You know what’s cool? When they pay you to rant about stuff that you’d probably rant about anyway. At least, that’s what I get to do over at one of my shopping blogs. As long as I can segue over to a coupon at the end, it’s all good. Over there today, I tell the story of what happened last night when Middle Sister was getting ready for her friend’s birthday party.

You know what’s not cool? Learning a real-life lesson about intellectual property…the hard way. I was hired to write some articles for websites that focus on building a personal brand and developing an “online portfolio.” I was asked to provide a biography and a photo. About two weeks after completing those articles, more were requested. I visited the websites to get an idea of other content on the topics I was assigned, and I found one of my articles from the first batch, attributed to someone else who (according to the person who hired me) is a fictional persona. Let it be known that in the future I will be a lot more protective of the copyright on any of my writing, because clearly I cannot claim authorship of those articles for my own online portfolio. Notice the irony there?

That led to a whole big dilemma for me last weekend, culminating in my decision not to do any more work for that group of websites. I was very afraid that I would burn a bridge, because I do have a very good working relationship with the person who hired me to do that and several other projects. Fortunately she was understanding (and as surprised as I was about what happened) and she asked me if I’d like to continue working on future projects with her (yay!)

It was a tough couple of days, but my husband and kids stood behind me and encouraged me not to work for someone who would put a different person’s name on my articles even if it meant a loss of business. And once I sent out that email explaining why I would not do more work for that website group, I felt so good. I knew I had made the right decision and was so happy to learn that I have not burned a bridge when it comes to other projects.