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It was mid-April. A listserv colleague suggested, “If you have content on the web, see if anyone is copying it at www.CopyScape.com.”

See for yourself In the panels below, the yellow areas identify text from Hildy's 2001 article "Why Boards Micromanage and How to Get Them to Stop" that was copied into a 3 part series published by the American School Board Journal in 2005 Click to read the article

I typed our URL into Copyscape. And my hands started shaking. There was my Micromanagement article, the one that has been one of the most popular articles at our site since I wrote it in 2001. My article had been published as a 3-part series in the American School Board Journal under someone else’s name.

And so our adventure began.

“Copying” does not begin to describe what I found as I read this 3-part series. The “author” had gone far beyond just cutting and pasting portions of my article into his, or changing my meaning into his own words. No, he had literally published my article, word for word, as his own.

He lifted an entire exercise word for word, and featured it as a sidebar. He removed my quotation marks and attribution from a John Carver quote, claiming Carver’s words as his own as well.

And then there was this:

In my article, in a box that says, “TRUE STORY,” I tell the story of a board president comparing a board to a ship’s captain.

And sure enough, the plagiarized article included my story - a story that happened to me! The “author” then added the following line to my story: “Let me illustrate with an incident from my experience working as a consultant to a school board.” That’s right - he intentionally turned a story that happened to me into a story that happened to him!

You can see why my hands were shaking. This went beyond lifting a few words or sentences. This was everything, including exercises I had developed and stories that had happened to ME!

The story then turns ironic. First, of course, there is the irony of the choice of publication - the American School Board Journal - a publication that would be particularly sensitive to plagiarism.

But then there is the worse irony.

The person who published that article is an educator himself -

A university professor,

In the education department of one of the country’s leading universities...

Teaching ethics and leadership.

I love our Intellectual Property attorney. Dale Regelman is brilliant. I fear I will never know as much about anything as Dale knows about patent and copyright and trademark law. But Dale is also thoughtful and creative. After explaining that we would have little to gain in filing a lawsuit (we have learned much about protecting ourselves since that day!), he recommended the following:

Both you and ASBJ have been wronged. The guy clearly sold them a bill of goods. So talk with them first.

Before you do, print out a copy of your article. And then print out a copy of theirs. Take a yellow highlighter and highlight everything in his article that is the same as yours. Let that sea of yellow do your talking.

Nick Perona interns in our office, a bright Political Science major, passionate about righting injustice. Nick was just the man for the job. Hourly, he would head to the supply cabinet for more highlighters as he created sets of documents for the various parties. You can see his work in the right-hand column of this screen. The yellow areas are those that were lifted, word for word, into the American School Board Journal article. A similar set highlighted their version as well, to compare.

Glenn Cook is the editor in chief of the American School Board Journal. Within moments of his receiving those yellow articles, along with a letter explaining the circumstances and some third-party documentation, proving the original work was, indeed, mine, Glenn picked up the phone and called me.

Again, my hands were shaking. Should I expect confrontation? Disbelief? Accusation?

What I did not expect was a delightful conversation with a man whose passion for the mission of his organization shone through everything else.

During those first moments on the phone, Glenn shared the history of the American School Board Journal. At 116 years old, it is the oldest continuously published educational journal in the nation. And in that 116 years, this is the first time such a thing has occurred.

As a writer myself, I was not surprised when Glenn told me that the “author” of my article had signed a statement, affirming that he owned all rights to the work. That is pretty standard stuff, as publishers seek to protect themselves from - well - just this sort of thing!

Suddenly the issue was bigger than my being wronged. This was a breach of contract, and potentially fraud.

And so, when Glenn offered to be the one to put the “author” on notice, I accepted. The rest of the story is in the editorial Glenn wrote for this month’s edition of the American School Board Journal.CLICK The piece is written with such quiet force and grace, that I recommend it highly to you.

So what have we learned?

The answer falls into two categories..

First, the problem-solving learnings.

1. To those who publish, check to see if your stuff is still yours, and protect yourself as best you can. We now have a system in place to check every month to see if someone has taken our stuff. And our reprint policy and notice is going on every page.
2. Determine the extent to which it is valuable to share vs. to protect. We believe strongly in the work of the Creative Commons - an effort to balance protecting ownership with sharing knowledge. You can learn more about them here: CLICK
3. To be protected in the eyes of the courts, at least in the U.S., you need to have registered your copyright with the U.S. Register of Copyrights. If you want to sue for punitive damages, again in the U.S., it is not enough to put the Copyright symbol on your work and claim it is yours. Without registration, you can still sue for damages if you can prove you have been harmed (and if you can prove someone made money from stealing your stuff). But without a registered copyright, you cannot sue for punitive damages. And the registration is relatively cheap - $45 apiece or so.
4. If you are in need of back-up information, consider anyone who has blogged about your work - it will have the date on it. (Thanks to Michael Gilbert for having done so on our article way back in 2002). And speaking of "way back" - the WayBack Machine is an Internet archive that sweeps the web every few months, archiving what it finds. While it is not current minute by minute, we were able to prove that as of early 2002, the article just as I wrote it was documented at the Way Back Machine. CLICK
5. To those who have magazines, blogs, or other publications where you have others write for you, do more due diligence. It is not enough to have someone sign the statement that they swear on a stack of bibles they own the work. That statement will not save you embarrassment, it will just save you legal fees. Glenn would have much rather had someone do the homework beforehand than to learn about it from getting the yellow highlighted copy Nick prepared.
6. For great information about protecting your web content, this is a great article, called "What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content. CLICK While aimed primarily at blogging, it is a wonderful introduction to the realities of intellectual property in this digital age.

The Bigger Question

Trying to fight an issue like Internet plagiarism is like sticking fingers in the holes in the dam. Eventually, we run out of fingers, and the town gets drenched. Perhaps, then, it is time to stop using up our fingers on a futile effort, and focus instead on keeping the town dry.

As a global community that wants to encourage creativity and sharing of information while protecting copyrights, what can we do to begin aiming at that end result? If every action we take today is creating the future, how can we start building the future we want - aiming at keeping the town dry, once and for all?

I am in no way suggesting that we do not each have our own personal responsibility. Each of us is indeed creating our own future, as the person who plagiarized my article can certainly attest. He created what is now the present for him, and for me, and for the ASBJ editor, all by what he did 2 years ago.

My bigger concern is for the future we are all collectively creating. Are we perhaps unwittingly encouraging the very actions we abhor? What might happen if we did more than just discourage plagiarism - more than just finding more ways to plug the holes in the dam? What if we aimed our efforts at what we DO want, instead of at what we do NOT want?

The effects of inspiring reverence for something (learning, self-expression, wisdom) can last far longer than the threat of punishment. Why continue to only build systems around the punishment, when the inspiration is where all our power resides?

We are indeed each responsible for our own actions. And that makes us responsible for the future we are creating, not just for ourselves, but for everyone in this interconnected world. Can we aim our efforts at creating a world that needs LESS plagiarism monitoring, rather than aiming those efforts only at enhancing that monitoring? Can we start building the world we want, instead of fighting the world we do not want?

While for now, we will continue to protect ourselves and encourage others to do the same, the larger challenge is where our collective power and potential lie. And that is far more exciting than finding more ways to plug those holes in the dam.

 For a look at how Schools and Hospitals can aim at that future for their communities, 
CLICK