 When it comes to creating content, should you be worried that if your content gets out there, people share it, that someone out there might copy your content and reuse it or call it their own and not give you credit for it? So I know some people are concerned about this and it might even be blocking them from creating more content or they might spend too long finding ways to protect it somehow. So let me share with you now that I have written, I have made well over a thousand videos out there which has a lot of ideas of course and each of those videos has at least a short blog post attached to it, I have shared a lot of content out there. And so I imagine that somewhere someone has probably copied a paragraph if not entire articles and put it out there and maybe they just copy and paste it onto a Facebook post or something like that and not mention me. In fact, I think I've seen it once or twice before. Am I worried? No, I mean, some people do get concerned enough where they sign up for plagiarism monitoring services or they find, there's multiple kinds of monitoring services out there. I think it's too much stress. And when I saw that someone had pasted copy pasted my thing, I noticed that it didn't get much traction. Again, a little bit of traction but not as much as mine got. Again, that was only like once in a blue moon type of situation. So should you be concerned that your stuff goes viral and people use it and don't give you credit? I think that it's having that concern creates more limitation for your creativity than it does helping your business or the notoriety of your work. So instead of being worried about that and trying to hunt people down for it, I recommend that you take simple preventive measures that make it less likely for it to happen or rather the preventive measures I'm gonna share with you will make it such that if some idea you share goes viral and people start to copy it that someone will research and find you as the original source. So here are the simple ways and this is what I do myself. A very simple way of doing it is to make a video of you talking about the idea and upload it to YouTube because when you upload a video to YouTube, it has and you publish it, make it public. It has a timestamp and that timestamp can't be changed. You can't edit your video once it's been published on YouTube. And you can publish this on Facebook and Instagram as well and any other platform where there's a timestamp. So once you do this, then you can rest assured that well, at least you have spoken the idea or shared the idea of you, if you do art, you can share the art, a picture of the art or something on the video. And it's out there now so that there's a timestamp. Okay, simplest way of doing it. If you don't wanna make video then an alternate, if you just wanna do writing, then you could use Twitter for this purpose because Twitter also every single tweet has a timestamp. If you're writing a longer article, you can break it up into 280 character segments and just tweet it out as a Twitter thread. In fact, this very idea that I'm sharing with you, these preventive measures, et cetera, also started as a Twitter thread that I put out there and that was, I don't know how many months ago that I did this and now I'm making a YouTube video, Facebook video for this as well. So, I forgot to mention, podcast is another way of doing it. If you don't wanna be on video, but you wanna speak the idea, you simply publish it as a podcast. It has a timestamp. The problem with podcast is that you're gonna have to keep hosting the podcast files forever for podcast audio. So you have to keep paying most podcast hosts. There are like anchor.fm and other podcast hosts that don't, we can get it for free. But anyway, I think YouTube video is a longest lasting solution. And then Twitter is also another free and long lasting solution. So if you just do that, then again, people will eventually research the origin of some idea that went viral and find you as the source or if you find that someone has copied your thing and it's gone really done really well, you can always point back to the fact that you published that idea originally. Now, personally, I don't see myself ever doing that. I mean, well, I've been creating content now actively, very actively since 2015. And so in the past seven years, like as I have not come across this problem, I don't know, maybe my ideas aren't that good. But I would like to think that out of a thousand ideas I've shared out there, probably at least one or two of them are good enough to go viral. And some of my things have done pretty well. And again, I have not seen copycats. And in the rare case that I have seen them, theirs doesn't do as well as mine does. And so just a couple of preventive measures helps with that. But let's kind of take a step back and just think more about what ideas are and why we are so protective of them. Every idea that you think is original to you, chances are honestly someone else in the world probably has had the idea. But also, someone in the world has probably already put that idea out there in some other format. They might not be word for word what you said, but it's probably similar enough. And so I just think that this whole notion of, okay, this is my idea, I got to claim it and I got to make sure no one else uses it is really small thinking and tends to limit our creativity. So what I do is I put my energy towards creating more ideas and putting them out there, like I said, as quickly as possible. Now, the reason I still do this to this day where I put my ideas quickly on Twitter, actually that's really where I first put it. If you go and find me on Twitter, you'll see that I use Twitter as a way to store potential blog posts ideas. I just use it as a public journal. And the reason I do that isn't so that I can claim credit for it one day. I don't care honestly about that. What I care about though is if someone else puts their idea out there and they find, and okay. So if someone else puts their idea out there and then I make a blog post or video about it after they did, right? They might be able to point to me and say, hey, you stole my idea. This is why I feel urgent about putting my ideas onto Twitter as quickly as possible because then at least there's a timestamp for the origin of the idea. I still have a lot of ideas to be honest right here in my phone that haven't yet put on Twitter because I don't wanna be that active on Twitter either. So anyway, I'm just saying that I do that so that people don't think I stole their ideas. But I just wish, I really just wish that we could all be much more unattached to where some idea came from. And we just simply share ideas. And because of the reality is that no matter how much I copy or no matter how much my idea is similar to someone else's the way that I communicate it, it's different, isn't it? Especially if it's on video, it certainly looks different. But even if I do it in writing I'm not, there's no chance that I would word for word use someone's idea. I mean, that would be too uncanny if I literally wrote an entire paragraph that was word for word or even 90% similar. The same idea said by two people is gonna be probably at least 20% different, right? So I just wish that, this is why years ago I put my ideas out there as uncopy righted. Yes, all of my blog posts, all of my videos are uncopy righted, which means you are welcome to literally copy and paste every single blog post I have put it on your website, call it your own. Not even mention my name once. And I don't have the energy nor the time to go and hunt you down and go, why are you doing that? What am I gonna do? Sue you? I don't have the money and the time for that. I'm too busy creating. If you wanna copy my stuff, by all means go ahead. If it helps you somehow to do it, go for it. I've uncopy righted everything because I just prefer to not worry about that. And I just wish everyone would do this. I mean, because I sometimes worry if I read one of my niche mates stuff, if I read their blog or read their newsletter, I might accidentally get guts in my subconscious and might accidentally say it and forget to credit them. And I honestly worry more about accidentally stealing other people's ideas. So that's why I try to avoid being an avid reader of other people in my niche because I am trying to stay clear and create on my own knowing full well that every idea that I have probably was subconscious, at least subconsciously influenced by other people, right? Same with yours. Do you really think you have an original idea that wasn't influenced by somebody else and maybe that you're even accidentally emulating something you saw and you forgot that you saw it? I think it happens more often than we realized. So I mean, gosh, even as I speak, the my manner of speaking, I'm sure is probably somehow emulating some someone I respect or something I saw, someone, how they spoke and how they wrote as well. So I just wish that we would be in a world where we could just share freely our ideas and that way humanity can, you know. Now, what about online courses, right? I should, because I have a full-time business selling online courses. Should I be worried that people copy my course content and sell it as theirs? Again, same thing. What am I gonna do? Try to like, especially if someone is copying my courses and selling it as a product, there's no monitoring service for that because the monitoring service would have to buy every course, right? So they're truly, what can we do until we wait for someone to report, just come back to us, hey, I bought this course and it's very similar to yours. You know, I have never had that happen. Great, great, really grateful to say. I mean, I've been creating online course systems 2009 and in all of those 12, 13 years, not once have I had someone come back to me and says, hey, someone copy your online course, not once. And I've created dozens of online courses at this point and have had thousands, tens of thousands of students. So I honestly don't think it's a real issue, but even if so, again, this is partly why I put my course content on YouTube as unlisted videos, not public, because my course content, people purchase it. So they're hosted on YouTube as unlisted videos. Once people buy it, then they get access to the special links. But YouTube videos means that, again, there's a timestamp. And so someone else can claim that I stole their course idea or whatever because there's all these old timestamps. So, but even so, like I said, even with paid products and paid content, I am not worried that other people steal my stuff because number one, what can I do? Why am I gonna sue them? Again, I don't want the time or the interest in doing that. And number two, that just takes away the time and energy for creating more. I have more than enough to create. I have so many things I wanna create and just don't have time for it. And so I just wish that we could all just let go of the fear of having our stuff stolen, our idea stolen, okay? Our content stolen. And spend and just redirect our energies to creating, creating freely and putting stuff out there as quickly as possible because then I think the world would move forward more as there are innovative ideas being shared and people helping each other with solutions to problems that they've discovered and through their own lives or through studying other people's stuff. So, and at the same time, I do try to give credit where it's due. If I remember that I took an idea from somebody, I will give credit. So, for example, this whole idea of un-copyright, where did I get that idea? I wanna thank Leo Babalta for that. Originally, that's where I saw it. His website is zenhabits.net, I think. Anyway, Google Zen Habits, Leo Babalta and you will find his stuff. So, that's, you know, his un-copyright was what inspired me to kind of get going on. And I think he's been doing it since 2008. And I've been un-copywriting my stuff since 2014. So it's been about what, eight years of un-copywriting for me. All my books, for example, are un-copyrighted. It says right in the beginning of the book, hey, this is unusual. You could, it's literally, you can copy my entire book and publish it and call it your book and not mention me once. I don't care. I mean, if you can make money doing that, I, it's not authentic to you, right? It's not authentic. It's not ethical. It's not honest, but I don't care if people do that and people can quote me at length. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Because I'm just busy creating. I'm busy making more stuff. And so, it's made, it's given me a great deal of peace of mind to just let go of that fear. Again, let me say this again, let go of the fear of people copying ideas and also let go of the fear of people not crediting me. That's part of it too. Because there are multiple levels of un-copyright or we might say creative commons. Creative commons is the sort of popular licensing methodology for putting ideas out there freely. And I have taken the sort of the highest creative commons license to say, you could take my stuff and take it as your own and not give, to not even tell me and I don't care. So just even needing to get credit is continuing to have energetic attachment and fear essentially to, ooh, someone is not giving me credit. Let's let go, okay. Who cares? You know, like no one, chances are if you vigorously create and share, your thing is going to be the well-known thing, the well-known version of it, at least among your circles. But like I said, what we need to prevent is other people think we stole their ideas. So that's why there is the urgency that I always have within myself and what I encourage you, the urgency of sharing your ideas as soon as possible so that it's out there and you can rest assured that no one will think you stole it from them but you should not worry at all if someone else borrows your idea or takes your idea and doesn't credit you. I just think that's wasted, human, wasted energy of humanity that could be making more progress. So I hope this is inspiring, inspiring you to think more abundantly about ideas and I hope this inspires you to let go of fear, have more peace in your life and have more urgency of creating and sharing so that we all might move forward together more quickly. I hope this helps. Feel free to borrow this, take this idea and share it with your people as well. And I look forward to your comments and questions below. Thanks for joining me. I wish you well.