A while back I mentioned the similarity between G-Dragon’s “Heartbreaker” and songs from Kanye West’s album 808s & Heartbreak. It turns out that more people are thinking that G-Dragon is ripping off other artists. Loot at comparisons illustrated in this YouTube-video:
Korean Rum Diary (where I saw this video for the first time) wrote an interesting post on what seems to be Korea’s “Culture Theft” habit.
I have written on occasion about the problems I have with plagiarism among my university students before. Apart from plagiarism, there is the problem of cheating. Before every exam week, administration sends a serious request to all examination supervisors to be vigilant against cheaters. It seems that cheating is a rampant problem. In a survey we performed last semester, we were surprised at the results. While most students say that cheating is wrong, many also said that given the opportunity they would cheat if they knew other people are cheating because the competition for high grades is so great.
And then there is the problem of “sharing.” There is the general attitude that students showing answers to each other during tests are not cheating, but sharing. Keep in mind that this is a communal culture where sharing is very common. After all, people even eat communally from the same bowls.
This brings me back to plagiarism. It might be that in the Korean paradigm there is little wrong with plagiarism or even “Culture Theft” because it is not really “stealing.” What it is, is “sharing” and how can sharing be wrong?
Scary! He's not the only Korean artist that does this, but he sure has a lot of songs that's the same than other artists' music
ReplyDelete