Comments on: How NOT To Do Business on Facebook… or anywhere!

By: Gillian

Gillian — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 04:24:50 +0000

A variation on a similar theme - I used to do a lot of feasiblility studies and business plans.I once found that a client had revised the 3 year financial projections I had prepared to make the project profitable (and therefore eligible for a grant) when it was destined to be a major loss maker … fortunately the person reviewing the document knew me and knew that I would never have produced some optimisitic figures. This scared the heck out of me though … naively perhaps but it had never occurred to me that someone would take my work and then change it and present as my porfessional judgement in order to raise financing. I also experienced someone using my CV and adding me as a consultant adviser in order to win a contract without my knowledge or consent. I have not figured out how to avoid this - short of restricting my work to business coaching.

Gillian’s last blog post.. Tag Biz - Application on Facebook

By: Patty Hankins

Patty Hankins — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:03:14 +0000

@Mari - we do have lots of problems tracing the images on the web. One thing I’ve discovered is that many of the thieves are pretty stupid. They’ll deep link into my site - directly to the file.

What they don’t realize is that stealing my bandwidth makes it much easier to find them. For images - I just do a google images search - and put in my domain name. It brings up pages of files that have that as the URL - and what website they are shown on.

For a few non-US sites that were stealing several images - I just did a little behind the scenes work on my site - renaming the files and fixing the links internally. Then I replaced the file they linked to - with one that said “If you can see this - the website you are viewing is stealing my photos” Generally the deep links into my site were gone in a day or two

I do have Google alerts set for my name, my business name, and my URLs. I’ve caught several infringements that way as well - from the people who think they can swipe them images and it’s OK as long as they provide a link back to my site.

The sad thing is - in most cases - for personal use - I’ll grant someone a license for no fee.

Patty

By: Jianjun

Jianjun — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:23:05 +0000

Mari,

Thanks for sharing your experience. This kind of thing is disgusting. My own web site has been copied many times by fellow translators from China. I used to help some of them with starting business! So they reward me with this kind of flattery

I love your attitude toward coping with such an unpleasant thing and appreciate the link to CopyScape, which is amazingly helpful in detecting copycats.

I believe what you stated is correct: “Even if you and I offer the exact same service, people will always do business with people they know, like, and trust.”

Best,
Jianjun

By: Barbara Rozgonyi

Barbara Rozgonyi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:50:27 +0000

Mari ~

It was worth reading the post to see these words - very empowering and in direct contrast to the story you told.

“Here�s the thing: I do not believe in competition. Especially for the solopreneur. There�s only one YOU. No one can “compete” to be you.”

Now, back to plagiarism. . .

Three suggestions:
1. Monitor your work online from time to time with Copyscape 2. Contact a copyright attorney to protect your work - like the one I met a social networking event last month.
3. Research your rights at the US copyright office site: http://www.copyright.gov/

Thanks for sharing your solutions/story ~
Barbara

By: Adam Gershenbaum

Adam Gershenbaum — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:12:04 +0000

Wow CopyScape is a great find thanks!

There are many people who are educating people on the same subject. It would have been simple for her to look to you as a a mentor and cite you vs actually copying your words verbatim. Not a well thought out decision for her.