George Kao stopped worrying about people copying his work and published over a thousand videos and posts since 2014 without copyright restrictions. He recommends stamping ideas publicly on YouTube or Twitter to establish precedence, arguing that ideas are abundant and sharing them freely actually fosters more creativity.
Questions this video answers
2014.
Over a thousand.
2014.
Four books.
Leo Babauta (Zen Habits); uncopyrighted since 2008.
Chapters
Do you ever worry that someone might take your idea and run with it, copy it, use it as their own and not give you credit? Well, I hope that this short video will give you some calmness and peace about that and could give you a more abundant mindset about ideas. So I have been creating content, consistently putting stuff out there since 2014, 2015, 2014 actually. And up to now I have made over a thousand videos and blog posts and it's all out there. So there's lots and lots of ideas. And I'm sure somewhere someone has copied my idea, saw it for me, copied it, used it as their own and not given me credit. I think I've actually seen it like two or three times over the years. And I noticed when that happened, it's usually someone copy pasting something of mine on Facebook and not quoting me, not putting my name. And I saw it happen. I'm like whatever. And theirs didn't go as far as mine did. Mine obviously went viral enough where they saw they copied it. So number one, if it's any comfort from my own experience, just know that even if someone copies and pastes your stuff, it's not going to do as well as yours did to go so far as to get to them so that they could do. They could also copy you. But number two, I believe, I mean, I've seen it within myself that when I give energy to protecting my ideas or being fearful that someone might not give me credit for it, that's energy taken away from creating, from sharing, from dreaming, and from just doing the work of publishing. And so long ago I let go of that fear. In fact, in 2014, I decided to uncopy. When I started becoming active in sharing content, I decided to uncopyright all my content. Yes. So what does that mean? It just means that you can feel free to take anything you see from me, any idea, and even go so far as copy and paste my entire books. I have now four books. You can copy and paste any of my books and you can publish them as your own with you as the author. And I don't care. I don't have the time nor the energy to hunt you down or anybody down. I don't have the money or the time to sue anybody. I don't care. It's just, it's too much work. And I found that once I made that decision of uncopywriting everything, I just relaxed and just, it became so I became much more abundant minded. And not surprisingly, my audience has continued growing over the years because I'VE continued creating very actively. Now you might say, well, isn't there something we can now there is one concern, I just have to say one concern that I do have is when someone sees my stuff and says, hey George, you took that idea from me because look, I published this idea earlier than you did, so you must have seen mine and taken it from me because it looks so similar. That is a real concern that I have. I don't want to be accused of having stolen someone else's ideas. So the way I prevent that from happening is this is why I have such an urgency and I encourage you to have an urgency of sharing ideas as quickly as possible. And there are two simple ways of doing that. One way is to make YouTube videos. If you have a new idea, go ahead, put it onto YouTube public, as a public YouTube video. You can even make it unlisted. And even if it's unlisted, it'll still have the date stamp so that you know there's proof that the idea was out there on a certain date. So that makes me calm. I share my ideas as quickly as I can and put on YouTube. If you don't want to make videos, you can put your ideas and writing on Twitter because Twitter also has timestamps and even if it's a long article, you can simply put it into a series of tweets, a Twitter thread it's called. And those are all timestamped. And so this is why if you find me on Twitter, you'll see that that's what I do. I use Twitter as a public journaling tool to get my ideas out there as quick as I can. And so again, I don't care if anyone takes my ideas. All I do care is if someone claims that I stole their idea. Thankfully it hasn't happened. So I'm glad to say that hasn't happened either in the past eight years since I've been actively putting ideas out there. But just in case, and just in case I do put it on Twitter and YouTube and also like I said, encourages me to, you know, share, create and share content as quickly as I can. So if my story is any encouragement to you, I hope that this helps you to become more abundant minded with your ideas. And I just, I just wish that all of us could uncopyright all our content. I know it's a, it's a strong move to make that I what I did, what I've done, but I've only had tons of peace in doing it and tons of creativity after doing it. So I just wish that everyone could uncopyright all the content so none of us have to worry about, oh, did I steal someone? Oh, did I forget to give credit? I always try to give credit when I remember that I took someone's idea. Of course I do. I try to. And this uncopyright idea, by the way, came from. I got it from Leo Babalta of Zen Habits. If you Google Zen Habits Leo that you'll find his website. And he was. He's been uncopywriting his content since 2008. Since 2008 he has uncopyrighted all his content and he's done very, very well. Anyway, so that's where I got the idea. But yeah, you know, I just wish we could be all much more liberated about ideas because truly no idea is original. Is it really? You think you came up with some idea. It's almost certain that you were at least subconsciously influenced by a number of other people and you didn't even realize that you were influenced by it. And that's how your, your ideas came to be. So I think all of us share ideas, even the very vocabulary we use that came from our teachers. Right. And it came from their teachers and original, whoever started using certain words. So anyway, I hope this is helpful. I hope this gives you some more urgency of creating content, putting stuff out there. And thank you for joining me and always welcome your questions and comments. So be well and I will see you in the next video. Thanks for joining me, Sam.
