One of the banes of Internet marketing is the file sharing site. Quite honestly, I don’t know how these are allowed to remain online, but that’s not my decision to make. Point is, these sites freely share our hard work. Question is, what can we do about it AND…more importantly…is it worth spending our time trying to fight this pestilence? This article will attempt to provide some concrete answers.

At the top of the list is to try to protect your work as best as possible. That means, at the very least, not having any static download links that can easily be indexed by the search engines. That’s just an open invitation to people stealing your work. Get something like DLGuard or some download manager program or service. This way, there isn’t one download page link for people to access.

Another thing you probably want to do is password protect your work. For software, this is easy enough to do with registration keys where you can disable any software that isn’t properly registered. For ebooks, you can consider EXE ebooks. PDF protection is weak at best and not something you really want to bother with.

Okay, but what about what happens once your product ends up on one of these sites? Well, here is the reality, as much as most people won’t want to hear it. Most of these sites are hosted in countries outside of the US and where, quite honestly, the hosting companies themselves don’t give a rat’s behind that our work has been pirated. So complaining to them will fall on deaf ears. Going to the FTC, if they can even be bothered with such a small matter, won’t help either. Most of these sites are outside their jurisdiction.

And even if you DO manage to get your file removed from one of these sites, there is a very good chance that it will end up on another site, if it already hasn’t. In fact, if you check, you will find that most products that are pirated end up on many sites. Just do a search for the product name itself and you’ll see.

Ultimately, the time you spend tracking down pirates and trying to put them out of business is your decision. For US sites, you want to send a DCMA to the hosting company with all the information that you have to prove that the work is yours and that this site has no right to sell it or give it away. If there are a number of sites, you might want to outsource this task.

Most people who download products from file sharing sites would have probably never purchased them anyway. It is the mentality of those looking for something for nothing. So you’re not really losing any money. In other words, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

Do what you can…but don’t kill yourself.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim.

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