Are Your Ideas Really Your Own?
“Didn’t we just write a post about that?”
Harry’s question comes over IM after clicking the link to a blog post I sent him.
“Mmhm.” I’m reading the same blog post he is. It’s not our post, it’s not copied and pasted, but it’s way too damned close for comfort. Even the title is almost identical.
I’ve had the same sort of reaction a few times. Sometimes, a post’s title catches the attention of my radar. Sometimes not, and I read through the first paragraph or two of the post, thinking, “Man, that looks really familiar.”
Then it dawns on me. “Wait a minute… That post looks really familiar.”
Harry was having the same moment of truth. His truth. “No, I’m serious, James. This looks like my damned post.” I can feel his indignation. Harry had worked hard on his series about the 7 Deadly Fears of Writing, and he’d been really pleased they’d been popular posts. A little too popular, maybe. “Even the title’s almost the same.”
But what can you do? Your concept has just been ripped off, someone has spewed it back out as if the idea was theirs, and there’s not even the smallest damned mention that the person got the idea from your post. It isn’t even a well-written post.
Happens all the time.
It’s frustrating. It’s insulting, too. It’s kind of flattering, sure, because someone thinks your work and ideas are good enough to rip off. Groupies and fan clubs play copycat all the time. If you want to write about something that you know came from someone else, avoid irritating the original author and avoid a potential tarnished reputation for stealing ideas. Both can be avoided very easily.
A while back, Deb from Freelance Writing Gigs posted about how she wished these copycat writers would give credit where credit is due – with someone else. I wish the damned same.
If you’re the non-original writer, put a link at the end of your post. “Inspired by X’s great post on Ys!” Put a link with a name. “XY posted on Z recently, and it made me think about…” What’s so hard about that? Oh. Wait. That’s right. Your content is a copy of X’s post. Tough admitting to people you can’t write original content, isn’t it?
If someone rips off your content, you can always send letters and start in with lawyers and whatnot. I hope I never face having to do that. I have no clue how it would work for me, coming from Canada – and please, that is not an invitation to try to screw me over to see what I’d do, alright? I have faith in people. (Too much, Harry says.)
In the meantime, those too-close-for-comfort posts get the blog a nice comment from me. It says something like, “Wow! That’s almost identical to what we were posting about last week!” It links back to my original post. There is no doubt about who wrote what.
It also gets the blog removed from my feed subscription and Harry’s as well. That makes two fewer readers, fewer comments, and no links to the blog.
What makes it worse is when one of our regular blog visitors pulls this stunt. It makes for bad blood, people, really it does. We start to get to know the person, we see and respond to comments, and we start to comment on their blog a little, and BAM!
“Hey… Didn’t we just write a post about that?”
24 Responses to “Are Your Ideas Really Your Own?”
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Hey James, I know what you mean. On some of my blogs, I do copy people’s ideas…but never without at least one link to the article and clearly defining where the inspiration begins and ends before my analysis kicks in.
It’s a shame that not everybody is willing to give credit to the originators.
I try to give credit to the originators. If I don’t remember, I say so and invite the person to contact me so I can include the link. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs, and unless I make a note of the link at the time, I sometimes forget which one provided the inspiration. I’m trying to address that by being more diligent about marking posts I want to refer to.
However, I can think of one instance recently where I posted on a similar subject to someone else within a couple of days. The thing is that I had drafted my post a couple weeks earlier and just hadn’t used it. Since the other person got there first, it could have looked like I was ripping off their idea. I know my conscience is clear, because I would never knowingly rip off someone else’s work (and get really annoyed when people do it to me), but what do you do in that situation?
@Chad: I do the same thing. After years of being in the graphics business I’m painfully aware of issues with people swiping work. I make it absolutely clear where the inspiration for a post came from, even if it’s only a fraction of what the post’s about.
@Sharon: When someone beats me to the punch my response is “Damn! James, look at that! They beat me to it!”
We stockpile posts a lot here and often have topics written up to a month in advance. This happens to us frequently. I feel the same way you do, my conscience is clear because I know I came up with it on my own. Right now I’m on a mission to come up with topics that no one else is doing. I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it (what do you think?) because on a few occasions I’ve noticed others picking up on the ideas for their own posts.
It’s flattering that someone thought enough of my posts that it inspired them to write one of their own and I’m so pleased when they give credit. When people do that, I take an interest in their blog, I subscribe, and tend to follow it for a while. If people want to increase their list of subscribers, this is one of the best ways to go.
I have had some luck simply sending a request to a blog that was re-posting my content without permission and attribution. Also, you can skip the lawyers and contact their hosting service. Many hosts will pull down a site that is engaging in copyright infringement.
A while back, I wrote about one particular site that was using RSS to stream content from other blogs. Several bloggers contacted the site, and eventually the entire blog was taken down. You can read about it here.
Since then, I’ve learned that it occurs far too frequently to go around chasing everyone who nips content.
@Melissa: I remember that guy. Never thought about contacting the host for the site, that’s a good idea and probably got a quicker response too. I guess what it comes down to is knowing which battles are worth fighting.
Ecclesiastes: nothing new under the sun..
Heck, people still stuff. I’ve had people rip off hundreds of my posts, lock, stock and barrel.. just rip the text and republish under their name. At least those other folks are just stealing inspiration
@Tony: Man, it sounds worse when you phrase it as stealing inspiration. But you’re right (or rather, Ecclesiastes is), there is nothing new under the sun.
Harry, you’re doing a great job of coming up with unique stuff.
This was one of my best blog discoveries last year.
@ Sharon – Thanks. That’s so cool to hear.
To all: I’m not talking about scraped content. That’s another annoying problem, but as a few said, it isn’t new and it isn’t going away. It isn’t anything we stress over either, because we just can’t be the Internet police. (Cool job, though.)
What gets me is people who want to blog and be bloggers. But they can’t take their own 52 cards and come up with something original, something off the beaten path.
It’s tough, too. Thinking of constantly new material is hard – damned hard. That’s one of the reasons both Harry and I prefer to write in a personal tone – to share our thoughts and tell a little bit of our story. We tried the “pure information” route, and by the end of a month, we were tapped out.
The Internet offers a wealth of information. Nothing new there. What makes it unique is your take on it, your thoughts on the matter. Sure, someone else blogged about it first – so go ahead and use that inspiration, yes. But make it your own and unique. Changing a few words or writing a post that just sounds like everything else out there cheats not only your readers, but yourself.
You may not be out to create flagship content, but you certainly can make your content your own. Have that community spirit and show respect by pointing to where you got the idea, then wow the damned crowds with your personal angle.
@Sharon: Thanks!
It has happened to me a few times. The times I’ve been inspired I always link back to others. That’s being respectful. I do a lot of link love on my websites.
That happened to one of my blog buddies. He’s a technical writer. He sent an idea to one of the A list bloggers. He used to read their blog daily. They liked the idea so much they used in on one of their post without acknowledging him. He immediately removed them from his feed and stopped commenting on their website.
He’s sent ideas to other A list bloggers, and they have always recognized him.They have actually stopped by his website and participated in his conversations, even when he had low traffic and a PR of 0. I know many who wouldn’t have given him the time of day because of that. In fact, some of them visited one of my websites and added to my conversations. That showed me they recognized everyone not just those with high traffic websites. That really impressed me. Not everyone does that. My buddies blog jumped to a PR 5 in six months, very impressive.
Dear James,
Thank you for bringing up this topic. I’m new to blogging and already found my work lifted and used on another blog.
I thought I would grimace and bear it. When I read your post I thought about it again.
So I wrote a polite comment to that blogger saying, thank you for quoting my work. If your readers would like to know more they can go to my blog, eatingdisordertoday.typepad.com.
And I made a positive statement about something she wrote on her own.
Comments are moderated so time will tell if she allows my comment to run. Regardless, I feel better!
Thank you, James!
Joanna
P.S.
She ran the comment.
Joanna
@Joanna: Welcome to our blog. Glad to hear your comment was run. Sounds like you handled the situation well. Sometimes the best thing to do is kill’em with kindness. Thanks for the link too, I’ll definitely go check out your blog.
@ Joanna – Brilliant. That’s exactly what I would’ve done, because it’s important not to come off looking like a raging flamer. (Though if nothing happened after that comment, I probably would’ve turned into a raging flamer myself.) Another trick you can try is writing a post about it and telling everyone (but that drives traffic to the offending blog, at least momentarily) or try these two tactics:
The nice request
The conspiracy theory
@ Harry – WAS RUN?! WAS RUN?? Glad to hear they RAN the comment, bro! Sheesh.
@James: Yes! WAS RUN. It was late. Shaddup. Even geniuses can make mistakes.
I always include links to people’s post that I get inspiration from. Mostly because I know how i’d feel if someone did it to me. As i’ve really started to concentrate on my blog and what I want to accomplish with it i’ve worked hard at always making that effort.
Sam
Hey Sam, welcome to the blog. I went to look at your blog, and I sure do like the design. Very peaceful.
I think many of the people who copy other people’s work are looking for the shortcut to success and they really don’t care about what they’re doing. They probably don’t even care if someone is copying them either. These scavengers put absolutely no effort into their work. It all comes back to them in the end because they usually don’t last for very long.
Link love is really good. However, there is thin line between inspiration and copying – most don’t know which side they are now!
Giving credit where it is due is very important!
I just wrote a post yesterday (re: the FDA allowing cloned meat to be sold to consumers) after I read another blog post on the topic. I didn’t hear about that story through Yahoo! or MSN first, I read it on that blog, so I put a link to their post at the end of my article even though my writing style is nothing like the other blogger’s style. It doesn’t matter, I wanted to give credit to where I got the idea for the post.
You know, on the one hand you could feel sorry for people who are copying you because they clearly don’t trust that they have any originality or creativity of their own, they don’t trust that they are “good enough” to stand on their own two feet, but that doesn’t make it right.
I like your way of leaving a comment on their post (hey, I just wrote about that!) and linking to your original. It’s especially a shame though, if the culprit is someone who you’ve come to know.
@ Davinder/JoLynn – Yeah, it’s not much fun. It takes very little to leave a link in the post to show where the inspiration came from… maybe people are too focused on trying to be 100% genius original instead of socially conscious!
Harry:
I had much to say concerning people who are not proud of themselves.
But I ‘m satisfied by your leads”Are your ideas really yours?”. It rang the bell in my mind of the the time I started writing articles. I asked myself the same question:Am I going to be myself while producing an article?
Finally I got the answer. Bridging the information gap by facts. That was my answer.
There the work started and now I can read , write of what I’ve collected from people without labeling out their names. It makes so much joy like seeing your new baby born even raising up maybe damn difficult.
Ntarugera François