Wait a fucking minute, IH was already exposed for this. If you search for "cave man plagiarized" or similar you'll find some videos on it, and I'm pretty sure it was widely talked about on twitter, reddit and possibly here a bit as well though don't take my word for it.
He should have credited the guy from the start in the video itself, maybe something like "this incredible story is from this website from this writer, go read it and throw nickels at him"., but I don't think it would have mattered one way or another. You don't go to IH for his breaking original stories and on the ground research that nobody else has done before, you go for his unique style of presentation and his entertaining humor. I
always assumed he gets all of that information from some wiki, article, book, etc, just like
pretty much every other youtuber.
I doubt even 1% of the people who watched the video care enough about the story to actually read the article themselves. Here's how the article begins:
Floyd Collins traipsed over damp leaves and thawing snow and stepped into the shadow of a cave. It was an unusually warm Kentucky winter morning—January 30, 1925—and a thick curtain of icicles hung from the lip of the cavern like the pipes of a church organ. The cave's mouth, a bow-shaped rock overhang that resembled a band shell, dripped with water.
I'm genuinely curious how many people this type of romance-novel descriptions actually captivates.
The article was rewritten and re-ordered quite a bit, animations done, jokes, so there's a fair amount of work on it. There's an incredibly large number of youtubers who do nothing but read articles without even hiding it, making animations or bringing in any humor. If it's enough to pause every 10 seconds to say a couple words without even editing the original video for a reaction, then isn't this transformative enough to be fair use?
Hbomber makes it seem like IH was rubbing his hands like a fly siting there AH YES, I SHALL NOT CREDIT THIS MAN and then letting out cartoon villain laughters, but hear me out: what if whoever from his team edited, uploaded the video and/or did the description just fucked up and forgot to put the sources then IH decided to change things even more to avoid any drama or arguments with random journos/companies? Who wants to even be in the same room as a journalist?
I don't care about anything else in the video. If I hear hbomberguy's voice one more second I'll smash a screwdriver into my eardrums.