You Can’t Reproduce My Story Without Permission. Not Even With Proper Attribution
That’s stealing.
I know it happens. It’s the internet, after all. And even though I don’t think my work is good or important enough to have been reproduced without my knowledge hundreds of times, I imagine some of it has been already. I have, however, never caught anyone before like I caught you now, and I have to say it made me quite angry.
I have since contacted you about it, and you’ve been nice enough to take it down. However, I feel compelled to dig deeper into the many reasons why I think what you did was wrong. Partly to explain myself (in case you’re reading this), partly as a PSA for anyone out there who thinks copying and pasting content from the internet is no big deal.
What did you do? You copied one of my Medium stories in its entirety and created a social media post out of it. You didn’t take a paragraph or two and quoted it, you copied the whole thing.
Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
You said you thought attributing the piece to me would be enough. And my name was there in your post, right under the title. By Tesia Blake.
It seems like it’s supposed to be enough, but it’s not. Let me tell you why.
You didn’t ask permission
You found that story on Medium, the only place where I posted it. Medium has the option of a response section, and the response section on my story is open. You could have dropped a line there letting me know you liked my story and asking if you could post it on social media.
Other people have made similar requests. I’ve been politely asked to have a story read on someone’s podcast, and I said yes. I said yes because, unlike you, she had the decency to ask my permission first.
I posted that story behind Medium’s paywall
Which means I do expect to make some money out of it. Part of the idea of joining the Partner Program is that my story shouldn’t be available for people who aren’t paying a Medium membership (unless they still have one of the 3 free stories Medium allows non-paying members every month, but still, it’s meant to be read on Medium, not anywhere else).
I’m trying to be a professional writer here, you see, which means I have to make money from my writing.
By copying my story in full and sharing it on social media, you’re making a story that’s intended for a paying audience public, which potentially hurts my monthly earnings.
If you need content for your page, I’ll be happy to provide you with some, but you bet I’m going to charge for it. Writing content for clients is what I do for a living, after all.
Just attributing my name is not enough
There’s a reason I use Unsplash pictures on my Medium posts. Unsplash is a website specifically for free-copyright images, which means that when people upload their pictures there, they are allowing others to use these pictures for free, with the only request being proper attribution.
Medium, however, is not Unsplash.
When writers post on Medium, they retain the rights to their work. Meaning, if you reproduce work you found on Medium without the writer’s permission, you’re stealing.
Quoting, sharing and stealing are 3 different things
It’s ok to quote people. I do it all the time. I have taken a line or two of someone else’s story, put it between quotations, given proper attribution, and used it to make my own story better. I usually use a quote to sustain a point I’m making, or I’ll open my story with a quote I’d like to make a comment on.
Here’s the thing, though: I have never quoted more than a paragraph of someone else’s work.
Reproducing an entire story is not quoting someone. That is, as I’ve said before, stealing.
Reproducing work is also not the same as sharing. There are proper ways to share content on social media (more on that later), and if you want to feature someone else’s content on your blog or page, again, you have to ask permission first.
You can’t just reproduce content without permission and think it’s ok because you call it “sharing.”
You didn’t even post a direct link to my work
I have also never, ever, quoted someone without adding a direct link to the original piece.
How could you think it was ok to copy my entire story and not even share a link to the original post?
I work my butt off every day to create original content to post, and even though I do it out of love for writing and for the ideas I share, I also do it to build an audience. Love doesn’t pay the bills, you know.
When you take a piece (or everything) of my work and don’t link it back to the original post, you take away an opportunity for me to expand my reach and increase my audience. By not linking back you show that you’re interested in building your own audience out of my efforts.
You could have used a share button
Medium also has share buttons at the bottom. It creates a nice post with the title, subtitle and picture of the piece you want to share. If you were only interested in sharing content you liked the proper way, you could have gone that route, and the fact you chose not to makes me question your intentions.
You seem like a nice person
You really do. You were nice enough to respond to my message and take the post down, which makes me think you had no malice behind your actions. I just hope that you can also understand my side, and that what happened between us today gives you a new insight into the etiquette of reproducing content on the internet.
And by etiquette I mean never do it unless you have express permission to.
