"Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery"

Not so, unfortunately, when it comes in the form of plagiarism. We recently came face to face with one of the downsides of internet marketing when we discovered that two other companies who offer wedding consulting services – one in Illinois and one right here in Connecticut (actually, it's a florist who dabbles in wedding consulting) – have blatantly copied text from our website. Now, we can certainly understand visiting competitor websites to get an idea of how other wedding professionals are positioning their services in the marketplace, but these people didn’t even make an effort to change things up a bit. The verbiage was copied word for word directly from our site.

What makes matters worse is that this is a creative profession, one that requires out-of-the-box thinking. One of the offending companies even uses the word “Original” in her business name. I can’t think of anything original about taking someone else’s work without permission and claiming it as your own. We have contacted these companies to make them aware that plagiarism is a crime, and we encourage other business owners to run a search on your own websites to see who may have “borrowed” copyrighted material. You can visit www.copyscape.com to utilize this free service.