Episode 41: The Epidemic of Stealing Ideas

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, everyone. Hope you are doing amazing today. I want to talk to you about an unfortunate event that happened to me last week and sort of the ethical arguments that it brought up in my head. So last last week, I wrote a post on abortion. It's obviously a big topic in our society right now, and I got a lot of feedback on it. And I noticed that a woman had basically copied the text and pasted it as her own without attribution. So I went into that thread and I said, hey, I'm glad my words are resonating with you. Can you please go ahead and attribute it to me and add the link to the post? And she said, oh, I'm so sorry. I got busy, I got a call, I was totally going to attribute it. And I said, you know, that's fine, I understand. Just fix it and we're all good. And I didn't really think much else of it because I tend to believe the best of people. I'm a pretty trusting person. And it was later that some of my followers who were a little bit more suspicious, they had their. Their bullshit meter dialed in a little bit better, said to me, julie, she's been plagiarizing you for months. And sure enough, on her timeline on Facebook were tons of my personal posts, all written as if she had done it. And these were things that were really personal. Like I had been talking about dialectical behavior therapy and my feelings about animals and the environment and just stuff that, you know, had taken me a long time to write. So of course I was furious. And it got me thinking about plagiarism, intellectual property, and how the whole community at large, Internet marketing, online marketing, handles this concept of intellectual property. And because when she finally got called out, she told me that, you know, this was what was modeled in the community. It's, we're supposed to hack people and do what's working and not try to reinvent the wheel. And I thought, gosh, what a horrible, horrible description of market research. So I wanted to talk to you today about how to figure out when you're stealing somebody else's ideas or when you're just doing research that's going to help you become a better service provider, entrepreneur, etc. So the first thing that I want to say is if you go back to high school when you had to write those horrible book reports, we were taught when doing research to go do research with a lot of different texts. The idea was that you were going to look at books and magazines and, I don't know, remember those, like, things in the library that would. Like microfiche? Is that what it's called? I can't remember. And then once the Internet came along, then it was looking on Internet websites and trying to figure out which ones were credible. And the idea was that you would come up with lots of different research and then what would you do? You would copy down a footnote and it would be, you know, the title, the author, the date, the original source. You'd source it and then you'd go off and you'd write your report. And I remember in high school we had these like APA style. You had to be. It was a big deal. And in college it became even bigger of a deal. How that you. How you would credit people for, you know, for the research that you had done. I say all that to then bring it into the online marketing space. If you are going to create content, I don't care if it's free content or paid content, but especially if it's content that you're going to sell, of course you would expect that you're going to have mentors and people that you've learned from that you are going to then want to bring your teaching. It's all in how you do it. We don't expect anybody to become a complete original author with original work because a lot of the stuff has already been researched extensively. What we do say is, okay, if you're going to talk about, let's say you're going to do a course and you're going to talk about productivity and you remember the whole 10, 50, 100 time stacking that I talked about, you could say in Julie Stoian's podcast, episode number, blah, blah blah, she talked about this concept, blah, blah, blah. And then in your course, in your program, program link directly to the source. You will eliminate so much headache. And you know what else is that when you are creating content, in order to make sure that you're introducing your methodology to the market, your new idea to the market. It's best because if you think of it that way, you are obligated to have your own spin on it, your own idea on it, and that will make you ultimately a better teacher, a better course creator, better provider. So just freaking attribute it. Like, that's all I like. That's like. The biggest thing I can say is if you are teaching something that has somebody else's idea, pay honor to that idea, link and credit that person, send traffic their way. It is very, very rare for me to be upset if I see someone talking about something that I taught, if they credit me. Now, the second thing is, what if you decide that you want to offer something or teach something, and it's so much of it, it's so well done, it's so complete that you're like, I don't really know what I could add to this. This is exactly what I want to sell. If that's the case, my recommendation is that you go to the original offer author, sorry, and you ask them if there's an opportunity to white label their product. Now, this has happened to me multiple times with Proposal Secrets. People love the course. They think it's excellent. They want to teach the same exact thing. And I am so happy to have them white label my product and sell it and by licensing to use it, then to find out later that they hacked it, or they literally recreated all the content, just, you know, maybe changed three words, and that was it. So go to the original author and see. I know when I was selling Proposal Secrets for, you know, $800, I was giving licenses away to people for 97. I said, yes, you can go sell it for whatever you want. You pay me $97 for every login. Simple. So those are two ways that you can make sure that you're not plagiarizing. The next thing is if you are getting ready to write a book, write a blog post, record a podcast, anything. I actually sort of reverse engineer my research. So what I will do is I will, without looking at any other material, see what I can produce on my own. Once I've got all my original ideas and thoughts and feelings out, then I will go and do the research. Number one, I may find that some things are the same, but because I wrote it sort of in isolation, it's so much my own words that there's no risk of plagiarism. In other cases, I'll go out and do research and I'll be like, oh, that's a great idea. And it will accentuate my writing. As long as I give attribution. So when it comes to course creation and content, podcasts, blog posts, Facebook posts, deliberately do it in your own words, without looking at any of your competitors first, and then go out and do the research. It's simply switching of the chronology of how you do things, because it will, it will make you, you know, better. I know that because a lot of things out there online are what we would call swipe files. It's easy to get confused. A perfect example would be funnel Gorgeous, right? This is a brand that I co created with Kathy Olson. We sell these gorgeous premium templates for, for very inexpensive, every single month. And a lot of our service providers buy those templates and then use them as the basis for the design. And so what we've said is, you know, if you're a service provider and you are going to go ahead and work with somebody and build the funnel, use it as a base, and then design it and customize it for that customer, that's fine. But you can't simply turn around and resell them because essentially what you're doing is you're stealing money from us because we sell them, not you, right, Versus we don't do done for you customization of the funnels. So it would stand to reason if you want to charge the money for your time to customize the template for them, that is different. So even though this is a lot of nuanced stuff, it always helps when you ask, when you reach out to the original author, when you reverse how you do your research. If you do your research after you've come up with your idea instead of before, and if you create great attribution, if you stick to those three rules, you are going to be well on your way to avoiding the uncomfortable situation that this girl found herself in when I realized she had been plagiarizing my content for months. And lastly, don't try to pretend you have feelings about things that aren't your feelings. People will smell through inauthenticity so fast. And it's way better to just be honest about where you are and where you're headed than it is to try to pretend that you've got an expertise that you don't. So, anyway, that's my little soapbox for today. I hope you have a great week. Talk to you soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.