What's The Best Way To Handle Someone Stealing Your Product From You Online?

When I first got to this forum and community, one of my initial Big Ideas was to do all the research on how to build a truly piracy-proof business, then write up the details and sell it.

I did about a year and a half of research.

It can't be done.

Do you want to know why? Here, let me explain.

Pirate communities operate in tiers. At the bottom level, there are "public trackers" - places that any schmuck can join and leech files. And in these communities, pirates develop reputations for uploading new stuff and maintaining good ratios and generally being "cool."

This gets them invitations to join private trackers. The private trackers can't be joined by the general public; you need an invitation. Invitations are progressively harder to get as the trackers become more "elite" and have better collections of material.

So before you can even see whether a given tracker is stealing your product, you have to earn the trust of pirates on the lower tiers and get invited to those private trackers. Which isn't trivial. And once you're on the tracker, you can check for your product and get your DMCA takedown notices ready. Except hold on there, bucko.

Private trackers use unique torrent links.

If you send a DCMA notice that says "take down the file at this URL," the URL you give - the only one you can get for the given torrent at that site - is unique to your account on the tracker.

If they delete that account, every URL the account holder could possibly send a DCMA notice about disappears. Nobody else will ever get those URLs. They have complied with the request.

Of course, the torrents are still there. On the tracker. Just under different URLs which you didn't and couldn't ask them to take down. So your product is still stolen and still being shared, and you have accomplished nothing.

And now you don't have your account, which means you have to get a new invite. Except guess what? That tracker tells other trackers about how this account sent a DCMA notice and was logged in from these IPs at these dates and times. Any other private tracker where you were logged in during that window? They delete your account, too.

Which leaves you back out in the cold on the public trackers, unable to even see whether your products are being stolen at all, until you earn the trust of more pirates and get new invites.

And that allows you to see what new products they are stealing, so you can send another pointless notice that doesn't change anything... except to get your account deleted again.

Oh, and the "go after the payment processor" option?

That takes even longer to explain. But I'll summarise: it doesn't work. Not outside of the "complete retard thought he could copy your sales page and sell your product as his own" space, anyway. (That space does exist, though.)

The problem here, Steve, is that you don't want to accept an answer you don't like. Which is why you've expressly asked people not to give it.

But the raw fact is that you just don't like the answer. That doesn't make it not the answer. It doesn't magically create a new answer. It just means you don't get the answer you want, because that is not the answer. The answer is the answer. Other answers are not - they are just garbage.

But please, feel free to tell me again how wrong I am about something you don't know. After all, it's not like I know anything about the subject.