To be annoyed someone has lifted some of my work and used it in a presentation without at least asking?

[Lex345]

Fully prepared to be told I'm a grumpy, joyless shit lol

I have a niche knowledge base that is not common for where I work and I have been working on projects bringing some of my expertise into the field. Part of this was a training suite which has been going on for well over a year.

This week, I was on an unrelated training session and my ACTUAL EXACT work (not changed, exactly the same) was used. I didn't know it had been used in this way and no one has asked. I didn't even know it had been disseminated.

AIBU to be a bit peeved? (I am also a bit flattered, but mainly peeved)?

And to add, I say this with experience of working on a project currently, that is specialist and technical, and I've seen materials that I've personally created being circulated far and wide and nobody has credited me directly. I take the view that if people are using the information, that's a professional complement, they wouldn't use it if it lacked voracity and credibility, so I must be doing it right!

This is plagiarism. Call it out. No-one has a right to use your original work without attribution.
Permission would be nice, and the professional thing to do, but failing that, work should be attributed and acknowledged.

Thank you-I do appreciate the balance of opinions and different perspectives here. I think I will start by first looking at the view history as this will help understand where it has gone and if there is a risk other things could be used similarly-I am actually very proud of anything I produce being used widely-it was I suppose more of an issue about being blindsided and the quality of content.

i think they said only 4 or 5 people have access to that drive but I might be mistaken.

Another way of looking at this @Lex345 is "who owns knowledge?"

we all stand on the shoulders of giants. The work we produce won't be 100% ours, we have formed our ideas from the concepts, frameworks and theories of others, in my case from the collaborations I've had within our organisation and from my technical background - I'd never be able to thank or acknowledge all those great minds who have influenced my work, there are too many great minds! We've added value, insights and taken it to a new level, and someone else will do likewise 😊

Once 4 or 5 people have the information, the floodgates are opened and they could each have shared it with multiple other people .... suddenly 4 or 5 becomes 30 or 50 or ....

Yes this is correct :)

I feel better for people acknowledging its OK I feel a bit miffed but that really as soon as something falls out of my head onto the company drive, I should just accept that it can and will be used for whatever they want.

It will make me more selective with what I share.

I think you've answered your own question as to how to approach it.

This is good. Make it more about wider context and simplification.

Express concern that it might lose accuracy if added randomly in this way and you'd appreciate the chance to review it.

@Lex345 So you know the person who passed off your work as their own? were they giving the talk? can you password lock all your work or something so they no longer have free access to it? I would perhaps send a block email stating that your work was stolen and used without your knowledge! if your boss is not going to say anything then go above to the next boss! that is an awful thing to do!

I do not know who has lifted it- I know the people who I originally shared it with of course and they are involved in the team that have produced the training it was used in. I think this is probably an honest mistake that went something like-

We are re hashing training of X.

Person who had "my work"(v high up in organisation): oh this could be useful, see if this helps-sends to person organising training
Person receiving the above shares with another colleague or working group and then it is lifted as a direct copy and paste, formatting and all (even though it didn't match the rest of the training deck!)

It is probably more carelessness/lack of awareness than anything else

It’s worse that you will be using the same material in future training. I would come at it from this point of view. As it’s duplicating information given and that your presentation will show that the previous presenter didn’t really understand the context which will be embarrassing for them. All of which could have been avoided if they’d come to you beforehand.

Then in your presentation you say ‘This is the work I did on xxx, I know xx touched on this in his/her presentation but if you look at the wider context you can see the impact goes further & is xxxx.

Agree with a PP that best response would have been to comment at the time - in a cheerful way- that that particularly slide/slides came from a larger body of work that you’re currently working on, and would the presenter mind if you added a few comments at that point to give some clarity. But I’m picturing a boardroom with 12 people sat round, it would obviously be harder if there were lots of people and the presenter was way up in the front with a mic or something.

Failing that I’d have said something to the presenter after the presentation, just a polite, interested question about whether they know where those slides came from.

I think there’s a difference between someone taking original work and palming it off as their own- as if they were the one to figure something out, vs simply sharing useful information (it would be a pain if everyone had to come up with this alone, so sharing generally is a good idea). My boss never used to let me have his slide decks to present to other groups and it used to drive me mad- I wrote loads of my own stuff, but would sometimes say ‘oh that slide where you have the stats on x,y,z is great- could you send me that to include in one of mine?’ And he always said no! Which meant I had to go back to the original research and pull out the data and create a similar slide, it just took a lot longer!

But I do appreciate the point that it was potentially misrepresented in this case, which is more of an issue.

Please put some value in yourself, your your knowledge and your work

This feels to me to be a good example of why women get paid less than men. Of course you should highlight to their manager that it was done by you and they missed out relevant parts. You did the work, do should be credited for it by the department using it. Not necessarily during the training presentation, just that the person collating it shouldn't be saying it was by them. From now on, make sure that your name is on the title page of any powerpoint documents.

You need to copyright all your work.

Hi There was a situation like this on reddit whether true or not the op made a very faint copyright mark on his work after developing it himself when someone stole his work. he had proof going to bosses when the other colleague tried arguing it was their work. He said added comments like I see you found my work useful but I hant quite finished it yet lol

@Lex345 can you put your name on as a watermark over every page, which they are unable to remove without a password?? is that even possible????

Watermark! That's word I was thinking of! Lol

You quite clearly don't understand how copyright works. When you are employed, what you create is owned by the company and not by you. In many companies, information is shared / edited / improved/ reused hundreds of times over, and this is what lets the company get best value from the information it has specifically paid to have created. Reuse is a good thing in the same way as repeatable processes, so much so that implemented methods encouraging reuse count as a positive factor in CMMI assessment. You can and should explain to the trainer if they misunderstood something so that they can improve.

If you escalated to me about this in the style of your posts here, then I would be very concerned about your understanding of how company IP works, particularly given your role. A "trainer" being more concerned with recognition than with the material being used is clearly not looking out for the company's best interests. Depending on your specific contractual terms, you might argue for bare authorship (stating your name as author), but most modern contract terms usually block even this. Best to tread very carefully, get legal advice on your employment contract and really think about what you are asking (and implying by asking) before you raise this again.

Ownership would need to be lodged at the IP office with proof required of which elements belong specifically to the owner/author and are uniquely theirs. That costs money time and effort to do that and you'd have to question the wisdom of doing that. It's fine if the original materials and ideas are worth protecting with copyright because eg they could make the person a multimillionaire. Whether its worth it in this case is for @Lex345 to decide.

Nowadays there is an alternative view about knowledge, under the Creative Commons movement, that knowledge is there to be shared and not held or protected. The benefit of sharing research freely is that it does create wider posture and the academic authors are creditedso it builds their reputation more widely. Its just a different philosophy to knowledge sharing in the information age.

The person didn't know the source of the information being @Lex345 was in the wrong for not bothering to find out, but the got their fingers burned when the owner was in the audience oooops!

The Pp upthread whose manager refused to share their slides causing the pp to have to do all the work from scratch 😱omg! I'd be silently judging them as petty and pathetic.

I would think the same, but I would definitely be finding who wrote up the slides and letting them know. It could be completely genuine. People do take information from other places not even thinking of referencing the source, but you should investigate

Surely the bigger issue is that the information being taken out of context is giving a wrong understanding?

I think you should be explaining that to the presenter and whoever wrote it in case they are giving more sessions. That way you're less likely to look petty but you also show that asking permission is important to make sure that things are presented correctly.

It is important to take a stand on these matters. Firstly for your sake, your research your work needs to be acknowledged, perhaps not rewarded, but recognised.
The Company also need to make it clear that they require ethical standards.
The CF who did this needs pulling up about it.
ps. Think like a man on this one. A bloke would make a real fuss and not be apologetic about mentioning this.

I realise you did this for work but this is your intellectual property and they should credit you at least. Can you find some way of copyrighting the other work on the server or password protecting it? You've told your boss but it won't hurt him because it's not his work. Honestly I don't know how you watermark electronic files and PP, but I would.

Funnily enough I actually remember a similar scenario (but this one was far worse as the person had built an actual tool using skills far above my skillset!) and went absolutely ballistic very publicly. I have absolutely no intention of doing this. I think I will look at the view history and hopefully this will give more context and then I can decide how best to approach it in terms of making sure the right information is out there