I’m sure you’ve heard of Lawless and Transformers star Shia Labeouf digging a hole for himself by now – the hole just keeps getting bigger!
27-year old Labeouf’s short film Howard Cantour.com which premiered at Cannes last year, was later revealed to include uncredited dialogue from Daniel Clowes’ comic Justin M Damiano. Labeouf apologized on Twitter in a seemingly heartfelt and eloquent fashion, which appears to have been lifted from Yahoo! Answers. When he apologized online to Alec Baldwin over a dispute on Broadway, he blatantly copy/pasted bits from an Esquire article, and in a recent e-mail exchange with Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston, Labeouf continues his rant against copyright and continues to plagiarize, quoting Picasso, Lawrence Lessig and Kenneth Goldsmith – all without mentioning the source.
His bizarro defense for stealing from Clowes include nuggets of wisdom such as:
Authorship is censorship
Should God sue me if I paint a river?
Should we give people the death sentence for parking violations-
You’ll not only have less parking violations but less DRIVERS.
Er…
As an artist and a writer, I find the discussion of inspiration versus stealing interesting. But honestly, the man who was the son of Dr. Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls seems to have finally lost it. Or maybe he never had it in the first place.
Or as @FadedYouthBlog wrote in reply to Labeouf’s tweeted apology in the sky (see below): How do you manage to out-douche yourself each and every time? It’s like a talent!
PS: I hope I have quoted and credited everyone correctly in this article. If not, let me know and I’ll fire up my skywriting plane.