LinkedIn copycats stealing your work? Here's my perspective

Do you copy other people's content and pass it off as your own? Or have you been a victim of content theft on LinkedIn? Here's why I ignore it now.

This UnfilteredFriday, let's talk about plagiarism on your favourite professional networking platform.

A contact pinged me this week. Turns out others are copying the technical data centre content he painstakingly created on LinkedIn. Lock, stock, and barrel. No credit.

What should he do?

The great copying game

I've seen this dance before. People copy content wholesale on what's supposed to be a professional platform. Some get called out. They delete the post - no apologies. A week later, everyone's moved on.

Others take a different route. They run copied content through AI tools - some built right into LinkedIn helper tools, to "rewrite" it. Then hit publish.

But why?

Simple: metrics. Impressions, likes, comments, and shares. Here's the thing. They're missing the bigger picture. Because it isn't just about numbers.

Here's what your content actually does.

It makes you better

I've written about this before. I would have stopped posting daily long ago, except I soon realised the benefits of writing regularly.

• Learn new things.
• Improves my writing.
• It clarifies my own thoughts.
• Broadens my understanding.
• Help me communicate better.

Above all, it's making me a constant storyteller.

I now see stories everywhere I look. Indeed, yesterday's post: "Where do GPUs go to die" came from a casual chat that morning.

It draws the right people to you

Your content has the unique ability to attract like-minded people. I mean, these are the people you can sit down for an hour and have a great chat with.

I've had the distinct pleasure of doing lunch or coffee with:

• Director of engineering at Fortune 500s.
• AI leaders doing LLM training.
• CEOs building data centres.

And of course, lots of new contacts and friends. No gatekeepers. Because they contacted me directly.

Copied content would be useless here.

It creates new opportunities

Finally, your content can also open new doors. It certainly did for me.

• New writing gigs.
• New fractional roles.
• Content partnerships.
• Consulting engagements.

So yes, the plagiarist walks away with an impressive list of content on their feed that's repurposed or outright copied. And probably lots of engagements too.

But they won't get the benefits I outlined above. And these are the ones I value most.

Has someone ever copied your content?