Copying Isn’t A Bad Thing - Stealing Is

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post and I thought of doing a follow-up to an old post about stop copying others. However, this time I thought of writing on a different perspective. You can guess from the title of the post that it brings forward a different view.
When I entered the make money niche in 2007, I was a complete noob. Where you might be today, I was there 2 years ago. My introduction wasn’t very clear as compared to people now. For example, there were not sites like 3arn.Net in 2007 and all I found in the search engines was spammy websites and scams.
I did not even know that there was something other than paid to click websites that could be used to make money. So I read around about blogs and decided to create one for promoting the websites with my referral ID.
I still remember, my posts were crammed up. Some lines were all capitals others were full of slang and grammatical mistakes. I knew I needed a head-start. Accidentally, I happened to read somewhere about making money with adsense and I was quick to act and put it on my sucky little blog.
I happened to visit my blog almost 20 times a day and happened to come across an ad that read ‘Your blog’s a money-maker’ and I was curious to find out. I clicked the ad and landed on John Chow’s blog.
Even John had just started out with make money blogging and soon I found myself reading similar blogs. You can’t be unique all the time, so I had to copy the way these blogs were running when I created this one.
So, we come back to the topic of copying. Basically, copying ideas and styles is not a bad thing. But when you actually copy steal content, that is when things go wrong. You might be thinking that how would the things go wrong, but it’s much simpler than you think.
Let’s involve a reputable blog in my niche on my level. I will not name it, but I actually really enveyed the blog because it seemed very good. It was until I found out a post on it which was a mere copy of a post that I read on John Chow’s blog.
My first impression on it got bad, real bad. I never tried to steal other people’s content. People always mix up stealing and copying. Here’s how I describe them:

• Copying ideas: Imitating ideas but putting them forward in one’s own way.
• Stealing ideas: Using the same idea, the same title, the same text with only changing a few words on the post.

So in the second case, you’re not just saying that you’re a reader of that big blog but you’re also trying to merely copy a whole post saying that it is yours. I wouldn’t say that it is a very nice way of gaining exposure nor authority.
Whatever authority that I have today in my niche is because I wrote unique and quality content. I did copy other big bloggers (Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start). By copying, I mean that I tried to have a design like John Chow (I dropped that soon).
So the main thing in this post is that you may want to be like other bloggers and you imitate some of the things that led them to success. That is perfectly normal, but if you steal their content and put it on your blog, that’s not cool.
Someday, someone will find out and point it out. Trust me, no one wants to read an article which is just another copycat. It is no different than other spam blogs with automatic posters. So, what are your views on this matter of stealing and copying?