So pissed! (Plagiarism of my work!)UPDATE

UGH

I am so pissed.

I am going to have to be a bit vague, and I'm sorry. I'm not necessarily looking for advice, but I do need to vent.



I work for a non profit organization, and as part of my job, I do a lot of writing. I have written most of the brochures and booklets we give to the families we serve. A couple of years ago, thanks to a grant, I wrote a booklet on a very specific topic. We don't sell it; we give it out to people who take (and pay for ) a workshop I teach online about this topic.



That's the background.

Last week, we discovered a new non profit in our city that works with the same population we do. We were very irritated because on their website, they have a lot of information that comes straight from workshops we teach, so we looked, and they have taken our workshops.


This morning, I was looking through their website some more and noticed that one very specific section is literally word for word from the booklet I wrote on this topic. Not paraphrased, but WORD FOR WORD. Some of the words aren’t even mine, they are from a friend who I once taught this workshop with, and I credited her with that part in my booklet I wrote after I got her permission to put it in my booklet.


This organization does not give me or my organization credit for any of this. It looks like it is their work, which pisses me off for more than one reason. The biggest reason is this topic is something I have always dreamed of publishing a real book on, and I have actually been working on doing just that this summer. Now, my work is on someone else’s website.

We have a couple of attorneys on our board of directors, so I am sure they will be able to advise us on what we can or can’t do. It’s not a real published book, but it is our intellectual property.

I don’t know how they thought we would not find this, but man, I am pissed. In case you can’t tell!

10/4 UPDATE:
Hi all, thank you so much for your thoughts and kind words. I have a good update! Our board's attorney told our director to start out being nice to them because if we need to get an attorney involved, it would have to be someone other than him because copyright infringement isn't his specialty. We can't really afford that, sooo...my boss wrote them a very nice email, but made it clear that they either need to remove that information or give me credit for it. The were very apologetic, said it was an "oversight." LOL Sure it was! Anyway, at the end of it, it now has my name and my organization. That's all I really wanted was the acknowledgement that it is my work.