DISQUS

valerie · 2 years ago

That is really interesting, indeed.
I hope that your wife's company does indeed investigate that situation.

Really makes you think, too, if when you're viewing someone's resume if it's all true or not. I think if I were an employer, I'd be a bit paranoid. Glad I'm not in that position :)

JB · 2 years ago

Valerie,

I know I would be paranoid if I were an employer. Not only do a lot of people lie, but having a plagiarist on staff can be a huge legal liability. I've heard of cases with graphic designers that have nixed elements in over 80% of their work.

Not cool.

I'm glad I work for myself, by myself and can't afford to hire anyone else (I'm doing good to afford a night out on the weekends).

Besides, who wants the hassle of being a boss?

Cathy Roberts · 2 years ago

I've come across this quite a few times myself, I write a lot as a 'ghost writer' so I don't put my name on everything I write, in fact, I'm often writing for someone else, as in they call my work theirs, blog owners etc.

Well, I've come across people publicly advertising my work, or my writers work, as their own work, in forums, advertising for work :O

JB · 2 years ago

Cathy: I can imagine that, as a ghostwriter, the issue comes up a lot. How do you handle those situations though? Being a ghostwriter raises a whole slew of other problems since, depending on your contract and employment situation, you may not hold a copyright interest in the work.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

John Cage · 2 years ago

One of the businesses I own is a web design company - we've been around for approx 12 years now - and we've seen our work copied a number of times. We've had sites ripped off completely - with only a few elements changed and its often the designers who do this, so the ultimate client is unaware that this has happened. In another instance we found out that a new startup design company was taking one of our interactive CD's around and saying they had done the work. The work was for Nike, so you can imagine how angry we were - turns out that one of their staff did a small bit of freelance work for us before joining them and therefore they thought it was close enough to say that they (the company) had 'done the work'.

What we do these days is we use various techniques to protect our work - or at least to find out when its happening. This is what we do:

- we always create some very specific files with image names that will not be anywhere else online. We have a piece of software that routinely (once a month) uses Googles API to search for these files. If they turn up on a domain that we were not aware of, it flags them up and sends us an email with the direct link. We investigate it manually then. So far this has worked well and whilst it does not happen often, we have caught people using our images, photographs and site designs - usually they don't even think to change the graphic name

- we employ a small organisation that specialises in monitoring the internet.... news, blogs, forums etc. We mainly use this for our larger customers, but its a great service. I'm not going to promote it on here as I don't think thats appropriate, but a Google search will turn up companies that do this. These guys only cost from $100/month, so its worth it

Good article anyway. Just found this site today, so will keep checking back

John

JB · 2 years ago

John Cage:

Some great tips there. I've talked about the idea of naming images with unique phrases or numbers in other articles. It has worked well for myself and others.

Out of curiosity though, what service do you employ? Would you be willing to provide a link either via comment or email? I'd be interested to learn more about them. I'm familiar with some such services, but only a few seem to be willing to deal with copyright issues.

Generally, it's more of a reputation management service.

Thank you very much for your comment!