I see way too often the complaint of "this product looks exactly like mine". I've had it happen to me. It appears the person took one of my free products, changed it from matching to open-ended, and created a product line with a similar title based off of my resource. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn't.
If you sit down with someone else's product and recreate it with some tweaks here and there, this is wrong! You definitely were not inspired. You are actually just copying someone else.
There are some ideas out there that have been tossed around classrooms for years. For example, bingo or a quiz show style game are not new ideas. And those type of resources will most likely look very similar from one seller to the next. That doesn't mean they stole your idea.
Sometimes you make a product that you think you created from your very creative and brilliant mind only to realize later that someone else made something similar before you. This happens!
I know it is hard not to be inspired by someone else if you spend a lot of time on Pinterest or searching through TPT for things to buy. Sometimes we struggle to know where the idea actually came from.
Some things to keep in mind before creating:
↣ Did you think of it on your own?
↣ Is this something that would benefit your students?
↣ Is it something new that you don't think has been done before?
Your products should be something that you have created based on your ideas.
