Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

I'm smiling as I write this, but I must admit that it took me a while to see the positive side of things. At first I was very insulted and angry. But now I think it's a funny story and worth sharing.

Someone I don't know sent me a question on LinkedIn about the best way to raise money for his email marketing company. The question was sent to a group of people, not just to me.

Even though I didn't recognize the person, I clicked on his name to see his profile and try to help him out. I immediately saw that he was involved with email marketing and went to his company's website to learn more. When I clicked on the Consulting tab, I had a strange sense of familiarity reading the text.

It seemed so familiar. I went to the SKYLIST website and looked at the description of our consulting services... and they were exactly the same. I know that they copied and pasted the text from our website because I personally wrote the text on our site.

I'm just including one example below, although there are other examples of entire paragraphs that were copied word-for-word if you look for them. Every page of our website is clearly marked "copyright 2008 SKYLIST, Inc. All rights reserved."

Here is their website:

and here is the same section on our website:

Hopefully he'll see this post and change his web page. Either way, I'm flattered!

Comments

[AltaGray30]

Cars and houses are quite expensive and not everyone is able to buy it. But, loan are created to aid people in such hard situations.

[Byron Van Arsdale]

Josh:
Thanks for sharing this and for helping me to see the positive side of it. What an interesting discussion it will be when someone googles his name/company and finds this blog post. Nice demonstration of taking the high road and trusting the process.

[deaconbradley]

I remember recently @andrewhyde had a similar problem with his http://startupweekend.com/ project. It was copied verbatim (idea and copy) at http://startupweekendisrael.ning.com/ . When confronted they quickly changed to 3-day-startup.

[Jen S.]

Ha! This happened to me once. Somebody copied my home page word for word, and a friend noticed it and alerted me to it. I confronted the web site owner (not accusingly; I'm not very good with confrontation) and they claimed that it was a coincidence, that we must have gotten our information from the same place. (There were a lot of links to news stories.) I countered that it was highly unlikely that we used exactly the same news sources *and* posted the links in the same order, *AND* wrote our copy using the exact same words. They countered that "there are only so many ways to say the same thing." I couldn't believe it. :) Luckily, this was all actually going on in one of their web site forums (because I couldn't find a contact e-mail address anywhere on their site) so the conversation was public. After one more retort from me, they removed the swiped copy and the thread in the forum. Amazing nerve. I, too, was somewhat "flattered", but as it went on I got hot under the collar. It's plagiarism, and it really can't be allowed to go on.