The internet is amazing and messy. It gives nearly everyone the chance to have a voice, to create, and to showcase their skills, especially writers. For work or for fun, whether you consider yourself a writer or not, if you’ve ever published or shared anything online that you’ve written, you’ve probably wondered whether you should copyright it. Which brings us to the downside: Worldwide access to virtually everything that’s published online is often paired with a shocking amount of plagiarism/virtual theft.
- We’ve seen it:
- A LinkedIn post with three words changed from the original writer’s.
- A homepage or logo or tagline that is almost identical to a competitor’s.
- A family’s fake GoFundMe page with a story copied directly from a new site.
- We’ve committed it:
- Reshared a story we didn’t realize was under copyright.
- Used a source without citing it correctly.
- Reposted a funny image that had a user license.
- We’ve been the victim:
- Your work appears on somebody else’s site without attribution.
- The greeting card you submitted for publishing is rejected, but you see it, word for word, by the same company, in a grocery store a couple of years later.
- A client refuses to pay for a white paper you wrote but broadcasts it to their email list anyway.
