Flattery Or Plagiarism?

You've probably heard the phrase that says that imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when imitation turns to plagiarism, it's stealing and illegal. Now, I don't plagiarize. I've made mistakes, but I've never plagiarized, that I know for sure. But, I was plagiarized a couple of weeks ago. Now, I'm a big fan of Google Alerts. It's alerts.google.com. You use it to setup notifications; you could set up your name. You could set up your business, or you can set up titles because I'm known as the bacon man, Bacon Academy, whatever. If somebody's stealing or using my stuff, I want to know about it.

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Now, a lot of times, it's with my permission. I am an authorized author at Business2Community.com. What happens is that I write my blog, and I have an agreement with them that when my blog is published they actually pull in the latest blog post via the RSS feed. Now, they have permission to take that and put it up there. At the very top it says by Brian Basilico. At the bottom, it has a link to my bio, which has a link to my website. They're giving me credit, and it shares my content with hundreds of thousands of people, where my blog post may only reach thousands. I love that. As a matter of fact, if you can get your blog, or your podcast, or anything syndicated, or aggregated, or any of those kinds of things, it really helps to grow your audience, to expand your brand, and hopefully to build your sphere of influence.

Get Alerted

There's another tool called Talkwalker Alerts. Check that out. Just Google Talkwalker Alerts, and you will find it does kind of the same thing. Google did not alert me to this specific incident, but Talkwalker did. It says, “Hey. Your stuff is being found on a website.” I went and checked it out, you know, just because I was curious, like, “Aww, cool. I got aggregated again or used somewhere.” But of all things, it was was a SOCIAL MEDIA company out of Canada, (I'm not going to divulge their name or everything about it), and they decided to take what was posted on  Business2Community.com and actually copied and pasted it.

I was pissed!!! They're copying and pasting my exact blog. They're taking the images off that blog, which I have paid for. I pay Adobe Stock, which is what I use now, which used to be Dollar Photo Club. I used to use iStock Photo which was bought by Getty Images and the price has just skyrocketed, but I still pay $3 an image versus $1 an image, and I have a record that I paid for that. They're stealing the image. They're stealing the content. What it said was, “Written by so-and-so social.” They were actually taking my content and saying that they wrote it. At the bottom, they had a link back to the original work on B2C. They thought that that was okay. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not okay. You cannot do that. You cannot copy and paste that content. You can use the RSS Feed with permission.

If they had contacted me and said, “Hey, we want to use your stuff as a guest blogger.” I could've just said, “Fine.” You know, it's totally cool. I don't care if another social company wants to use it. The key thing that I wanted was my name at the top of the page saying by Brian Basilico, not their agency, so it has me as the ORIGINAL author – not THEM!!!

Then, I started digging into a whole bunch of these posts. There were a bunch from Business2Community, but  they were also using content from Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. Magazine, HubSpot — tons and tons of different companies — and using it, pasting it, using the images, and saying they wrote it.

This company is a social media consulting company. If this is how they're teaching their customers to use social media, they're opening up a world of hurt. The reason they're opening up a world of hurt is that what they're doing is illegal. Rule number one: copying and pasting the texts without permission is not a good idea. Rule number two: don't take an image. It's one thing to link to an image. It's another thing to download it and upload it to your own website. That, my friend, is copyright infringement.

Copyrights & Wrongs

Based on copyright law, you can put links to things. You just cannot download it and put it on your website. For example, if you want to reference an article, you can put a link to it. If you want to use an image, if you can find the image URL, you can put that on there. Now, it's not 100% going unnoticed, but the bottom line is… don't download it and then upload it to your own server, because that's wrong.

Now, there are companies out there do nothing but search the internet looking for images, for Getty Images, Masterfile, CartoonStock. Trust me. I've gotten hit by all of them. I made the mistake once. Years ago, I had an image on a PowerPoint that I had created when I first did my website back in 2001. I put the PowerPoint on my website, but it was only up for like a month or two. Then, I deleted everything except for one page and that image, and it was found. I was notified by a FedEx envelope sitting at my front door.

I get solicited all the time by all different kinds of companies for Christmas cards, stock photos, stock videos, stock audio, whatever. I thought this was an ad. When I opened it up, what I had was a $12,000 bill, so then I had to hire a lawyer. I ended up having to settle because they were right. I infringed on the copyright. I also get a lot of emails from these companies that say, “Hey, you're using our images.” No, what I'm doing is I'm linking to them.

Now, I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV, and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night (hopefully you know that joke). I would make sure that, before you do anything, talk to your lawyer, or get a lawyer and talk to them, particularly somebody who is into intellectual property in copyright. The bottom line is that they pretty much have let those go, because it is not downloaded to my server. It's on somebody else's server, and the image is being configured so that the link to the other server is showing up. That's just the way it is.

Taking Action

Now, in this situation, what I did was I asked this company to take the article down or give me credit. They gave me credit, but they put it at the bottom, and they still had it at the top that they wrote it. I told them to take it down and it took them a few days, and they said, “We took it down,” but they didn't. So what I did, because they didn't take it down immediately, is I contacted Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, and a few other large publications, and I said, “Hey, by the way, do you know that your content is being used?” Now, they've been really lucky (so far), because there's a chance that Masterfile, or Getty Images, or Adobe Stock, or one of these other stock photo companies will find out that they're also downloading and using their copyrighted images, which is not good.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is, don't steal. Create original stuff. If you want to use somebody else's content, ask permission. Have it linked via RSS or some other way, but don't just copy and paste, because the last thing you want to be is a defendant in a legal suit where you're going to lose.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this subject. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions on copyright. Have you or your business ever been plagiarized? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/