Copying content
This week I saw Anonymous. In it, it is suggested that an actor by the name of William Shakespeare got to take the credit for the writings of Edward de Vere, thus creating the illusion that it was him, and not De Vere, who wrote some of the greatest plays of our time. Historical accuracy aside, it was a perfect example of someone being comfortable with claiming credit for work that wasn’t his purely for financial gains.
In todays internet world this kind of behavior happens more than you could imagine. People like Chris Brogan and Tim Ferriss have used their Twitter accounts to point out people who have used their work and claimed it as their own in products or blogs. So I was aware this kind of thing happened, but never saw it up close. Until recently.
As I’ve mentioned before one of the people I follow on Twitter is Aaron Lee. Besides being a solid resource for social media news and information, he’s just a great and approachable guy. We’ve been having short conversations for a while now so I wasn’t exactly surprised when I saw (at least I thought) one of his tweets mention me. However, it was one that he send me a couple of days earlier. I hadn’t really paid attention to the Twitter handle because I recognized him from his picture, but then I saw that another name was mentioned. Since his name has become somewhat of a brand I found it strange that he would change it. So I took a look at the profile that send the tweet and I was stunned about what I saw.
Here was a profile with Aaron’s picture, his description and look and feel. It was the same but for a different name and (at that time) 3 tweets. I DM-ed Aaron to ask if he had seen it, but he was as surprised as I was and decided to take action against this. Luckily Twitter has a procedure in place for this kind of thing. In other instances you might not be so lucky.
When somebody copies your work on the web, there’s not much you can do. Of course you can go the legal way and send a seize and desist letter, but if they refuse and they’re in another country your options are limited. Because of this it’s easy for scammers to do this and ride the success of others.
I never understood why you would want to make money by copying what others have created. If you want to make money on the web there are numerous ways, but I’m guessing some just want to take the easy route. And it’s a shame there’s not much that can be done about it.
