Lizard licks
Ouch. I’m wounded, and need to howl a little.
An ostensible VA, whose name I will not reveal though perhaps I ought to, took multiple posts from my blog and pasted them on her site, without permission or attribution of any kind.
This theft came to my attention when the pingbacks were emailed to me.
I experienced all the usual creepy feeling that accompanies being ripped off. The revulsion, the indignity, the pure yuckiness of knowing someone else has your stuff.
Of course, the contact information on the burglar’s site didn’t go through. I used whois to grab another email address, wrote a self-righteous cease and desist, and next morning got a reply that a mistake had been made (uh-huh) and the situation would be corrected immediately.
Which it mostly is. The pages are live, still, but not in her current navigation. I’ve asked her to remove them from her server. We’ll see.
During all this, a slowly encroaching under-thought spread in a trickle through my consciousness. After a while, it became a puddle I could no longer ignore.
The thought was: who cares? So what if this desperate person has stolen my blog posts? What is the actual consequence of her action?
I might fear that my writings will earn her respect and recognition that do not belong to her. Yet no one who actually worked with her would believe she was one and the same as the author of those posts. The contrast was sharp between her site copy and the language of the posts. By using my writings, she was only endangering her own reputation.
A brand is in the eye of the beholder, and really can’t be faked for any length of time.
So, in any practical sense, how did it hurt me that those posts were duplicated without their author box? I give them away for free on my site; it’s not like they’re for sale or anything. I write the posts as contributions to the ongoingness of business life, as a way to have a share in the conversation.
The reaction I had to being ripped off must be grounded in the lizard brain: that paranoid, primal animal brain that kept us from the dinosaur’s jaws millennia ago. It’s a stone age kind of emotion. Perhaps we can get past its reptilian fears, as we build a better society.
It’s true that I was raised to consider first and foremost the needs of the other person. So to take something that doesn’t belong to me without asking for it seems to ignore the needs of the other, who will be shocked, alarmed, hurt when the loss is discovered – n’est-ce-pas? I would certainly prefer to be credited with a legitimate author box each and every time my writing appears on someone else’s site.
Nonetheless, a breach of courtesy does not necessarily equate to a breach of law; and all my indignation and name-calling above is perhaps unjustified even if understandable. Since imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, the duplication should be a mild vote of confidence instead of an insult.
Maybe I should have just approved those pingbacks and forgot about it.
I’m really curious about your thoughts on the matter.
