I organise regular sports competitions in our town as a volunteer. I and a few other volunteers started it from scratch a few years ago and it's become quite popular.
I recently became aware that someone else has started something similar in the next town. I don't have any problem with that. I'm all for anything that gets more people involved in the sport and outdoors being active. The distance is sufficient that I don't feel that we're in direct competition for the same participants either so that's all absolutely fine.
But one of our regulars recently competed in one of the new club's competitions and brought all the paperwork to show me. It's clearly very heavily copied from mine. Big chunks of text are definitely copied and pasted from documents I have previously circulated to competitors in my events. They're my words, down to my spelling mistake at one point, so not just similar, definitely copied. I'm a bit pissed off to be honest. It's taken a lot of time and effort to develop our events and one of the things people particularly comment on is the quality of the pre event information. I feel like my work has been stolen in a way.
The daft thing is that had anyone from the new club asked me for help or if they could use my documents I would have said yes. Other clubs who use the same facilities as us but for different sports have asked me if they can use some of my documents in the past and I have agreed.So maybe I'm feeling aggrieved about nothing. As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's just that this was done without asking me or crediting me and it seems a bit underhand.
How would anyone else feel and what if anything would you say or do? I'm not a confrontational person and I probably haven't really got the nerve to approach the new club, but it has upset me to see my work being presented as if someone else did it so maybe I should speak up?