Stealing Other People's Work Doesn't Pay

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13.3K followers
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Hey, folks!

Wealthy Affiliate teaches us to create original content. This is a big part of your future success. Unlike many other "programs", Wealthy Affiliate also makes it very clear that there is NO magic shortcut to success. If you want to make money and build a sustainable business you need to invest your time and effort.

I am not going to point fingers at anyone here but two days ago I found 3 different Youtube channels that re-posted my videos, needless to say without my permission. The sad part it that all 3 people are members at Wealthy Affiliate.

They downloaded my WA review video and re-uploaded to their own channels, including their affiliate link in the video description.

It took me about 1 minute to report each video to Youtube for copyright infringement and Youtube took those videos down in less than 12 hours. Google doesn't play well with content theft.

Now, my videos were not the only stolen videos. Original content of other WA members were also re-uploaded by the same channels and they will be reported to Youtube as well. Do you know what happens when your channel gets penalized for copyright infringement a few times? Your Youtube channel gets shut down all together.

So to those members who steal content: You spend time copying other people's work and then your channel gets closed. Do you think it's a wise time investment? Not at all. You would have been way better off investing that time into creating your own content. That's beyond the point that what you're doing is unethical.

I've said it many times before and I'll repeat it again: there is no shortcut to success.

On that, wishing you all a great day ;)

Alex

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Recent Comments

64

goodness! What a shame this has to happen however I am glad you found it. Thank you for sharing and I hope that your post will deter WA members from doing this.
Stay Awesome,
Tammy:-))

Agree! Although I am a big believer in Market and competition research, there is a huge difference between copying and modeling! People do not take into consideration how bad that affects their name and brand long term, those are also the same people that end up quit within a few months as well.

First let me say that I hate when people steal or copy or plagiarize, but I have a question here:

I'm not familiar with youtube channels yet, but when Kyle encourages people to 'leverage content at WA' he encourages us to take, for example, your blog or training at WA, put a link to it on our site, with our own affiliate link getting the credit - how did the youtube guys who uploaded your vids differ from this - was it still you talking but did they put their name to it or something?

Something obvious I suppose is that your youtube channel is not content at WA, and youtube definitely didn't like it...

Ok I'll try to explain.
1. They went on youtube and found my video.
2. They downloaded this video to their computer
3. They re-uploaded my video to their own Youtube channel, basically claiming it is their own video.
4. They added their affiliate link into video description.

So I work hard to create content then someone simply steals it and uses it for their their own benefit.

Now, about leveraging WA content.
Kyle teaches us that it's a good idea to LINK to wealthy affiliate content, not repost it on your own sites.

For example, you can write a blog post about setting up your own blog. Then, within that post you can write something like: "Check out this great in-depth tutorial on how to create create a blog that your readers would love". Now you use your affiliate link to link to this tutorial on WA.

As far as I know you are not allowed to copy/paste content from WA to your own site.

In short: Linking to someone's content is fine, re-posting someone else's content as your own is not.

yes, I see they should have sent people to your channel, not expanded their own channel at your expense

Thanks for the clarification! I have some youtube links/videos on my site as well. I did blog and ask if its ok to do that and got a thumbs up from many members.

Hi Alex, sorry to hear this but it will be good to educate us on the laws of youtube. some marketers give the impression that you can just upload other peoples videos and use them on your channel. not much education is given on copyright issues.

Well, I think not much education is needed on this subject. If you didn't create the content then you probably aren't allowed to re-use it as your own. And I am not talking about ONLY Youtube. This to text, images, audio, video and any other form of content. (unless it's clearly specified that you can use it).

At the very least, you can reach out to the creator of that content and ask if you can reuse it.

And my suggestion is to stay away from marketers who are teaching you to simply grab whatever content you like and pretend it's yours ;)

I hear you. thanks. everyone needs to do his own ground work, I suppose.

Sorry to hear that sort of crap happens!

Thanks again for the heads-up Alex.
I reported the one you mentioned.

I remember this being a problem years ago, but I guess it's never stopped being a problem by the looks of it.

Yeah, it'll never stop. However I don;t mind reporting such issue if it only takes a minute of my time ;)

I'm sorry this happened to you Alex. I'm shocked that people would do something like this and even more so WA members! I'm glad you found out.

Very unethical Alex, as you say, we're taught the correct way to do it here. Surely a video review looks so much better if it is coming from yourself as the owner anyway.

You did the right thing Alex it has happen before and some people think they are taking a shortcut but they soon find out the hard way there is no shortcut.
These are the same type of people we try to avoid with scams and to me people copying content and videos such as yours are just scammers in my book.
Take care
Andre

I usually don't spend time looking for those who copy my work, I happened to stumble upon these videos by accident. I'm glad I did though ;)

That is not cool at all. Sorry to hear that Alex. I am shocked that people would do such a thing.

C

As I mentioned, the big surprise to me is that it was done by WA members who are taught against doing this. I guess not all members are created equal ;)

I'm afraid I have seen some plagiarism around here before - a couple of websites are knocking around that have literally taken word-for-word the content that Kyle posted on his howtolosebellyfattoday.com site.

I guess you could call it flattery, and at the end of the day, the people stealing your work will lose out.

Why can't people just come up with their own ideas!?

C

Yeah, in the long run that won't be beneficial. Google will probably penalize the site for duplicate content. And if Kyle will take a few minutes to report that site it will most likely be taken down.

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