they didn't manage to copy/paste was the sand bundle.

Exhibit F: https://i.imgur.com/QTSSWNE.png

Ironman Farming - Same menu title, same pricing. Only changes made here was tree runs added and birdhouses/seaweed runs split apart. This piece of evidence is slightly weak in standalone form, but when paired with the other pieces provided, it's obvious this was copy, pasted, and slightly modified.

Exhibit G: https://i.imgur.com/dabgHN7.png

Favors - Same order of favor listings. Same as exhibit F, arguably weak evidence on its own. Something I can easily look past as being plagiarized because of the limited variability for this service.

1. Arceuus
2. Hosidius
   
3. Piscarilius
4. Lovakengj
5. Shayzien

Exhibit H: https://i.imgur.com/bQuVuAx.gif & https://i.imgur.com/rhUpHrS.gif

Achievement Diaries - Same footnotes, same order of diary listings minus the fact they missed copying the Desert Easy diary as well as the entire Ardougne Diary section. Same as exhibit F & G, arguably weak evidence on its own. Something I can easily look past as being plagiarized because of the limited variability for this service.

Exhibit I: https://i.imgur.com/t1ZMVU4.png

Vanity link - Honestly I don't even care that much about this one. It was an open vanity link and they're free to use it as their own. It's more so amusing that even with all the similarities in the pricing menu's listed above, we even have a similar vanity link.

Conclusion & what do I want from this?

The main sticking points to identify plagiarism has taken place are shown in exhibit A through exhibit E, with A being the most serious and obvious copy/paste of our information. Additionally, we are able to prove the question of "Who did it first?" with both Discord updates in our private channels as well as Github updates, both of which state the date the changes were made.

Birdy (owner of @Venezuela United) also acknowledged he's aware plagiarism of any kind, including Discords, is against Sythe's rules. However even after being a 7 year member, it's evident he simply doesn't care to abide by them. https://i.imgur.com/eQEjyUh.gif

I want @Venezuela United to quit stealing our pricing menu's to use as their own and I want them to revamp the formatting so they don't look like a direct copy/paste of our information. I don't care if VU or any other service provider uses our pricing for guidance to help establish their own pricing or if they want to use some of our ideas like breaking out ironman stuff into unique categories. But don't blatantly copy/paste our information including our formatting mistakes to use in their own server. Have a bit of professionalism and respect to not copy someone elses work, change a few price points, and slap a sticker on it to call it your own.

 

[Venezuela United]

Good Evening.
I’m currently in hospital and going to bed (which you can happily ask any of my workers about)

I think if you happen to have a look at our server, the pictures you have posted are not what is on the server.

Regardless,
We work on a game with limited amount of tasks and even more so towards OSRS.
Ironman tasks are very much so limited and they are ABSOLUTELY the same.

As much as you may think they’re yours, they are the same tasks for everyone.

I am sorry to tell you, air orbs and air orbs, agility pyramids is agility pyramid. I can’t make new tasks just so it’s not plagiarism?

I don’t have any footnotes on sapphire at all so I’m more than happy to show any staff that.

please have a look at our price lists and you’ll see it’s different from what you’ve posted here so thanks again for your post but I’m sorry to tell you, you down own the rights to any osrs task nor the names of them…

 

[Venezuela United]

I can’t upload Imgur from my mobile. Please feel free to visit my pricing now which you clearly can find. Any issues you have please let me know I think all points are addressed.

I can’t make tasks appear or disappear. The tasks are the tasks, you didn’t create them nor are they owned by you.

I’m so sorry my OPEN vanity URL is similar to yours. Do you forget the game is called osrs? Or again is that owned by yourself?

Thanks for posting out dated pictures though, really makes a lot of difference on a report. If I’ve offended you by writing activities which are finite on the game, I sincerely apologise.

 

[Skilling Services]

You seem to be misunderstanding the report. The report is about you plagiarising our information, which I've painted a very clear picture in the images above about. It has nothing to do with us "laying claim" to the names of objects or activities done within OSRS. If you're unaware of what plagiarism is, it is by definition:

pla·gia·rism
noun

1. the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

Which is exactly what you had done.

It is true that you have gone through and changed the formatting in the main areas I outlined above. Thank you for promptly addressing the issue and making these changes from the hospital (or holiday like you had claimed here https://i.imgur.com/98sxngj.png), whichever the case may be.

It's bold of you to claim the pictures I've provided are outdated, seeing as ShareX conveniently labels all of the screenshots I take with the date it was taken on. And had these screenshots truly been outdated, we would not be here reviewing this violation report as I'd have no reason or grounds to report you on. It also wouldn't be worth my time to write this entire report up for something that had already been addressed or taken care of prior to the submission of this report.

Regarding the vanity link, I quite literally said I don't care about it, it was open and free for use. You're more than welcome to continue using it, I didn't make a request for you to change it. You're welcome to re-read my comment about it incase you misunderstood that, similar to how you misunderstood this was a plagiarism report.

 

[Venezuela United]

Back to the point at hand here as I have screenshots taken at 9am this morning of a different layout than the ones posted.

please elaborate out of your points and cases which ones are still relevant at this moment in time as I already said, the pictures you’ve posted are outdated.

Please feel free to look at my server and you’ll find that

 

It's very obvious that @Venezuela United has plagiarized @Skilling Services. Therefore I have banned him for 1 month as per the rule below.

• Plagiarism: Plagiarism (websites, ToS, discord servers and other significant content but not trivial things like thread titles) results in a 1 month ban.