A Word of Advice - From Judge Judy

• By: Dave Burr
• On: 12/21/2009 08:53:36
• In: Marketing
• Comments:

Alright, I will admit publicly to watching Judge Judy on occasion. I'll go one step further and admit that have TiVo'd it. Oh, the hell with it - I TiVo it every day.  Why not? She is a wise old lady, and her show, like Jerry Springer's, makes me feel better about myself!

One of the things she says often on the show is "If you tell the truth, you don't have to have a good memory." I am quite sure that she is not the one that made that up. It seems pretty obvious. Sometimes it makes me think back to an incident that occurred about a year ago:

I received an e-mail with the following content: "Notice to SalesSync(sic): It has been brought to our notice that the content on your website has been plagiarized from copyrighted material on XXXXXXXXXXX.com which is under the wing of XXXXXXXXX. Please remove / change the content within 2 days. Else we might be forced to take necessary legal action. Please feel free to contact me for any further clarifications"

(Of course I X'd out the name of the web site and the company, although to this day I am tempted not to.)

Well, of course I immediately went to that site to see what that was about, and sure enough, some company had literally copied and pasted whole paragraphs from our web site - words that I had personally written almost ten YEARS prior! Until this happens to you, you have no idea what it feels like - it is a real violation. As is my nature, the next step was surely to be an unleashing of shock and awe, and its attendant megabucks of legal fees. Records were dug up, attorneys were contacted, the wheels were in motion. I mean, this was 10:20am and I had received this e-mail at 10:00.

Along with those things, I did write a quick response to the originator of the e-mail succinctly stating my case and what was bound to happen, and within about 30 minutes (well before my lawyer got back to me), I received an e-mail from that same address, the sender now claiming to be a different person, and additionally claiming that the original sender had used that e-mail address in an "unauthorized" fashion. The "new" person indicated that they would check into it, and I politely said, "please do, and have it down within 48 hours", to which they ultimately complied.

So it seems that some marketing guy at this company got on our site and noticed content that seemed strangely familiar, and without knowing that the content on their own site had originally been stolen from us, took no time in contacting us about our "violation".

Moral - If you are unethical (or perhaps in this case, hire someone else who is prone to dishonest behavior and don't do any oversight), you are going to get bitten, and it may be in what can only be described as in an a very embarrassing manner. Over the years, you are bound to forget the details of past ill behavior - especially if that behavior is part of your corporate culture.