Maybe it's karma. I have been posting a lot of articles about "life story rights" lately. Questions of copyright, trademark, rights of publicity and privacy seem to affect every film, play, and television series I advise. So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that there's some dude out there that's pretending to be me.

As far as I know (and I've done a lot of digging), I am one of two Michael Pryweses in the world. The other one is a really great guy (and distant cousin) on the other side of America who is a realtor at West and Praszker in San Francisco. But in the past few months, I have become aware of another Michael Prywes, a fictional journalist who lists the Prywes Schwartz website as his own and links to the @MichaelPrywes twitter handle, my little-used personal handle.

He publishes articles under my name in online publications such as AllBusiness.com and LifeHack. One bio (that has been since taken down) reads: "Michael Prywes is a self-styled entrepreneur and legal expert with a specialism [sic] in online media law."

Another claims that I am "...a digital marketing expert, MBA, and serial entrepreneurial [sic]. When not in front of his computer, he can be found beekeeping, knitting, and being as Brooklyn as humanly possible." Someone is clearly having a good time using my good name.

There are so many wrinkles to this story. For one, I first started thinking something was fishy when my rarely used @MichaelPrywes handle started getting shoutouts and virtual high-fives over articles that were related to subject matters about which I advise regularly: startups, terms of service, personal branding, etc. These articles were actually not so poorly written. I tried to contact allBusiness multiple times, to no avail. I was under the impression that this impostor limited himself to allBusiness.com, until I received this copyright request email all the way from Japan:

The funny thing about copyright in the U.S. is that authorial attribution is not required in U.S. Copyright law. This is the reason I am able to use licensed photography on my sites without attribution; it is my understanding that, in other countries, proper attribution for copyrighted work is a necessary component of "moral rights." Our country has little use for moral rights and is more obsessed with fair use and open source--Creative Commons itself has an open license that can still require proper attribution. So, I find it interesting that, with my oft-mentioned passion for modern-day soft intellectual property matters in the United States, I have been, in some ways, a beneficiary of mis-attribution.

Lawsuits and controversies for things like this seem to drive a whole cottage industry. A Fox News anchor is suing Hasbro over the use of her name on a one inch plastic hamster. The Fake Steve Jobs account sent the whole Internet into a tizzy once-upon-a-time, and it only took a year for Fake Steve Jobs to be unmasked as comedy writer Dan Lyons, who writes for one of my favorite TV shows and also wrote an exposé on HubSpot, a marketing company Prywes Schwartz, PLLC unceremoniously stopped using earlier this year because of our dissatisfaction with... hey, wait a minute...

Look, the concept of identity and identity-theft is multi-layered. We are more than our names and our professions. The police and federal authorities have better things to do than to go after someone publishing decent SEO-driving content under my name. I am not a tech CEO or news anchor, and, while my name is rarer than a white humpback whale, its misappropriation seems to be more a part of clever journalistic experiment than an attempt to deprive me of everything I hold dear. So, until the day that Fake Michael Prywes tries to destroy me, I have just a few more words for that beekeeping, knitting hipster in Brooklyn: double-check your work and i before e except after c.

Update (11/11/15): David Hennessy from AllBusiness.com has contacted me and informed me that they will deal with the situation appropriately. This type of identity theft was a first for him as an editor.

Prywes Greenberg, PC

Prywes Greenberg, PC

Insights and Opinions for the 21st Century

Prywes Greenberg, PC

Some Guy is Pretending to be Me, and I'm Okay with That... For Now.