We hear a great deal about credit card fraud on the internet,
and illegal downloading of music gets high profile publicity.
However, those are not the only illegal activities taking place
online.
Copyright theft relating to ebooks, articles and software is
rampant. People with no rights at all sell the software of
others, sometimes even giving it away in a thieves' bundle. The
same is true of ebooks. The authors of these products may have
spent months or even years working on them. They will, no
doubt, have put them up for sale, either directly, through
affiliates, or by selling resell rights, at a market price that
will make it all worthwhile, and possibly after taking
professional advice on the pricing. They will then have planned
and set up all the marketing, again maybe with expensive
professional advice. The owner has done all the hard work, and
now expects the rewards their effort deserves.
Things may seem to be going well, with a few sales rolling in
on a regular basis, until one day they find someone selling
their product at a knock down price, having no rights to do so.
Within hours, that product can be spread around auction sites
and the rest of the internet at low or zero cost, while the
owner and his affiliates, plus those with genuine resell
rights, are trying to compete at the original price.
How can that poor author police such blatant theft alone?
Instead of working on new products that people want and maybe
need, the author is forced to waste time trying to track down
thieves, take legal action, and look for ways to stop it
happening again.
Such an occurrence is far from rare; it happens every day. One
thief can steal a long list of products and blast them out from
a long list of websites, without any integrity or honesty
whatsoever. He may even sell or give away resell rights,
creating another level of people who think they are owners of a
product. They are sucked in by the thief, without knowing that
if they offer the product for sale, they could have the
copyright owner's lawyers breathing down their neck with a law
suit.
Now, we are talking there of one individual. But what if the
copyright of the product has been bought on behalf of a
membership club, and that club has 1000 members; and most of
those members are quite astute when it comes to internet
marketing, software and other related skills? Now it's not one
pair of eyes looking out for offenders and pursuing those who
are caught; it is potentially all the members. So, 1000 members
could mean 1000 pairs of eyes, a 1000 people keen not just to
stop the thief distributing their products, but to make sure he
cannot do it to anyone else either.
I belong to a membership site which suffered such a copyright
theft recently. Once spotted, members were very quick to get to
work investigating the thief, tracking down his 100 plus
websites, and advising all other product owners whose products
it appeared were being sold illegally, with resell rights that
were not available to be sold, or being given away illegally.
Multiple members contacting payment processors, hosts, and
domain registrars had a fairly quick impact on the criminal
action of that particular "gentleman". That thief can have no
doubt now that his dishonest activities are going to become
more and more difficult over the coming days and weeks. He
faces the prospect of multiple lawsuits, and maybe criminal
charges for fraud, selling items he had no rights to sell and
offering rights which were not his to offer.
Let us hope there are more instances where copyright thieves
are pursued, cornered and put out of business, leaving the hard
working and honest authors and internet marketers to earn a just
living.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Roy Thomsitt
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