Fri 13th Feb 2015: This matter has now been resolved. The company have removed the content. In fact, at the time of writing, their entire site was down. The owner refused to take personal responsibility, claiming his production company’s wording was all written by somebody on Fiverr (a website where you pay people a few dollars to write content). As a gesture of goodwill I have removed the company’s name from this post, and any pictures showing their name. I have kept this post up as a record.
I am writing about being plagiarised all too often. Just last week I wrote about another company, who not only stole content from my showreels page but still kept my name in their coding. (This week they took down they complied with my request to take down the stolen content)
And now I find that COMPANY NAME have also been stealing from my site.
Here’s a line from my site:
“I create showreels from scratch for actors. I pride myself on producing exactly what each actor needs to showcase their talents. I write unique and original scenes for EVERY showreel”
On their site, they wrote:
“COMPANY NAME create showreels from scratch for actors. We write unique and original scenes for every* showreel. We pride ourselves on producing exactly what each actor needs to showcase their talents.”
(RED indicates how they are different).
*They didn’t capitalise EVERY the way I did. I admit this may be an improvement, grammatically.
(IMAGE REMOVED – It names the company who stole)
In case their cleverness has fooled you, let me explain. They switched the sentence order and changed ‘I’ to ‘COMPANY NAME‘, but it’s the exact same writing!
And of course, in a world of similar ideas, I concede there is always a small chance that they accidentally, somehow, used the same wording. Unlikely, but possible.
But now look at the image below. Look at the wording of my ‘Edit Only’ page and the details of my video monologue offer. And then look at the words of COMPANY NAME.
The creator of the site has plagiarised my words, the design outlay of the deals, and the precise wording of the offers.
Also, the changing ‘Monologue Filming’ to ‘Video Audition’ and pricing it at £50; guess what: that is also from my page! Here’s how my page looked back in March 2013:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130312024215/https://www.danieljohnsonfilms.co.uk/showreels
This is the FOURTH time I have discovered my work being plagiarised. Last year, another website, started by a couple whose day jobs were working as Junior Researchers on a well known British TV show, decided to literally TAKE ONE OF MY VIDEOS and claim it as their own.
This matter was eventually settled and their website taken down. Similarly, another guy was recently posting showreel offers on Gumtree using the precise wording of my showreels page. The screenshot is here:
And now in the past week, the discovery that two more companies are using my material. People keep saying to me that I should take it as a compliment, and in some way, I do. But a nice compliment would be having these people email me to say they like my work, rather than ripping off what I do to make a living.
The thing that gets me about the way these guys are plagiarising, is that they are stealing words and videos that are about ORIGINALITY. How original can their scenes be when they’re stealing wording, videos, and code from other websites?
