Member-only story

My writing was plagiarized basically word-for-word (*Updated 3 days later — with an amicable ending)

I just think… this sucks (but then it didn’t as much)

Kaki Okumura
3 min readSep 11, 2021
Photo by Soumil Kumar from Pexels

It’s not the first time my writing has been plagiarized, for I have seen my more viral articles end up reposted on other websites without any proper credit assigned to me. The ease of copy and paste is the major downside of the Internet, and these sites know that no one would really take the time to litigate and sue for plagiarized writing.

Although it’s both saddening and disappointing to see my work so easily stolen, I try to let these instances go, for I know that writers and content creators like this seldom ever really get anywhere for taking shortcuts. But this time, I found myself particularly shocked, for three key reasons:

  1. The plagiarized piece is posted on Medium. And if you use the search function on Medium to search the key words in the title, the plagiarized version comes up first — and mine comes up never. How did that happen?
  2. It is published in a well-established publication with thousands of followers.
  3. The writer has about 1000 followers, and so can be earning money off work that I wrote.

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Kaki Okumura
Kaki Okumura

Written by Kaki Okumura

Born in Dallas, raised in New York and Tokyo. I care about helping others learn to live a better, healthier life. My site: www.kakikata.space 🌱

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