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Plagiarism in the Digital Age: Practical Advice and a Personal Story of How My Work Was Stolen · Talk Copy to Me | Content + Copywriting Podcast

• 0:00
  Have you ever stolen someone's copy or content?
• 0:04
  I'm gonna hope that you came to an answer very quickly right there and that you've never stolen anyone else's hard work in their copy, their content, their graphics, or any other marketing materials.
• 0:19
  But, let me pose another question.
• 0:23
  Have you ever had your copy stolen?
• 0:27
  or even ideas stolen from you.
• 0:31
  In this online business world, copy, content, and concepts are stolen so frequently that every creative entrepreneur or business owner really needs to understand how it's happening, why it's happening, and how you can avoid finding yourself in the situation of accidentally copying someone else's work or having your own work stolen by another person.
• 0:56
  Today, you're going to get a practical overview and a personal story from me about how my own intellectual property was just recently stolen.
• 1:06
  But I'll begin this episode by first dissecting what plagiarism is, especially in the context of marketing, and how to navigate that very fine line.
• 1:16
  Between Inspiration and Outright Stealing.
• 1:19
  And then I'll end the episode with that personal story.
• 1:22
  My recent firsthand experience of having my copy, my content, and my concepts stolen by another person.
• 1:31
  And actually, it was stolen for use in two different businesses, a podcast, and while I have no proof of the fourth one, likely a future course that they were creating.
• 1:43
  So, That really inspired me to share this insight, , that I've gained recently and the experiences I've had with you.
• 1:51
  So you don't end up in the same situation or you at least know what to do if you unfortunately do end up in this situation.
• 2:00
  So let's just jump into this super fun and exciting topic.
• 2:04
  Plagiarism.
• 2:06
  What is plagiarism?
• 2:08
  Now, because I care about citing my sources, I will say that the following definition comes from the Merriam Webster Dictionary.
• 2:18
  To plagiarize, as a transitive verb, is to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one's own, to use another's production without crediting the source.
• 2:33
  As an intransitive verb, it's when It's To Commit Literary Theft, Present as New and Original, an Idea or Product Derived from an Existing Source.
• 2:46
  So for Kix, I also asked AI what they thought plagiarism is.
• 2:51
  Why?
• 2:52
  Because it's learning from copy and content that we've created.
• 2:57
  And as a content creator myself, I think one thing many marketers, many creatives are worried about is that a lot of people will be accidentally plagiarizing because they're using AI tools.
• 3:11
  I actually have a great episode that I did with Sarah Walbuser of destination legal that I want to share with you.
• 3:19
  She came on the podcast a little while ago to talk about intellectual property and artificial intelligence.
• 3:26
  And I think it's a great primer for this conversation.
• 3:29
  And if you haven't heard it yet, it's a great follow up to this conversation.
• 3:34
  So, uh, because there is that lingering concern in the background, that AI is learning from, Original pieces of creative work.
• 3:43
  And there is a potential for plagiarism if you use things that were, you know, spit out through an AI tool without editing them and putting your own thought leadership into them.
• 3:54
  I thought it would be fun to talk to it about what plagiarism was.
• 3:59
  So.
• 4:00
  They said, in simple terms, it's taking someone else's work and using it as your own without proper credit.
• 4:09
  This applies to not just written content, and that's really key to point out, but also to things such as SEO.
• 4:16
  Images, videos, audios, and even concepts, so think like course creation as an example.
• 4:25
  And I think it's really easy to understand what plagiarism is through the lens of academia.
• 4:31
  You know, it typically involves like an instance where A student could use material from research that they've done.
• 4:38
  Let's say quotes from books they've read, , statistics they found online, or just information that they found while trying to write a research report or, , do whatever it is that they do in their college education.
• 4:53
  , but what happens is that failure of giving proper credit is considered, you know, academic dishonesty, which really has strict consequences to the student.
• 5:04
  , but unfortunately in the creative world or in the marketing and online business world plagiarism happens just as often.
• 5:14
  And it's not always as cut and dry as the example of academia may be, because there may be both glaring and sublefts of creative property.
• 5:26
  And unfortunately, it's really quite common.
• 5:28
  I've been in business now full time since 2016, you know, but originally started my freelancing in 2015 and I've worked in marketing for years before that.
• 5:43
  And I've seen so many instances of.
• 5:46
  People using other people's property, people directly copying, pasting work, stealing images, stealing concepts, and selling to a wider audience based on things that weren't their own.
• 6:02
  And I've had situations arise in my own personal life that weren't quite as obvious as this situation, and While I'm telling you about this current, you know, plagiarism that's happened, I don't want to discredit any smaller bits of intellectual property theft.
• 6:20
  You know, this is a very obvious one, which is why I think it's easy to talk about this example.
• 6:25
  Before we dive in too much, I want to get you thinking about how plagiarism occurs.
• 6:32
  I just shared that one example, but I want to, to do a few more real world examples of plagiarism.
• 6:39
  But before I do that, this is just a simple list.
• 6:41
  This is not exhaustive at all.
• 6:43
  It's just to get you thinking of things you may have seen based on things I've seen recently.
• 6:50
  These are all made up.
• 6:51
  I've changed all of the facts here from things I've either seen or I've literally just, you know, ideated them on my own.
• 6:59
  Here's an example of plagiarized website copy.
• 7:02
  An architecture firm discovers that their About Us page and the copy on that page is now on another firm's website with only minor tweaks to the company name, the projects that they've had, and the employees that work there.
• 7:20
  For blog content, let's say a fitness blogger finds entire paragraphs of her unique advice repeated verbatim on another blog, and it's attributed to a different company.
• 7:31
  But she knows that it's her workout advice because there are things that are unique to her within the original article.
• 7:40
  One that I think we see all the time is social media content.
• 7:43
  Let's say a digital marketing agency copies a competing agency's campaign post, only changing the client's name and call to action.
• 7:54
  But I think even more so, what we'll see a lot of the times is the regurgitation of things like carousel posts and, you know, like hot takes or questions for the audience that obviously we all may be considering some of these things on our own, but they seem so identical to someone else's that it's just very obvious that they're being reused.
• 8:15
  You know, and I mentioned that it's not just words that are plagiarized.
• 8:19
  Um, graphics as an example is a good one.
• 8:22
  A graphic designer could notice that another designer took their infographic and simply recolored it before sharing it on their own channels.
• 8:31
  For videos, a YouTuber will post another channel's tutorial video, but they crop out the original watermark and add their own introduction.
• 8:42
  For audio, a podcaster uses the transcript of someone else's episode and adjust the outline.
• 8:51
  Keep all of the content the same for an episode that they share on their own podcast, without any credit to the original source and claiming that the ideas are their own.
• 9:01
  I think this will help you see why it's so important to properly protect your copy and your content and your concepts in a digital world and emphasize really the necessity to monitor and safeguard your intellectual property because no one's doing that for you, obviously, you know, and I think the reason why I wanted to give you tiny examples was to show you how diverse the issue of plagiarism is.
• 9:31
  You know, it could be like, again, the graphic, just changing the color of graphics doesn't make it your graphic.
• 9:37
  The website copy, just taking someone's, you know, entire outline for a page, but putting your relevant facts into that outline.
• 9:48
  is, you know, conceptual theft, you know, like it's not okay to do any of these things.
• 9:54
  Yet, the examples are diverse and really have a spectrum of, you know, how bad, quote unquote, that they may be.
• 10:04
  Let's talk about consequences for a second.
• 10:07
  Let's start with the legal aspects.
• 10:09
  When someone plagiarizes, they are potentially infringing upon copyright laws.
• 10:14
  And these copyright laws protect creative expressions, such as Writings.
• 10:21
  Images, videos, audio, or anything like that.
• 10:26
  Not crediting an original creator can lead to lawsuits, substantial monetary damages, and other severe legal penalties.
• 10:36
  Trademark infringement is also something that's very important, and it could be at stake if there are things like copyrighted logos or brand elements that are duplicated by someone else.
• 10:49
  You know, this goes beyond simple text or image theft.
• 10:52
  It's really about like the trademarked rights of brand identifiers, and those are not scenarios you wanna find yourself tangled in personally or professionally, especially if you are accidentally stepping on someone's trademark without knowing it.
• 11:12
  Which is why it's so important to do your own research when developing any type of branding work like brand messaging, company names, taglines, course titles, or anything like that.
• 11:26
  Just because you do not know something is trademarked does not mean you are in the clear.
• 11:32
  If you go to the court of law and tell a judge, I'm sorry, I didn't know Starbucks was the name of another coffee company.
• 11:42
  I just thought it would be a great name for my own coffee company.
• 11:45
  The judge is going to laugh at you because it's not a good enough excuse to excuse your actions and behavior.
• 11:56
  In addition to the legal consequences though of plagiarism, I think we need to talk about the ethical implications.
• 12:03
  Plagiarism damages a brand's integrity.
• 12:07
  You know, every creation is really a reflection of its creator's thought process, their experience, their expertise, their education, and their effort.
• 12:18
  So to take someone else's creativity, it's not just unlawful, but it's really, you know, it, it's disrupting things such as trust and it's sabotaging your own professional relationships and your own professional standing.
• 12:36
  Because I think it's very clear that when someone finds out that you have stolen the work of others, they're not going to trust you.
• 12:45
  If there's anything I really learned through this specific example, it's that if someone is willing to steal another person's creation one time, it's very evident and they're comfortable with it.
• 12:58
  Like they, they posted it on the internet publicly for anyone else to see.
• 13:05
  Then they're, they're willing to do that again.
• 13:07
  And I don't think that.
• 13:10
  People who do this are able to be trusted, which is why I also don't think it's important to protect the identity of someone who has plagiarized.
• 13:18
  I've seen people say something like, well, of course you should, you know, if they took it.
• 13:22
  the content down, you shouldn't say their name or like, name them, whatever side of the spectrum that you fall on , my stance really truly is that if you're going to really do something unethical and you don't feel and you feel it's okay to do that thing, then you should deal with the repercussions of taking that action, And trust should be lost.
• 13:48
  So I'll get off my high horse for a second here and let's talk about the difference between inspiration and plagiarism, because this is where I think things get so tricky, you know, true inspiration is understandable.
• 14:02
  Like as a copywriter, the amount of research that I do on competitors, on clients, on industry for my clients, so that I can develop a well rounded strategy for the copy and content and SEO that I create for them.
• 14:21
  It, I mean, it takes a lot to do the research and it's really helpful.
• 14:25
  So there's nothing wrong with doing research and being inspired by other people.
• 14:29
  If anything, I think it's extremely healthy to find sources of inspiration.
• 14:37
  But true inspiration means to really synthesize those elements that you like, that you've observed, and then add your own insights, your own experience, your own feelings, your own values, your own mission, your own everything to make something that is uniquely yours.
• 15:02
  So the inspiration is kind of like a starting place, but it is never the end result.
• 15:12
  It's just something that you found that you respect, that you admire, and that you'd love to create something that has similarities to that original thing.
• 15:27
  Not the same thing.
• 15:29
  Inspiration really allows you to take a mix of ideas and aesthetics to fuel that creativity that you have.
• 15:36
  Think of it this way.
• 15:38
  Even if you don't consider yourself an artist, let's say you're doing like watercolor painting with your children.
• 15:45
  When you look at someone else's painting and you feel inspired by it, maybe a trip to the museum, you can see that there's so many different techniques, so many different uses of color.
• 15:55
  And then when you sit down to create something similar, What happens?
• 16:00
  Your technique, your skill level, your, , Goal for the future of the picture can be completely different from the original source of inspiration.
• 16:10
  Plagiarism, on the other hand, is copying someone's painting stroke for stroke.
• 16:16
  So I think one of the funnest activities that I did when I homeschooled my middle child for kindergarten was a weekly artist study.
• 16:28
  Now, mind you, she's actually young for her age.
• 16:31
  I think her kindergarten year, she was five years old when many preschoolers in America are five years old.
• 16:36
  So I obviously did not expect our artist study to have a end result of my child doing the exact replicas of artwork that she had seen.
• 16:49
  What I hoped that.
• 16:51
  Would happen was that I would present art to my child that was very different from the art that she saw the week before, and I would give her opportunities to create things that were new to her that maybe we wouldn't have done in our normal type of craft activities.
• 17:11
  One of the artists that she really liked was Yayoi Kusama and Yayoi, if you're not familiar with her, does a lot of polka dot painting.
• 17:20
  And my daughter absolutely loved the idea she was very into polka dots at the time, that we could use dots to create an entire painting, ironically, one of Kusama's popular images is polka dots on a pumpkin, and it happened to also be Halloween when we were studying her, and.
• 17:42
  We sat down to create a replica, let's say, of Yo Yo Kusama's painting with a pumpkin.
• 17:50
  Let me be clear with you.
• 17:51
  It did not look anything like the actual artwork that we saw.
• 17:56
  You know, other artists that we had, studied were Pablo Picasso, and we looked at the self portraits, and my child and I used cutouts from magazines of other people's faces to create our own self portraits.
• 18:11
  We actually studied Claude Monet and did some of the water lily Scenes or I think another one of another picture we attempted was like the woman with the umbrella and again None of these pictures looked anything like Picasso or Monet They they looked like a child and a middle aged woman trying to create something it was It was exciting, and yes, we used these exact images for complete inspiration of what we were creating, but because we were taking our own personal spin on things, because five year olds cannot follow directions and Literally paint something that looks exactly like they see on a screen they put their spin on it.
• 18:58
  They want to do the colors that they like.
• 19:00
  They want to see the size dots that they want to do.
• 19:03
  It's experimenting.
• 19:05
  And, you know, with the creativity, which is what you find in marketing, experimenting is key.
• 19:12
  So I am getting off topic here.
• 19:13
  I'm going to rein myself in.
• 19:16
  The point that I'm trying to make is you can use something as direct inspiration, but using my story of homeschooling as an example, the direct inspiration should not yield the result is stealing someone else's artwork.
• 19:32
  So to sum up this example part of the conversation, It's important to know how you can safeguard yourself, one against violating someone else, or two against being violated and having someone steal your creative work.
• 19:48
  If you are creating something new, if, let's say you're working on your own website copy or sales content for a course you're creating, and maybe you are reviewing the work that other people have done.
• 20:01
  as a way to feel inspired, to get ideas about what you'd like to do.
• 20:06
  The first thing I have you do is just an internal check, you know, compare your output, especially if you have a draft that's been completed against those sources of inspiration that you have, and make sure that you're completely doing something different.
• 20:21
  You're not just adding a superficial layer to something that's already been created.
• 20:26
  It's also really helpful to have a peer who can help you do peer reviews of your work.
• 20:32
  The last time I updated my website copy, this is exactly what I did, and I was very happy to have done this because what I have are recorded, Zoom video conversations with a writing partner that I trust.
• 20:47
  about how I was choosing to lay out the copy on my page, how things were outlined, the decisions that I was making based on where I would put things like my values, how I came up with my values, how I wanted to showcase my services or my processes or anything like that on my site.
• 21:07
  It's all in a video.
• 21:10
  That shows like the creation process happening.
• 21:14
  So if anyone were to ever suggest that I had plagiarized something and used it on my site, I would have, time stamped proof of how the creation actually occurred, which I think.
• 21:26
  is clearer than any other type of proof, even an end result.
• 21:32
  Because,, I could compare my, let's say, About page with their About page, but I could go backward in time to this video and talk about how the About page was created to showcase,, that the work was self created.
• 21:46
  On the flip side, how do we determine if someone is stealing our copy?
• 21:50
  It's tough.
• 21:52
  It really is.
• 21:52
  I mean, I used Copyscape, which is a great tool that helps people, identify whether the copy that they're submitting to Copyscape is elsewhere on the internet.
• 22:02
  You can also set up things like Google alerts to help you monitor the internet for, unauthorized usage of your work by having certain phrases that Google searches for.
• 22:14
  Grammarly and other tools like that have some AI capabilities built into them, of course, in their paid products that could also potentially do like things that Copyscape does, but really it's about proactive monitoring.
• 22:29
  Setting this up in your schedule to regularly check that people haven't stolen your copy content or concepts.
• 22:39
  So recently what happened about a week ish or two ago, I was on social media, completely doom scrolling only to find out that another copywriter had been plagiarized.
• 22:53
  And they found out that they were plagiarized by watching different copywriters social media video about how they were plagiarized.
• 23:02
  But I wasn't taking it very seriously because I didn't assume it would be me being the third person.
• 23:10
  in this instance, but just realizing that it had been a very long time since I had used a tool like Copyscape, I decided to check my own content.
• 23:21
  And immediately, I discovered that another site Unmistakable parallels to my website on their website for their business.
• 23:32
  , and unfortunately, it was an art studios website, which makes me feel so frustrated because it was a creator, you know, an artist who understands how hard it is to develop something that is beautiful.
• 23:48
  Using, you know, for their example, they were a painter.
• 23:51
  I am a writer, you know, like we're taking something that's a skill that we've developed over time, it's learned, it's experienced, and we're producing something and end result for them.
• 24:03
  It's a painting.
• 24:04
  For me, it's a document with words in it, but they understand the craft and the experience and the dedication that goes into that end result.
• 24:14
  Yet, they still felt it was appropriate to steal that hard work from a different Artist, a different creator.
• 24:23
  That made me feel really sad.
• 24:25
  , but unfortunately, what happened was that website was not the only instance of this individual stealing my copy.
• 24:35
  Off the top of my head, I don't really remember what pages it was, but let's pretend it was my website.
• 24:39
  Homepage and my about page on their Art Studio's website.
• 24:45
  What happened was that this artist had a secondary business, where they offered content strategy to other artists.
• 24:56
  And surprise, surprise, that second website was also an exact replica of my work, my homepage, my about page.
• 25:06
  My contact page.
• 25:08
  And what I find even more curious was that even the questions that I had created for the form on my contact page were used on this person's website.
• 25:20
  The frequently asked questions I have on my contact page, questions that are about my job, nonetheless, were used and just lightly adjusted to make them fit for their content strategy.
• 25:34
  Business, I guess, that they're offering.
• 25:36
  , I think what bothered me the absolute most, even regardless that all of my hard work had been duplicated and lightly adjusted, but completely replicated,, was that they had taken my exact values, which took me a while to write.
• 25:55
  I even wrote a statement that talked about how, like, I'm a work in progress, and while I strive to hold these values, I think I still make mistakes, and I'm really learning as I go.
• 26:04
  They took that statement, and my values, and reused them.
• 26:12
  Which is really just mind blowing to me., you know, that audacity is, it's staggering.
• 26:19
  So, you know, when things like that happen, the highest, advice I can give you here is not to take what you see at face value, meaning don't just say, okay, well, this individual stole my work and used it on two websites.
• 26:36
  You really have to dig in to see if it's anything is used elsewhere.
• 26:41
  And it was, you know, this individual actually had a brand new podcast that at the time of finding the plagiarism had six episodes.
• 26:52
  Two of those episodes were interviews with other artists.
• 26:55
  I didn't even listen to them.
• 26:57
  Two of those episodes were almost exact replicas of my episodes four and five on the podcast, which are about homepages and about about pages.
• 27:11
  Ironically, They were Episodes 4 and 5 of this podcast, and while anyone can talk about homepages and about pages, truly copywriters go out there and preach about these pages.
• 27:24
  What I found rather ironic was that it's the exact content of my episode.
• 27:29
  So it's literally like someone took my transcript and said, Hey AI, could you lightly adjust this for like voice and tone, but keep the content exactly the same?
• 27:42
  And then they used that and spoke it word for word in their podcast episode.
• 27:47
  But that's just four of the six episodes.
• 27:49
  The other two episodes , sounded so similar to things that I know I've created, but I was having difficulty tracing where they came from.
• 27:59
  So I actually had to listen and listen and re listen to these episodes, taking notes to showcase like how much had come from one episode.
• 28:09
  What I think they had done was combined.
• 28:12
  episodes of mine into one.
• 28:14
  So let's say they took, I'm making this up, let's say they took episode 110 and episode 84 and they combined that into their episode.
• 28:22
  I had to take notes.
• 28:23
  Can I tell you how much time this took?
• 28:25
  It took an immense amount of time out of my already busy week.
• 28:29
  So after all of this had happened, I mentioned they had six episodes.
• 28:32
  The seventh episode, which I found really humorous, was all about testimonials.
• 28:37
  Friends, this individual has downloaded my, lead magnets about testimonials.
• 28:44
  They had also listened to my episodes about testimonials.
• 28:48
  , What I later came to find out was that they had purchased, at no cost to themselves, because it was part of a bundle that I was in, purchased my blogging course, , my course is called Blogging Foundations.
• 28:59
  I'll link to it below.
• 29:01
  , but on their website, it says Blogging 101, Blogging 101.
• 29:06
  And when I log into my , learning platform, I can see that they've worked through the course and exactly how much of the course they've created.
• 29:14
  So, can I assume that the course that they were planning to launch was also, a replica of my course?
• 29:20
  Of course, I can assume.
• 29:21
  I won't know for sure unless they decide to launch it, but I can assume.
• 29:27
  So, basically, I'm going to sum this up.
• 29:29
  This episode is already longer than I had hoped that it would be.
• 29:33
  What I had done was I initiated the legal proceedings, through cease and desist directives.
• 29:39
  I sent them a cease and desist, clearly indicating what I had found and requesting that they remove all of the content immediately.
• 29:48
  giving them a timeline to do so, and letting them know that, you know, I'd already contacted my legal team and that they would be following up immediately if we did not hear back from them before the end of the timeline.
• 29:59
  And they did.
• 29:59
  The plagiarists responded to the cease and desist, removed the content for their podcast, for their art studio, and for their secondary content strategy business.
• 30:10
  And, you know, I don't really know how to report more on that.
• 30:14
  It was a relief.
• 30:16
  , and while that unauthorized copy of my work was taken out of public view and the resolution was technically what I was hoping for.
• 30:25
  The ordeal really has left a really residual feeling of violation and distrust.
• 30:30
  I guess you could say that I should feel triumph because what happened was what I was hoping, you know, that they'd take down the copy, but I don't.
• 30:40
  You know, it makes me really introspective about how people are approaching creativity and who we trust in this online world.
• 30:51
  My hope is that sharing these stories help you protect your own work, that you create your own work and that you stay both vigilant and proactive about your intellectual rights.
• 31:02
  So until next time, keep creating authentically and fearlessly.