I discovered an unexpected benefit of being plagiarized: it makes imitators easy to find. A couple days ago I was curious how many YC clones there are now, so I tried to make an up to date list. The most fruitful source was to search in Google for distinctive phrases from our application form. Practically all of them copy that, and more often than not they leave chunks of verbatim text unchanged.
You can use this technique to by pass the middle people in other ways too. For example with agency job ads, it is sometimes possible to find the company from the phrasing or combinations of technologies listed along with the location of the company. So then you can apply directly to the company, rather than going through the agency.
You can put these unique terms in things like google alerts, and then you get an email each time a ycombinator clone springs up!
Many times I have seen terms and conditions on websites and other software ripped off of other ones... and sometimes they even forget to change the company names, and even the product name! Quite funny really.
Maybe copyright infringement is a better term than plagiarized though?
I'm not sure talking about the term plagiarism with regards to business or ycombinator is all that useful. Surely ycombinator drew inspiration from other things without crediting them? The three months, and $5000 figure seems eerily similar to another program run by a company that starts with G, for example.
Micro finance was around along time before ycombinator started. So were incubators that helped startups. Investing is a very old idea.
I'm not sure if plagiarism makes sense in a medium where no credits are given at all. Where if you give credit to some other companies, they might get angry at you... and maybe bring down the law on your head. In this way academia is permitted to be more honest and free with ideas.
It's always nice to have an idea, but it's really good if people copy it. Firstly it's flattering, and secondly the idea has much more potential to spread if other people take it up... growing the market for the dominant player.
Borrowing ideas and claiming them as your own is rife in business. I'm not sure business would work if they had to credit their competitors every time they advertised, or published something.
Would you say that since no other program actually competes with yours - you get your pick of the best applicants - YC probably benefits the more clones there are?
Indeed, I've noticed in the niche we're in, several sites have copied the wording on our advertising sign up page. Of course, it's complemented by strong similarities to our layout and functionality, but there's something that seems more blatant about duplicating prose.
(I found 26. Some are still unlaunched.)