Well the good thing about that is usually it's obvious when people do stuff like because they usually rip off material above their skill level and just end up making themselves look foolish when they try to add their edits.
The funny thing was that the judges, who are supposed to be "the world-renowned artists who teach as TAD faculty" (quoted from Deviant Art, not sure if I am allowed to post a link to the contest here), have selected those works to be in the semifinalists list, and then the community shouted foul play when they noticed that, thus the contest supervisors removed one of the rip offs, but not the other.
I've entered under the 3D section of the contest, probably wasn't good enough though as I didn't make it to the semifinals, but I'm still following the contest, as I can learn some more about art, but just by entering, it motivated me to learn more about 3D modeling / rendering as I needed to search for stuff such as how to render mesh with wireframe.
There still are plenty of people that didn't follow the rules (such as entering fan art even though the contest rules state that no fan art is allowed except for Illustration section) and yet they made it to semifinals.
But here's one interesting thing worthy of a Philosoraptor quote:
"If copying other people's work is plagiarism, then isn't copying parts of the world around us plagiarism since God created the world?"
And I'm an agnostic... but that's just a thought. Lol. As it seems like us humans can never pull something out of nothing, we get inspired by events and things from the world around us.
As examples:
Dragonfly - Helicopter
Whale / Fish - Submarine
Bird - Airplane
Bird courtship - Dancing
Bird Song - Music (not to mention that nowadays the only way you can make something original is by using beats that most likely were done already, unless it's totally random but that's rare and may not sound right)
Not to mention that movies / stories are inspired by people's day to day lives and sometimes by stuff from the media.
Last edited by SilverFeather; 08-01-2013 at 07:48 PM.