Flickr/Oliver Bruchez
For as long as I’ve been publishing stuff, pirates have been ripping it off. Is this happening to you?
Yesterday I spoke with an attorney who goes after intellectual property thieves. She’s in the business of shutting ‘em down. I’m deciding what to do about a couple of situations.
Much as I’d love to rant about piracy and how it hurts producers *and* consumers, today I’ll keep my mouth shut. I just want to know:
How does piracy affect YOU and your business?
What have you done about it? Has it worked?
I’d love your comments below.
Perry Marshall
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
8 Comments on “How do pirates affect you?”
I think that most people are honest and will buy the products they want from you because they will be looking for help and support and after a specific result that they will not get with a pirated product. You can’t pirate a mastermind course for example, or a coaching session.
While there are some people that will copy your digital downloads and make them available to others for free, or even try and profit from them, the majority of people will still come to you to buy.
Now you’re worried about piracy, Perry?
You warn that the one thing that’s likely to happen with your USP is that someone’ll copy it! Isn’t that piracy? Now there’s nothing you can do about it – save retalliate with a better one you’d prepared for just such a circumstance.
Remember, information’s cheap. Understanding it is another matter altogether – and your advantage is that you understand this right down to the ground. I am happy to share information – tips and even “how to” lessons.
Why?
Because I know that even amongst the masters, there are those who’ll find an excuse not to take that step to the next level.
Provide results on the basis of that understanding and you’ll not have any problems with Pirates. Because they can’t steal something that can only be learned!
Well, to be honest, I’ve been wondering about some of the stuff that I’ve found on my account that “says” it is a product but I don’t know if I should have. I know alot of your products come with bonuses and access to cool stuff. . . so I’m guessing if you didn’t want me to have it I shouldn’t have access to it right?
If you want to check my account it’s the Adwords copywriting, wistia, and some other stuff that I’ve found while searching.
Or are you talking about torrents and superdiscount websites offering material that they say is from you? I know I found some of those, but I don’t give them any money because I’ve had my identity stolen before, including IP addresses.
And if we define “pirate” by people having access to our information that we want to keep private and ours alone to distribute as we please, then the No Secrets America (really, the initials–NS. . . ah!) has really screwed that up haven’t they? Whoops, that’s another soap box for sure.
I believe that pirates are really bad. There are sites that you can download the complete works of very prominent names.
How does anybody sell their intellectual property against this free distribution?
I hope that we get an international law that will stop that once and for all.
We have teachers tell us directly that they photocopy our books for their students; Brian says we should go into the copy toner business.
We just got an idea from our son’s spelling book and with our next printing, we will be adding a small line of text to the footer of every page; “Do NOT Duplicate. Report violations to violations(at)ourdomain.com.” This won’t work for a lot of your clients, but there’s a lot of rebellious students out there who would be more than happy to report violations. ;)
In reality, I’m not looking to get teachers in trouble; I was a poor teacher with NO resources, myself. So, I understand they are caught between a rock and hard place. And, teachers will always be able to white that line out on a master copy. At the very least, however, this will add an extra layer of complexity to the process. More importantly, this will make them think twice before they rip off our materials.
That’s my $0.02.
Personally, waste of time and energy to go after them. Look at the RIAA. They haven’t shopped file sharing of music, and they have a lot more power and money than you do. And they probably aren’t buyers to begin with. I would probably add more optins to get them into your list. Also, consider setting up the fake torrents sites yourself. Then you can track them a bit.
I think Adam is right, there isn’t a lot that you can do about these pirates as far as the law goes. They’re like weeds. My mentor has a bunch of infoproducts on the internet and he told me the best thing to do is to put a lot of fake downloads on different file sharing sites to frustrate those who like to download free stuff or you could give away free parts of your product with links inside to buy the real thing.
Hi Perry,
So far, there wasn’t much of an impact from piracy to my business.
I sell licenses of my own software which gives me the possibility to manage licenses with a license manager.
I use a proprietary license manager which I wrote myself, so any cracks for widely used license managers will not work.
But once, I got an email from somebody who claimed that he has cracked my software.
I did a google search and only found links to cracks of my software where one has to pay to get the cracked version.
I decided to not pursue this further because I guessed that putting energy into that will cause more harm than benefit in the sense that I will have less energy to do more important things such as improving my product or marketing.
I couldn’t measure any impact on my sales figures etc, so it wasn’t a big deal probably.
If there were significant piracy I’d probably do something about it. But I’ll always evaluate cost/benefit. The cost is primarily distraction from important stuff.
Sometimes, if the pirates do heavy marketing for the pirated stuff, it may even create a positive effect on the business because of increased exposure.
A certain percentage of the people which are reached by the marketing of the pirates, will probably decide to buy the official product.
So, it’s probably pretty hard to evaluate the impact on the business. There might even be a positive impact in total.
So it’s not clear whether to do something about piracy. (And what to do about it.)
BTW, Last Monday I started to work fulltime for my own business. My employee job ended the Friday before.
Works well so far. I added software projects to my portfolio and already got a project to do.
(Doing software projects is a nice backend to selling licenses of my own software…)