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Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery ... To a Point

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what would you call plagiarism ... a form of fawning hero worship?

Hardly. Plagiarists have no respect for the hard work and creativity of others. They prefer to take a short-cut to success by copying the work of other people and claiming it as their own.

Psychologically plagiarists fit a wide range of personality types and patterns.

Many are otherwise decent, hard-working people who make a one-time mistake under the pressure of a deadline. Some may suffer deep insecurity about their abilities, ignoring the fact that falsely presenting somebody else's work as their own sets them up in the eyes of their employers for expectations that they may not be able to fulfill.

On a deeper and more sinister level, some plagiarists may be narcissists or socoiopaths who would do anything to advance their interests at the expense of others including lie about achievements, present false credentials on resumes, pander to the egos of superiors, or try to shift blame to others for their own short-comings and mistakes.

Of course there are people and places with no respect for concepts like "intellectual property" or "copyright", and who believe that they have the right to rip off the work of other people to support their own professional or economic development. But they're drinking from their own kool-aid. In the end, quality will be their Achilles heel because they are not prepared to do the leg work and invest the sweat equity required for lasting success.

Now Odysseus is a pretty easy-going guy. And lately he's been even more relaxed and laid back. I've just satisfactorily resolved some pressing family business and have returned from a wonderful vacation in New York City with Big J, who used to be my Little Buddy but now wears size 12 and a half extra wide sneakers.

So I come back all relaxed and feeling at peace with the world and ready to jump back into the endlessly fascinating business of designing and building e-commerce systems in an SAP environment ... When I caught my reflection in a distored mirror ... And in another IT Toolbox blog to boot.

Creative Copying

Somebody copied one of my most commented-on blog postings — SAP EDI Mapping: An IDoc for Every Interface — and published it on his blog under his own name ... word for word.

He didn't paraphrase it or incorporate portions of it into his writing. He simply cut and paste the entire posting and published it as if he had spent all the hours researching, writing, and editing it. The only thing he changed was the byline, even though my writing style is markedly different from the style in his blog description and profile, where it is painfully clear that English is not his first language.

He didn't imitate my formatting, however. I use an embedded CSS style sheet to format subheadings and tables. My erstwhile plagiarst clearly didn't know how to do this. My poor subheadings looked like tiny lonely paragraphs and my nicely formatted HTML table like a jagged tangle of words.

I take great care with my formatting and have spent hours trying to get the width of table columns just right. But this kind of attention to detail is what distinguishes somebody who's passionate about his work from somebody who couldn't give a damn as long as he gets a byline that he can include in a resume or a sales pitch.

I only discovered this theft of my intellectual property by a fluke. I got an email from one of my LinkedIn EDI groups that included a message from Harold DeWayne linking to his Laughing Blue Iris EDI Education Site.

I liked the title so I linked to it and noticed that he had a blog. I clicked on the blog link and immediately saw the posting title An Excellent Reference for SAP Mapping, dated February 9, 2010, that included a link to an IT Toolbox blog.

My Own Image

Naturally I clicked and you could have knocked me over with a feather ... my blog posting popped up, word for word, with the same heading, stripped of my formatting, under somebody else's name, dated February 2010. He had even gotten a couple of comments, hits that should have gone to my own blog.

So I contacted Harold and the IT Toolbox admin folks. My pilfered posting was immediately removed from the plagiarist's blog and Harold replaced the link in his blog with my original posting.

I spend a lot of hours each week working on my blogs. I'm a single parent with a demanding career and a unique family situation that eats up a great deal of my time. Every hour that I spend writing my blog is an hour that could be devoted to my son or my job or some other project or even just relaxing.

I write because I love my work and because I have experience and insights that other people may find useful. There are a lot of other reasons to blog, of course, but none of them are worth anything if I can't produce a product that is at least a little entertaining and informative. And that takes skill and hard work ... work that I don't get paid for I might add.

I hope that my readers can use my work. You're free to incorporate any of it in your own blogs or other published work. All you need to do is acknowledge the source. After all, everybody's work builds on the work of others. I collected the information for my own IDoc-EDI mapping blog from a number of sources, all of which are attributed. But I did more than just aggregate information. I added additional IDoc mappings and my own view of the transactions.

So I won't name my plagiarist. That would only give him and his blog more publicity, and potentially hits, than he deserves. He knows who he is. Suffice it to say that I've browsed through his few postings and they're not particularly original. I hope that he learns something from this: there are no short-cuts to success and there's no profit in stealing other people's work and claiming it as your own.

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