People copying your work will make you stronger. It’s something that only happens to the best of us (she said, time and time again while rocking back and forward). No honestly. Getting copied by others sucks big time. It makes you want to do something completely different from your work, life, sweat, joy, and tears. I have tried it around 5 or 6 times now and it’s not fun. It hits right up on the ego. And you end up having this small voice inside your head saying “See? I told you that you weren’t good enough”.
But you can take a couple of precautions for when it happens. Like having a good lawyer and friends to discuss your approach to it. And some time to craft a polite, yet a “stop using my stuff/terms/whathaveyou” email to people copying your work: the people who have been ripping you off.
I would strongly discourage everyone to ever rip other peoples work off, and instead, use their work but make sure that the person who created it in the first place they know, they’re thankful and they get a karma boost of a couple of 1000 because you’re using their work. I have written about this before in an article called “getting credit matters”.
As the ever-awesome Danielle Laporte has said:
“People say “It doesn’t matter who gets the credit” – well screw that, it matters a lot”.
Stuck in the middle with you, rockers!
