What to do if someone claims your work is theirs

What to do if someone passes off your work as their own. What measures should be taken in this case, whom to contact, how to defend yourself and prove your case. How should you protect your work so that it is not stolen.

What do you do if someone passes off your work as their own?

When creating something with your own hands, it is very important to properly protect yourself and protect copyrights. It doesn’t matter if it’s a drawn design, a written book, or a short article – someone may try to pass off your work as their own. Let’s take a closer look at what can be done in this case and how to protect yourself from theft of intellectual property.

Let’s look at a small example. You saw your work in someone’s portfolio on the freelance exchange. Moreover, this person is trying to pass it off as his own, without indicating your authorship. What can be done in this case? In order to understand this situation, you need to know how you can protect your copyright.

The fact is that in connection with the development of Internet technologies, this problem is becoming more serious and more common. By exposing your work on the Internet, it is very difficult to protect yourself from taking possession of it by third parties. The easiest way to indicate copyright is, however strange it may sound, a signature under the work. Whether it’s text or a website design, a caption like this will help indicate your authorship.

But will it help? Based on the number of people using the world wide web, it is almost impossible to control the actions of everyone. It is unlikely that such an inscription will stop someone.

How to protect your work?

In order to protect yourself from the theft of the work, you must somehow indicate your authorship. The more obvious signs in it, the easier it will be to prove your authorship.

For example, if you’re creating a video, you can credit yourself with a caption, your company logo, or watermarks. If in the case of a signature or logo, the video can be cut off, then in the case of using watermarks, this does not threaten you.

If the work should not fall into the hands of any person, you can protect it from this in a simple way – do not post it in the public domain. If the work ends up on an open resource on the network, it is already an order of magnitude more difficult to protect it.

In addition, you can use the services of special services that allow you to register your authorship for a particular work. Such services take money for this, but at the same time they will help resolve the conflict in case of disputes. They can provide evidence to file a lawsuit and even help win the case. This method is one of the simplest and most reliable, although a little expensive.

What should I do if my work has been stolen?

For example, while studying the portfolio of freelancers, you stumbled upon a job that is one to one similar to yours. What to do in such situations? To solve this problem, there are several options:

  • The easiest, but not always effective, is to write to the offender. Indicate in your letter that the authorship of this work belongs to you and ask to remove it. If a claim is filed, his response to this letter may be used for further proceedings.
  • Submit a lawsuit. If you have any evidence of the authorship of this work, the court will help protect your rights and may satisfy the claim for compensation for material or moral damages incurred.

Evidence for going to court is the information of the authorship registration services described above. Any documents confirming that you have this job before can also help.

For example, if you sent this work in a paper letter and the recipient can provide a dated envelope as evidence. Another way to confirm authorship can be the publication of this work in some paper source.

How can a lawsuit help?

If there is sufficient evidence, a lawsuit may resolve the situation in one of the following ways:

  • Paying moral damages. With sufficient evidence, the court may satisfy the claim to pay moral compensation to the injured party for the damage received.
  • Payment for material losses. If, as a result of the use of this work by a third party, you have suffered any losses, the court may force the accused to pay this amount.
  • To oblige the accused to pay a fine in the amount of the amount earned by using someone else’s property of funds.
  • Individual claims of the injured party (the author of the work) with sufficient evidence.

Litigation can help you recover your lost funds and punish the culprit, but this is not always the best option. To save your time and money, in most cases it is enough just to show the violator the seriousness of his intentions and the availability of evidence, so that he, under pain of litigation, will meet.

If you find your work in the portfolio of another freelancer, you can contact the administration of the exchange and describe this situation. They will help restore justice and resolve the dispute. However, this requires the presence of concrete evidence of their innocence. The administration of the exchange in this case may oblige the user to delete the work.

To avoid unpleasant situations, it is necessary to ensure that the work does not fall into the public domain. Otherwise, it becomes much more difficult to correct the situation. If your work needs to be publicly available (for example, in a portfolio on a freelance exchange), you should secure it from possible theft.

Use watermarks, custom software, digital codes, and signatures. In addition, you can use services to register your authorship, which will later help prove your case.

In many cases, talking to the person who is violating your copyright is enough to resolve the conflict. If you threaten him with litigation or complaints, he is very likely to remove the work from his portfolio without resorting to serious litigation.

When, after many sleepless nights, the diploma is finally ready, I want to pass it and forget it. But the university will not lag behind the student so easily. After all, the full text of the diploma was read only by the supervisor, and a whole commission will gather to evaluate it. Therefore, in many respects, his assessment depends on how a student defends a diploma.

So what is a successful defense?

  • Competent protection text
  • positive diploma review
  • confident answers to commission questions

In the introduction to the course it is necessary to indicate many important points. One of them is methodology. The student is required to indicate what methods he will use in the study of the topic. This is not the easiest task, and often students cannot cope with this task themselves. In this case, you can contact us. Our experts will write you a paper of any complexity, and you can discuss the price with them personally.

In the introduction to the course it is necessary to indicate many important points. One of them is methodology. The student is required to indicate what methods he will use in the study of the topic. This is not the easiest task, and often students cannot cope with this task themselves. In this case, you can contact us. Our specialists will write you a paper of any complexity, and you can discuss the price with them personally.

In the introduction to the course it is necessary to indicate many important points. One of them is methodology. The student is required to indicate what methods he will use in the study of the topic. This is not the easiest task, and often students cannot cope with this task themselves. In this case, you can contact us. Our specialists will write you a paper of any complexity, and you can discuss the price with them personally.

In the introduction to the course it is necessary to indicate many important points. One of them is methodology. The student is required to indicate what methods he will use in the study of the topic. This is not the easiest task, and often students cannot cope with this task themselves. In this case, you can contact us. Our specialists will write you a paper of any complexity, and you can discuss the price with them personally.

Speech structure

Of course, what exactly to say in the defense depends mainly on the topic of the thesis and on what exactly is written in it, but there are general recommendations that are suitable for everyone.

  • First, we need to say hello to the members of the evaluation committee. (“Dear members of the attestation commission! Your attention is presented to the final qualifying work on the topic …”)
  • Introductory part. Here you need to reveal the topic and identify the issues that are raised in the work.
  • Relevance of the topic. At this stage, it is important to prove the relevance of the chosen topic and the degree of its development in other people’s works. Indicate the subject, object, objectives and purpose of the study.
  • Theme disclosure structure. Here you just need to list the paragraphs that are in the work and briefly describe them.
  • Problem statement. To confirm the relevance of the topic, it is necessary to state the problem and indicate the debatable opinions on this matter.
  • Conclusions. At the end of the speech, the commission should hear the conclusions that the student came to in the course of writing the diploma, in which there are ways and methods for solving the stated problems.

On the one hand, it seems that it is much easier to write a graduation speech than the diploma itself. However, high-quality speech is a skillful squeeze out of the work, as well as its competent presentation. And it often happens that a diploma is written with the highest score, and a student gets a worse grade. Therefore, if there is a lack of self-confidence, you can order a speech on our website. And then the probability of failure due to bad speech will disappear. After all, we give a twenty-day guarantee for the work, and if something does not suit you, you can demand that the author finalize the order for free. We make sure that students are satisfied, so if the final version of the work does not meet the stated requirements, you will get your money back.

Formal requirements

When writing a speech for a thesis, you must also take into account that there are purely formal requirements.

  • Time. Do not forget that there are many students, but the commission is one. Therefore, the time for a defensive speech is regulated and ranges from 5 to 7 minutes. At the same time, you should remember about the time that will be spent on commission questions.
  • Intonation. Where, no matter how on the defense of a diploma, is it important to win over listeners? Therefore, it is better not to read the speech monotonously, making accents with intonation.
  • Style. When presenting a speech, it should be remembered that the main goal is understanding on the part of the commission. Therefore, you should not be too smart, but you can’t switch to colloquial speech either. In this matter, you need to observe the golden mean.
  • Pronouns. As in the diploma itself, it is important to remember during the defense that although the author of the diploma is clearly spelled out, there are a lot of true owners of knowledge reflected in the work (the authors of all the sources the student relied on plus the supervisor), so first-person pronouns are not appropriate here.
  • Questions. After the end of the speech, questions from the commission will inevitably follow, and you need to be ready for them. Suggested questions should be written down in the course of writing the thesis, work through all the questions that arose during the pre-defense, and you can also look at the questions at the end of chapters from textbooks on this topic.
  • Pre-protection. In such a matter as defending a diploma, it is better not to be presumptuous and neglect pre-defense. On it, you can practice giving a speech and write down possible questions from the audience. This will allow you to feel more confident in the official defense.

Of course, these are only recommendations, and no one forces you to strictly follow them. However, the rejection of some positions during the defense will create additional questions from the certification committee, which is not always loyal. Therefore, it is best to think through all possible questions and answer them in advance in a defensive speech. Then the teachers will have a minimum of questions, and they will be grateful for the saved time.