Help! Someone is selling my intellectual property on eBay

Imagine for a moment, that you are the author of a “how to” course. The course contains DVDs, audio CDs and written materials. You spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours making the course. The course has your name all over it. Since you are the author and you have not sold the resale rights to anyone else, you are the only person in the world who has the right to sell it.

You discover your course being sold on ebay. Not once, but multiple times by the same seller. It’s an airtight case. You own it, no one else has the rights, your name is all over the product and they’ve sold it multiple times. Since it’s so open and shut, all you have to do is contact eBay and they’ll prosecute the criminal, right?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.

eBay’s Procedure for Intellectual Property theft

They’ll ask you to fill out a NOCI (Notice of Claimed Infringement) form.
In the NOCI form, you’ll be asked to swear, on penalty of perjury, that you have the rights to the product. You give them the auction number and the reason you feel it violates your intellectual property rights.

As I understand it, from that point on, you’ll be a member of their VERO program and you can get offending auctions pulled down easily.

Here’s a link to the NOCI form…
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/NOCI1.pdf

More about VERO…
http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/vero-rights-owner.html

If you do a search for “vero” and “eBay,” you’ll come up with lots of people complaining about the program. Many of them are little weasels who have been selling illegally and now are mad their thievery has been uncovered. Some, however, have legitimate complaints that their auctions were unfairly targeted and taken down.

You see, there’s no way that eBay could verify whether or not someone owns the IP of millions of items. They just have to depend on the sworn statement of the supposed owner. So the system is vulnerable to abuse from both sides. I guess they figure that if someone makes bogus claims of ownership and takes down a bunch of auctions, enough people will challenge it (there is a challenge procedure).

But that’s as far as VERO will go unbless you pursue it further on your own.

Here are some concrete steps to help you put the whammy on eBay copyright theft…

Do a “persistent search” on eBay to locate suspicious auctions

Go to eBay, log in (you must have an eBay account to do this) and search for a term or phrase unique to your product. At the bottom of the results page, look for “Save this search to Favorites” ad save it.

Inform your customers…

Put a notice on your products stating that customers do not have resale rights to the product and that any illegal sales will result in prosecution. Add that you’ll reward those who let you know when they find illegal copies being sold (this makes criminals less likely to try it in the first place).

• When you find an auction you think might be illegally selling your products, PDF the auction’s web page (turn the web page into a PDF file). Do a search for “print to pdf” if you don’t know how.
• If not, do a search through the seller’s feedback to see if you can determine whether or not he or she has sold the item before. If so, you have them red-handed! If it’s a Dutch auction where they’re selling multiple copies, you have them.
• If you can’t find any evidence of an earlier sale, consider having a friend buy the product. If the seller relists the item again, they’re copying and selling your stuff!
• If there are any clues as to who the seller is, track them down. Some sellers link to their web pages on their “About Me” page or have identifying information in their username.
• If they have a web site, do a whois lookup and get contact information on them, including their web host.
  http://www.betterwhois.com/
• After filing a NOCI, ask eBay for the contact info of the seller.
• Contact the police in the sellers locale and report the auctions. Include the pdfs you made.

The point is to gather as much information as possible about the crooks for when you file your complaints.

Here are some places to contact when you have gathered your info…

• eBay (of course)
• the police
• the FBI
• the web host (you may be able to get their web site shut down if you provide the host with proof they were engaging in illegal activity)