How Do You Know If You’re Being Copied?

We’ve talked about copyblogging vs. inspiration before, but the topic is once again on everyone’s minds after I posted my latest rule Don’t Be a Sea Witch. In that post, I gave a pretty honest account of how it feels when someone takes your voice and plagiarizes you, which happened to me. I wrote it because I needed to get how I was feeling off my chest, but I was really happy that it also inspired further discussion.

After I posted, Heather of Then Heather Said left me a series of questions in the comments, which I promised to answer starting…now!

Heather, and most people, understood that I had a special set of circumstances on my hands: I knew the other blogger — I had helped her start her blog and provided coaching. I knew she faithfully read my blog every day. And the material that she used was extremely distinct; not only did she imitate my style, but she used my language, including words that I’d invented. And we were friends; at the same time that this happened, I had another e-mail from her in my inbox asking for boy advice.

But Heather asked about the not-so-clear-cut circumstances — “an ‘in other cases’ kind of question list, if you will.”

Well, of course I will!

There is a lot to say about this topic, but I’m going to start things off with the biggest one: How do you know if you’re being copied?

We all know that in a niche, a lot of topics are covered…a lot. And they aren’t only covered by blogs; they are also covered in magazines and on TV, in newsletters and by different brands. It can be very hard to remember where we first heard something. And it can be hard to take credit for something. You can’t assume that every blogger reads your every post (I know I don’t assume that!) — that’s extremely arrogant, and I highly doubt anyone thinks that way.

But you still deserve credit when credit is due.

When you see a post that just feels a little too similar, ask yourself these questions:

• Has this person ever commented on a post before?
• Am I on this person’s blogroll?
• Does this person follow me on Twitter?
• Has this person ever e-mailed me for advice?
• Did this person comment on or re-tweet the post that I think they are ripping off?

This isn’t an exact science, of course, but these clues help you determine if the person reads your blog regularly enough to assume that she did, in fact, get very inspired by you.

Next, you have to step off your pedestal and answer these questions honestly:

• Is what I did truly unique?
• Have I seen any other examples of this in the blogosphere before this?
• Can I reasonably assume that I invented this concept/idea/word/theme/etc.? (You can Google it to be sure.)

These are hard questions to answer, because you may not really know for sure. But this is a good starting point before you go opening fire on another blogger…

which we’ll cover in the next post in this series!

–

Tagged as: Credit Check, Rachel