— If you’re an escort struggling to uniquely express yourself online, maybe try Better Than Great by Arthur Plotnik.

— One could view The Prestige as a tragedy about stealing another’s idea.

— A good friend of mine is trying to rework her site. I really don’t know why she’s trying so hard. She could save so much time and energy by just finding a site she really likes and copying it. Everyone’s doing it!

— If you’re not convinced by the complaining about escort plagiarism you’ve read here, just Google the phrase “Intimacy and closeness are things I crave.” I don’t what poor girl wrote it first (Chelsy Heyden?), but I feel sorry for her.

— At least one escort explains in her FAQ that others steal her text and photos. Really wish IDoNotHaveaBrain was still around with their “Original Content” badge. Would be even easier for them to check with Copyscape. Sigh.

— Escorts should invoice plagiarists. According to the February 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest, freelance rates for webpage writing range from $40-$125/hr (or $0.21-$2.62 per word); email copywriting $64-$125/hr (or $300 per email!); online editing $25-$100/hr (or $3-$4/page). A pretty nice bill when you add up someone taking your entire ad-text and your website pages! Even better if they take some blog posts too — more billable work for you!

— Geisha Diaries made a post about this very topic the same day I did. They offered some good ideas on content-protection.

The escort world is rife with plagiarism. This is no secret among escorts. One of my naïve goals in writing Book 2 was to give escorts a way to learn how to write for themselves. There are new escorts who have read my books and taken the lessons to heart — the results are easy to see on their personality-driven sites and ads. There are others who took my examples a bit too literally and I have spotted them sprinkled over websites, much to my chagrin. And then there are those who just decided to go directly to the source (me) and lift whatever they feel like taking. How nice of me to do all the hard work for them!

I have a habit of this — I’ve changed escort-text everywhere I’ve worked. I’ve worked under different names and have found my writing appearing elsewhere (and obviously these girls had no clue whose text they stole). And people have seen fit to taken whatever they want from my book’s site too. I’m long past being amused, flattered or anything except completely and totally furious when I find my work stolen. Dragging around a truckload of others is very tiring work. I keep thinking that if I stop writing, they’ll have to go elsewhere for their ideas and words. It’s becoming the more tempting option, frankly.

It seems the issue is getting worse as more girls get online. Many seem to think that Internet = free for some reason. Some surely know better and yet still they steal.

In the online world, words entice, often more than pictures. Words = money to escorts. Copyright violations are violations on a serious level.

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