I was plagiarized
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Hi Reader, Chet emailed in to say a guy plagiarized me on Medium. I was plagiarized. I wrote an article about comedian George Carlin’s odd note-taking system a while ago. The article went viral, and Medium paid me a few hundred dollars. (You can read my article here) A few days later, a plagiarizer copied my article into his Medium account. He changed the picture and republished it under his name. When I heard about it, I left him a snarky comment and moved on with my day. I used to worry a lot about plagiarism. That’s not the first time someone copied my work. I found a PDF of my writing books on a torrent site a few years ago. Dozens of sites have copied articles from my sites onto their own. Sometimes, I issue DMCA take-down requests, but I don’t worry much about plagiarism. You see… That article was part of a series of articles and content promoting my course about the Zettelkästen Method for Writers. I earned several thousand dollars and attracted some high-quality students from the launch. That ahem writer copying one of my articles is like taking a single piece from a jigsaw puzzle and passing it off as a finished work. If you’re creating content online and attracting any kind of audience, you’ll be ripped off at some point. It could be a human. Or it could be AI. You can waste hours getting angry. Or you can move on. Whatever you decide, here’s what’s far more valuable: The relationship between you and your audience. No one can copy that. Write on,
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