This has little to do with product-management knowledge itself, but it has been bothering me for a long time.
Back in 2013, many friends contacted me through WeChat, Weibo, and QQ groups to say that a certain product-management training course had copied my series on how to write a Product Requirements Document. The content had been turned into paid videos. They also sent me screenshots. In those videos, both the on-screen text and the spoken explanation followed the same logic as my blog posts. In some places, even the wording had not been changed.
At the time, I did not make a big issue of it. Part of me was glad that people were spreading product-management knowledge, and part of me simply did not want to make enemies or cut off someone else’s income. I thought it might not be worth pursuing.
But I underestimated the impact of letting it go.
This year, the same person again used content from my blog to produce a new paid video course, this time priced at 1,999 yuan. Because I had been in the United States for a while, it was not convenient for me to deal with it immediately. But repeated copying is no longer a small matter, especially when the copied material is being sold for money.
After I recently returned to China, I published an article in which I mentioned certain acts of plagiarism. The person involved seemed to realize that I had noticed what he was doing, so he contacted me through Weibo. Since he took the initiative to reach out, I asked for three things: delete the infringing material, apologize, and promise not to copy my work again.
His response was firm denial. He refused to admit the copying, and he put forward a number of arguments that I simply do not accept. He even said that he would hold me legally responsible.
You can imagine how I felt.
By nature, if I catch a thief and he apologizes and returns what he took, I usually let it go. If he cried and said he had elderly parents and young children to support, I might even give him something extra. So originally, I did not intend to keep pushing this matter. But his refusal to admit anything, combined with the strange comment attacks I began receiving afterward, made me feel that I had to lay out the suspicious points clearly. Otherwise, people who do not know the facts might think I was wrongfully accusing him.
I do not reject learning from one another. Inspiration, reference, and exchange are normal. What I strongly object to is direct copy-and-paste plagiarism. For product managers, the PRD is one of the most important pieces of work. Yet on precisely this key knowledge point, this person copied my material. I will not speculate about where his other knowledge points came from, but I despise the practice of stitching together other people’s work and using information asymmetry to mislead students and make money.
He told me that trainers need to read widely, prepare lessons, design courses, and study teaching methods, and that some overlap in knowledge is normal. I disagree. If you present yourself as an original instructor, you should have your own structured understanding, not lift someone else’s framework. This is especially true in professional education: without practice, you do not have the right to speak authoritatively. If you really need to use someone else’s specific ideas, then ask for permission and cite the source.
Here is why I believe his courses constitute plagiarism.
The course called 'Product Manager from Simple to Deep'
His video course 'Product Manager from Simple to Deep' is, in my view, a patchwork of copied material. The PRD section in particular directly follows and reads from my articles.
My early version was the series 'How to Write a Product Requirements Document (PRD)', which began in October 2012.
My later version was 'Writing Product Requirements Documents', an iteration based on the earlier series and published in October 2014.
The most obvious copying in the video is the PRD-writing section. I previously wrote about the thinking behind this PRD-writing approach, and I stated clearly that this framework was not only original to me, but was also first proposed by me.
Before recording his video, this person had once asked me questions about PRD writing. I never imagined that after learning from me, he would turn around and commercialize that knowledge as a paid course.
In this PRD-writing series, I believe his conduct involves plagiarism of both knowledge structure and core arguments. The text shown in his video and the way he explains it orally are more than 90% similar to the content of my blog posts.
I have already organized the evidence into annotated screenshots. Anyone who thinks I am falsely accusing him can compare my blog content with his PPT and spoken explanation. The similarity in knowledge structure and core arguments is, in my view, well above 90%.
After my articles were serialized, they were reposted by multiple websites, including PMCaff, woshiPM, and WebPPD. So there is evidence that my publication date was more than half a year earlier than his course.
The course called 'Teaching You Step by Step How to Build Products'
His paid online course 'Teaching You Step by Step How to Build Products' was sold for 1,999 yuan. In this course, I believe the issue is plagiarism of knowledge structure.
The teaching outline uses the structure of my PRD-writing process as the instructional flow for the course’s section on product planning and design. Since that process was my own original and first-created framework, using it as the backbone of a recorded paid course raises a serious issue of structural plagiarism.
One of his paying students later became a friend of mine and sent me screenshots of the course material. The copied portions, as shown in those screenshots, reached a similarity of more than 90%. I have annotated those images to mark the overlapping parts.
What I am asking for
Even last night, I was still hesitating over whether to publish this accusation directly.
Among my friends, there were two views. Some worried about me and felt that, in the current environment in China, I might not be able to win if this became a legal dispute. Others believed plagiarism must be opposed firmly and openly. No matter how imperfect the environment may be, copying someone else’s work should be called out at any time.
My own thinking is very simple: knowledge that I spent time organizing and summarizing cannot be taken by someone else and sold for money. Even if it were an essay I wrote in primary school, I would still be unhappy if someone took it without even saying hello.
So after thinking about it for a long time, and after delaying this for far too long, I have decided to publish this accusation.
My requests are straightforward: he should delete all infringing courses, issue a public apology, and promise not to infringe again. If he refuses to delete the courses and apologize, then I hope the online education platforms involved will remove the infringing courses in the face of what I consider solid evidence. The platforms I currently know about include Duobei Open Course, Xunlei Kankan, and 51CTO Academy.
The person I am accusing is Liu Wenzhi.
I hope people will support this effort to defend copyright. For me, that support would also be a little warmth from the world, and an encouragement for more than three years of original writing.
Questions for those who support Liu Wenzhi
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Product managers are also creators. If something you created were copied by someone else, and your intellectual property received no respect or protection, would you still continue creating?
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Apple did not invent the word 'phone'. Does that mean Apple has no right to own the intellectual property of the iPhone? I did not invent the term 'product manager'. Does that mean I cannot own the copyright to my PRD-writing framework?
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Do you know what degree of similarity counts as plagiarism under intellectual property standards? If the knowledge structure and core arguments of one work are almost equivalent to reading aloud someone else’s original text, and the similarity exceeds 90%, does that count as plagiarism?
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If the attitude is that it does not matter whether something is original or copied as long as students can learn from it, does that mean copyright law is meaningless?
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Suppose a director takes an unauthorized script, makes a film from it, and shows it to you. You think the film is good. Does that mean there was no infringement?
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Suppose you want to learn how to operate an excavator. You go to the excavator factory and fail to learn it. You go to the textbook room and still fail to learn it. Finally, someone steals a textbook and an excavator, combines them, and teaches you successfully. Because you learned the skill, would you say that stealing the textbook and the excavator was legal? Would you say it is unreasonable for the textbook author and the factory to pursue the theft?