What To Do When People Are Stealing Your Products??

Blackhat forums - find the owner and hire someone to break his legs.

Seriously, nothing much you can do about it. You can sue but it's probably not worth the expenses.

Individual sites, complain to their host.

Tristan,

I understand your frustration. I've visited some of these sites after being informed that some of my products were being "shared" there.

There are many solutions and ideas that can be discussed to solve this problem.

Unfortunately, it's kinda like trying to solve the spam problem. None of the solutions will work 100%, and almost all of them will stop working eventually.

Unless you are selling a solid, tangible product, it's way too easy for certain individuals to rip and duplicate products.

Do what you feel you need to do (report to the hosts, payment processors, etc.), and then move forward.

Focus on the 95% of real customers who buy from you. Put your energy there instead of on the 5% who are stealing from you (whether by sharing on sites or serial refunding.)

Both you, as well as your real customers, will be better for it.

Bryan

PS. By the way, you have to wonder how many of those guys are actually using the products or making any money from it. How much value can you associate with most free stuff anyway? ;-)
(Besides, it all has to balance out in the end, so they're really just taking a lot of steps back.)

Tristan:

If they are contacting you, maybe you could shame them into buying?

Tristan, think of it as shoplifting. It sucks, the big guys spend a lot of money dealing with it. The small guys write it off.

Yeah thanks guys, I figured there was not much point in worrying about it. But was just curious to see if anyone had a certain solution but it's cool. It's only a small portion of people who are doing it anyway.

Cheers guys!

One of the best things to do for yourself, knowing that your products will be stolen or sold by others without your permission, is to embed links to your other products all over within each product, not just showing links but writing about those products quite a bit throughout your text.

That way any jerk who wants to steal your books or reports will have no choice but to advertise for you or go through it and make major deletions to remove your links and any mention of them, or completely rewrite it.

Most will see that as way too much trouble to go through and they'll move on to someone elses product.

If they want to steal your product, they'll have to advertise for you. Sound like a good idea? What do the Warriors think about that? Is it feasible?

Try DLGuard (it's on clickbank I think) but really, if it's digital, there's not much you can do.

Dude there's almost nothing you can do.

You have to understand that warez boards exist, and they will forever. Don't get me wrong, I am not a warez fan at all, I know what it's like to see your product being shared on those warez boards. But, you see, there will always be people that will buy from you and people that will get away for free. It's the law of the internet

So, relax, report those files to the file hosting companies they are uploaded to, register at the forums, be a bit helpful (get 20 posts) and request that your product gets removed. Those are all freebie seekers there, they never ever bought any products and never will. File a c & d if needed, some of them won't even listen. But never forget that there will always be buyers.

Large department stores treat shoplifting as a fact of life, they take appropriate steps to stop it but inevitably they assume that a percentage of their profits will be eaten by shoplifting. They factor in this loss when they set their prices, so sadly we are all paying extra thanks to the criminal minority.

Similarly you can try using passwords or having legitimate users register to use your product, but inevitably someone will steal it or post it on a black hat forum. As with the department stores you'll just have to factor this loss in when you set your price.

Bill

Just forget about it and move on

^

Agreed. The big boys like adobe and microsoft seem like they don't care their product being shared on warez boards. But they still make the big bucks.

There is no real way you can prevent it from happening, so see the positive in that they are promoting you and viewing your products.

Like some other says you can't do anything about it, the more you're trying to protect it, the more your product get stolen.

Someone thinking my product is good enough to steal? I'd almost take that as a compliment!

Please, steal my ebooks! Spread the link to the entire world and advertise my other products for me! I'd absolutely love all the extra (free) traffic!

I'm just one guy, but imagine having an entire army of thieves spreading my links around! Why, that'd be just like an affiliate program only without Clickbank!

Like has been said, when life hands you lemons, make lemonaide! You'll go a lot farther with a positive mindset.

Tristan,

The same thing happened to me recently. Just out of interest, some black hat forums have "Do Not Share" Lists. Get on them and you will stop it being shared on certain forums.

Maybe worth a try!

GoGetta

I am sorry bro there is absolutely nothing you can do You can make threats and stuff... that usually works well for me... and mentioning to them the word sue

Thanks guys for the feedback and advice.

I have some what of a different problem. There is some dude on another forum who is claiming to be me and selling my stuff.

He has been called out and people have said that he is not really me but cmon this kind of thing can get annoying after a while!