Plagiarism has been a plague on YouTube for pretty much as long as it has been an immensely popular platform to publish original work. If someone publishes an original video with original material on YouTube, and that video gets immensely popular (eg. millions of views), it's pretty much guaranteed that at least 3 or 4 other channels, at the very minimum, will copy the idea and make a recreation of that video to one extent or another (in the vast majority of cases not crediting the original, of course.)
Oftentimes a similar type of popular YouTuber from a different (usually non-English-speaking) country will just blatantly copy the idea of an even bigger YouTuber. You can be pretty certain that, for example, (what effectively amounts to) "the Mr Beast of country X" will copy many if not most of the ideas of the actual Mr Beast videos, the amount of imitation going to really egregious extents.
Of course it doesn't always need to be someone from another country speaking another language. Plenty of plagiarists share the same language and even the country as the original.
While it's rarer, in the most egregious cases it's not actually a (somewhat) smaller YouTuber copying the ideas of a bigger one, but the other way around! Sometimes a multi-millions-of-subscribers popular YouTuber might directly plagiarize the idea and sometimes even the very script of a video of a much smaller YouTuber.
And, of course, the source of the plagiarism, ie. the original material, doesn't always have to be another YouTube video. There are plenty of examples of people making videos pretty much reading verbatim someone else's written article or other similar material, oftentimes word-for-word, without crediting the original source. (Sometimes they might try to get away with it by making an extremely small reference to the source somewhere in the end credits of the video or even its description, but they still won't acknowledge the amount of material directly copied, which does breach the limits of copyright infringement and plagiarism when it's too verbatim and too excessive.)
However, not all plagiarists are the same, in terms of what they themselves are thinking.
There are, of course, those who know perfectly well that they are plagiarizing, that it's technically speaking not proper, but they deliberately and consciously do not care and are purely doing it for profit. They are not just plagiarizing other people's work, but are deliberately and intentionally scamming their viewers by pretending that the material is their own, for clicks and views (and thus ad revenue).
However, that's not the only type of plagiarist.
There are those who genuinely don't know nor understand what plagiarism is and why it's wrong (and perhaps even illegal), and then there are also those who at some level understand the idea but live in complete denial.
There are indeed people who just genuinely don't know that copying copious amounts of text, scripts or video ideas from other people is not only ethically wrong but could in extreme cases even be illegal. At some level they think something along the lines of "I'm just making a 'cover' version of that video, my own version." A bit like playing an instrument and singing an existing song: Sure, it's not your song, but you are just singing a "cover version" of it. And if they just so happen to get some ad revenue from it, all the better.
Sometimes there's a very childish form of thinking behind it. Like a 12-year-old seeing someone doing something cool, and then hurrying to others to do the same thing and pretending that he himself invented it. "Watch this cool thing that I invented!" They don't even stop to think about the ethical questions. It's just not something they think about.
Then there are those who are a bit in between those two extremes. In other words, those who do have some level of understanding of copyright and plagiarism, but who live in denial. They essentially make excuses and justifications for themselves about why what they are doing isn't actually plagiarism nor illegal. They might not verbalize it with rational arguments, they just dismiss and shove aside the entire idea that doing it is somehow wrong or illegal.
In other words, while they might know something about copyright infringement and plagiarism, they are convincing themselves that they aren't themselves engaging in it, and might even genuinely believe it.
There may be a lot of overlap with the previous kind of plagiarist in that these, too, might rationalize it with the precise excuse of "this is just a 'cover' version of sorts, which is allowed." However, they never try to actually research and find out if that's actually true because they want to believe it's true and they want to retain that excuse and convince themselves of it.
In summary, sometimes there's no real malice behind the plagiarism, but most of the time it's still opportunism: Trying to take advantage of someone else's idea, even if one thinks that it's actually "allowed" and "legal" to do so. They might genuinely think (or convince themselves) that they are "allowed" to do it, that it's permissible, and perhaps even that there's nothing wrong with it. It is, of course, a rather naive way of thinking, but a lot of people are naive like that.
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