Intellectual Property: Is it OK to steal?

NO. The answer is NO. That is all.

Ok, we're kidding. This blog post will have more than that aforementioned statement. However, the conclusion will remain the same.

As entrepreneurs in a small market we not only hear from others, but have experienced first-hand theft of intellectual property. One day we're providing what we think is our best pitch to hire us for services and the next day we see our prospect regurgitating the information without engaging with our company. 
It's just not cool dude.

Here's why this type of theft (and YES, it's theft) hurts everyone: you cannot be everything to everyone. Since we try to keep this blog marketing and PR focused, let's use us for an example. If you call and ask us for PR assistance, chances are you don't know how to craft a pitch, you don't have time to do it, you don't have the connections required to get said pitch picked up and as a result your pitch will come out lackluster. But, you send it along anyways because you didn't feel like investing and having a specialist do it for you. What then happens, you inundate the media with a poorly crafted pitch coming from a name they don't recognize. And then you get ignored. 

During the process you're fatiguing the media contacts and making them even more unlikely to respond to other well-crafted pitches that they just don't have the bandwidth to read... because they're too busy laughing at yours. 

If you've ever seen the movie The Social Network, you may be thinking I'm one of the whiny twins and that the idea you stole from us will make you a billionaire. This just in: you're not Mark Zuckerberg... and neither are we for that matter. 

So the bottom line is we all need to stop trying to take each other's livelihoods and invest in each other that way we expect to be invested in. Stop pretending you're a marketing guru and I'll stop pretending I'm a computer software engineer. See? We're all happy now.

---