Someone Out There is Swiping Nicholas Boothman’s Stuff

I recently received an email offer for a “Great Seminar Opportunity” that will build my business into a winner. The seminar is offered by a local business coach who is promising that I will learn to systemize and leverage my business - and even to increase my profits by a specific percentage. The coach didn’t promise that I will learn how to steal other people’s copyrighted materials. He should have.

The same coach, in a previous email newsletter, had written an article called “How to Make People Like You.” It was a pretty darn good article.

The problem is that is was too pretty darn good. You see, the business coach who offered the article under his own name, was not the author of the article at all.

In fact, the article had been copied word for word from a 2001 article for the prestigious and unbelievably practical newsletter called Bottom Line Secrets.

Yes, “How to Make People Like You: Secrets of Instant Rapport” was written by Nicholas Boothman, a leading speaker and author, and an expert on the ways human beings connect and communicate.

How did we know this? Something about the tone and voice of the coach’s article just didn’t ring true.

Search Engines offer a great deterrent to copyright infringement. Teachers have long known this and are able to spot which of their students are not writing their own term papers.

So, how did I test my suspicions? I put a phrase from the article into Google (almost any phrase will do) and made sure that phrase was in quotation marks, like this:

“Your attitude sets the quality and mood of your thoughts”

When I did this I found Nicholas’ article in Bottom Line from 6 years ago. Hmmm… So, was the “great seminar” coach really the author of his newsletter article, or was Nicholas Boothman the author?

To make sure, we wrote an email to Mr. Boothman and received a telephone call from the Canadian author a few days later. Within minutes we had no trouble telling that he was not only the author of the article, but also the author of several books published by Workman, one of which is How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less.

This guy is not making false claims - we liked him in less than a minute. Mr. Boothman was engaging, brilliant, funny and generous. He was surprised to know that someone had stolen his article, but decided to let his attorneys deal with the issue. (Note: the links from the business coach’s article have since been removed, so his attorneys must have been persuasive).

On the Internet people are swiping stuff all the time. In fact, they’ve invented computer programs to do the stealing for them. The term “blog scraping” is now so common that Wikipedia even has an entry about it.

I have often read advice to newsletter and blog writers that it doesn’t matter what they write. “Just write something,” the aspiring writers are told, “the search engines will love your new content.”

Well, it does matter what you write. When you write original content, it becomes a part of you. When someone else steals it, they steal that part of you.

Today, you can see who is stealing Nicholas’ stuff if you do the same kind of search. First read his article, and then choose a portion of almost any sentence and let Google or Yahoo do the rest (just make sure to put that sentence portion in quotation marks).

You can also test out other suspicious “original” content of the newsletters and blogs you read. You just might be surprised.

And don’t forget to pay attention to your own material. Someone out there is not only swiping Nicholas Boothman’s stuff, they’re swiping yours, too.