Copyright infringement on LinkedIn is worse than I thought

It was only last year when I first realised that LinkedIn had a copyright infringement issue after discovering a slew of users regularly publishing popular Instagram and TikTok videos as fresh uploads on their pages.

Almost all these videos were allowed to stay up, letting the unscrupulous individuals rake in the social traffic to boost and bolster their status on the platform.

Publishing free material that isn’t yours is bad enough, but it gets worse than that.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of George Mount‘s books, which had been posted by someone as a document on LinkedIn — all 250 pages freely accessible to everyone.

The highly-rated ‘Advancing into Analytics: From Excel to Python and R’ (avg. 4.7/5) is available on Amazon for £32.79/£37.44 (Kindle/paperback).

Immediately after I saw the first post, I duly informed George. However, I sensed it wasn’t the only account doing this, so it prompted me to investigate further.

Unfortunately, it turned into a procession. In the space of 15 minutes, I found about 10 other guilty posts. And later, I found some more.

Let’s be clear: publishing someone’s copyrighted book on LinkedIn is illegal, unethical, and downright unfair to the author, publisher, and people who buy it legitimately.

But it gets even worse…

I found tonnes more Amazon books that had been posted in a similar fashion. Even I didn’t quite realise the extent of the problem until yesterday. After all, I do not follow any of these people (thankfully); however, it only takes a search or two to find this type of activity.

We’re not just talking about a few accounts here and there. This issue is systemic, pervasive, and it ain’t going away anytime soon without LinkedIn’s intervention.

Just have a look at this video for ONE example of what I found on someone’s account. There are so many more like this, though.