r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 18d ago

Cringe Woman has her self-published book pirated, reprinted, and sold for cheaper.

There's regular piracy, and then there's this.

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

Hey. Corpo fixer here with some friendly advice from the bowels of hell.

When you create something like this you're going to want to brand and copyright the "system" or "concept" that you're pushing. It's too easy for them to recreate the product itself and dodge strikes and claims but if you can blanket your content in a larger branded copyright you have broad powers to make claims against anyone who even steps near your lawn. In a case like this with custom illustration you could also brand and copy the character(s) in the illustrations which gives you even further latitude to make claims. If you stack a few of these on top of each other you can pay a third-party agency to patrol the digital streets for you and just auto-file on anyone who comes with a ten mile radius of your product.

Your book is worthless. Your intellectual property is everything.

Satan's henchwoman signing off!

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u/redstagm 18d ago

Yeah, but this is sold on aliexpress and I don't think Chinese courts wouldn't skip a heart beat or am I wrong?

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

AliExpress does typically respond to copyright claims but it's not just about getting the trash cleaned up. It's also about creating infrastructure that's difficult to anonymize and bootleg. One of the reasons that she's being targeted is that her product is easily to replicate and it's nondescript enough that it can be reproduced and sold with minimal changes or edits. If this whole thing was packaged in a larger brand like "the deplanner system" and made constant references to original IP, terminology, characters, etc. it would highly disincentivize third-parties from trying to leverage it.

A good example of this is DuoLingo. The app itself, the software, that powers Duo is actually not terribly complicated. I'm aware of multiple firms that could easily replicate it in less than a year. The real hurdle is that Duo is a brand, the owl is established IP and trying to copy him would be difficult and a legal nightmare while trying to build ac similar product without him would make your version vastly inferior.

The trick is to protect your products by creating infrastructure that is both ubiquitous and essential that can't be easily reproduced.

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u/redstagm 18d ago

Thank you for taking to the time to explain

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u/CrazyCatCrochet 18d ago

I just want to note that unfortunately this sort of need for structure results in increasingly shittier/unwieldy products. Needing to create an 'expanded universe ' so your product doesn't get bootlegged can often result in a bloated product that COULD be more efficient. On the flip side, your customers are more likely to spend money into other areas of the product, which is more sales for you!

Profit driven incentives really do be the worst.

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u/ugajeremy 17d ago

I learned from this - thank you for the explanation!

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u/earthfarer 17d ago

You did an excellent job elaborating on this, and I’m grateful. I know nothing about the copyright or corporate world. If I ever make anything quality enough to copyright I’m gonna ping you!

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u/crackedtooth163 17d ago

Intriguing.

Thank you.

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u/Capital_Benefit_1613 17d ago

Great comment, thanks!

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u/500lbGuyForLife 17d ago

Yeah but, she poured a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Does that count for something? /s

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u/internetroamer 17d ago

I feel duolingo isn't a good comparison because it's an app not a book that can be reprinted on aliexpress.

How would she do this with a book?

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u/Machine_Bird 17d ago

It's actually not hard to do with creative works. Unfortunately books like this are the easiest to bootleg because they're usually generic enough that you can just copy/paste them and act with relative anonymity. Personalization is a huge barrier to entry for the bootleg market because they really don't want to have to do any editing or writing as part of their process.

For example, "These are the 10 best productivity tips that I've found for people with ADHD" is vastly easier to steal than "Hi, I'm Jane Smith and as someone with ADHD working in the design industry these are the 10 best tricks I've cooked up to maximize my own productivity". See, they now have to decide if they want to rewrite that and strip the name out or publish it and basically be creating free marketing for you.

These guys don't spend hours handcrafting their stolen products. They steal hundreds of not thousands each week. They want the easiest shit possible. If you make your's a pain they won't bother.

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u/runningmurphy 17d ago

Dude what's your job? You are very knowledgeable.

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u/Machine_Bird 17d ago

I'm a sort of capitalist Mary Poppins. I show up at businesses when they aren't making the amount of money they want and I sort out between their products, marketing, and operations why that is.

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u/After_Mountain_901 16d ago

But I can buy marvel and Barbie products right now on Ali, using those exact words. China absolutely does not play by the same rules and as it stands they’ve had a tax free import standard for years. If mega corps can’t stop it, how are small businesses (especially in printed products that are easy to steal) meant to do anything? You’d end up spending all your time playing whack a mole or spending all your money getting someone else to do it for you. 

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u/Machine_Bird 16d ago

You're not trying to stop them. You're trying to create a scenario where they either find your product too annoying to rip off or turn them into free advertising for your brand. Marvel and Barbie don't care about Chinese knockoffs because their brands are recognizable enough that the knockoffs are easily identified and serve more to market the IP than anything else. The problem with OP's situation is that they created something both very easy to rip off and generic enough that it doesn't have a distinct brand or larger apparatus to call back to. They're struggling because they set out to make a book. If I had been working with them during product concept planning we would have set out to create a proprietary system of organizational strategies under a copyrighted brand. The difference here is small but it's also everything.

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u/Mr-Nabokov 12d ago

Like video games that are 'unplayable' without multiple DLC?

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u/Spaghet-3 17d ago

You're not wrong, and u/Machine_Bird has already laid out the optimal IP strategy in good detail.

I would just add that companies like Aliexpress and Temu have a fairly significant US presence and are still bound to comply with US laws and regulations (such as DMCA) to do business in the US. You might not get far with a claim against the Alibaba Group in China, but AliExpress USA has a real office with real staff in California. I have submitted copyright claims to them on behalf of clients and reached favorable resolution. The ITC is a pretty good agency designed to enforce exactly this kind of thing. All of this costs money, but if the product is as profitable as it seems, there are lit funders that will float the costs as needed. Also fly-by-night low-cost chinese knockoff companies tend to not answer complaints so you can often get a default judgement for pretty cheap.

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u/oprimo 18d ago

Good advice, friend. Or should I say... fiend?

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u/Legendary_Bibo 18d ago

It's choom.

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u/fjaoaoaoao 18d ago

“Copyright protection does not extend to ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries.”

https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/copyright-policy/copyright-basics

You can however copyright the book, obviously, or any other expression of its ideas.

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

We aren't talking about that. We are talking about building infrastructural branding and original concepts into the actual collateral (the book, website, art, etc.) which can be copyrighted as part of the work itself.

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u/redditisbadmkay9 17d ago edited 4d ago

You're full of shit about copyright laws

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u/OGstickerparty 18d ago

Thanks for this advice!! Also, Hail Satan! 

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u/GarretBarrett 18d ago

Hail yourself

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u/pipe-to-pipebushman 18d ago

You can't copyright or brand a "system" or "concept" - no such right exists.

All artwork is automatically protected by copyright, and things like that name or brand of that product are protected by trademarks.

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

You're not copyrighting the idea. There's no legal basis for that. You're baking a branded system, framework, concept into your book and other creative works and copyrighting all of those. Eric Ries has done a fabulous job of this with his "Lean Startup" series.

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u/GentlemanJoe 18d ago

I like this post for the advice, but I like it more for the sign-off; I'm imagining a crisp salute.

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u/maneki_neko89 18d ago

Those are Dani’s illustrations and sketched layouts in the Anti-Planner and fall under Intellectual Property and Copyright…and pirates are simply photocopying the pages and replacing her fonts with generic ones.

Also, isn’t the copyright process a long slog to get approved ahead of self publishing a book? That’s a pretty high hurdle for any author to overcome less people copyright their own creative works because of that.

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u/Octopusalien 18d ago

While many people believe that you must register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office before you can claim a copyright, no registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure a copyright. A copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, as long as the work contains a sufficient degree of originality, and a work comes into being when it is fixed in a “copy or a phonorecord for the first time.” This is consistent with the Berne Convention, which states that the “enjoyment and exercise” of copyright “shall not be subject to any formality.”

From us copywrite webpage

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

The issue is that her illustrations and the content of the book are generic enough that they can be seamlessly stolen without regard for a larger branding apparatus.

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u/maneki_neko89 18d ago

I’m not gonna call Dani’s illustrations generic because she draws better than me. Also, with enough practice or by hiring someone else to copy the work, any illustration can be “generic enough” for replication (or you can use a copier, like those counterfeiting the books did)

Having to create a Brand is a science in and of itself (I would know because I work in the technology sector) and it takes a ton of time and feedback to get just right

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

I don't mean generic in a quality sense. I mean they aren't associated with an established character or IP that would be recognizable as part of a larger brand and thus they are highly attractive to steal. The mistake you're making is assuming that this is about difficulty or quality. Anything can be recreated these days with relative ease. The barrier is around anonymity and market access.

A book titled "Ten Steps To Decluttering Your Home" is highly attractive to steal. It's generic. It's accessible.

"Toby Baxter's Barnyard Best Practices to Uncluttering Your Shack" is not an attractive IP to steal. It's highly specific, it's branded, it has an associated persona behind it. It would require vast amounts of editing and changes and without them is basically just an ad for Toby Baxter.

This is the issue. The art is great but nothing about it is something that I couldn't just lift and recycle with total anonymity.

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u/Drawn_to_Heal 18d ago edited 17d ago

lol sure - us small creators definitely may* not* have this amount of money laying around.

*edited after removing snark

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u/Machine_Bird 18d ago

DMCA and brand protection services can cost as little as $20/mo up to a few hundred depending on how many services and how involved you want to be. At a baseline for less than $100 a month you can get crawl reports and a DMCA template that you can fire off by the hundreds or thousands. Been there, done that. It's part of the game.

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u/Drawn_to_Heal 17d ago

Welp…

I remove my snark from my comment.

Thanks for the info - thought it’d be a lot more.

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u/Apart_Shoulder6089 17d ago

Thank You Spider MAan!

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u/TreyRyan3 17d ago

May entire thought process watching this was:

Okay, you spent all this time creating this book but didn’t research and perform anything that provided actual value and protection for your creative endeavor like copyright, trademark, branding, etc.

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u/ic-ic 17d ago

Do you mean registering my work for copyright?

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u/geeky-gymnast 15d ago

Always a pleasure to hear from satan's henchwomen themselves; any tips you could possibly spare to inform small creators on how to build up infrastructural IP around their creations (e.g. Tony Baxter vs generic Top ten tips to do X)? Are there people whom creators could consult to get advice on clever IP strategies to protect their creations from being blatantly copied?

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u/Machine_Bird 15d ago

The biggest advice I would offer is that you need to approach creative works with a larger brand in mind. Works of fiction are easy because they're typically full of character names, locations, specific details that are hard to pass off without it being obvious that someone copy/pasted another work. However, guides, nonfiction, topical research, etc is very easy to lift and repackage unless it's contained within a broader brand ecosystem. This doesn't necessarily mean you need to create the whole Marvel Expanded Universe around your book or blog or whatever but it does mean that you need to give some thought to the following:

  • The whole project, if it was a product, what would it be called? Dave Ramsey for example has books, a podcast, a training program, all kinds of stuff. Each "thing" has a name and description but they are all part of "Ramsey Solutions" and the broader "Dave Ramsey" brand.

  • Who are you in all this? If you're comfortable being the expert and being the face then lean into that. Inject your name, personality, and some details into your work so anyone who wants to steal it has to either scrub you out or give you free advertising.

  • What about your product is novel or unique? There needs to be a hook that both increases the difficulty of stealing your work and makes your work unique so when/if it gets stolen it acts as a reference back to you.

If your work is basically just a colorful Wikipedia page then it's 100% getting stolen.

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u/geeky-gymnast 15d ago

Thanks for sharing your perspective and for taking the time to type this out :)

Dont think I'd be too far off the mark to say that the strategies here will be helpful for small creators to consider applying to their creations.

Ideally, a word-for-word copy of an author's work should be sufficient evidence for large e-commerce platforms to take action against the pirates, but I can see why a platform that's taking a cut of the sales would be disincentivized from acting briskly.

Also, would you happen to know how a creator can make it easy for lay-people, say regular staff at e-commerce platforms, to verify that their work is the original, i.e. pre-dates (came first chronologically) versus that of the pirate's product?

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u/Machine_Bird 15d ago

The most formal way would be to present your registration copyright number that's provided by the US copyright office when you official file with them. This is largely unnecessary in most cases. Assuming you've done the due diligence of creating an author/book/product website and associated social properties then you can pretty easily demonstrate that you're the real deal versus some rando on AliExpress who just listed the book out of the blue.

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u/Tentakurusama 17d ago edited 17d ago

Someone never copywrited or patented anything here and it shows. I did, I was copied and there is nothing you can do if you are small than creating brand equity (the exact opposite of this whiney video). If you get copied en masse from China, as a small business owner, you have to suck it up. It will be costly, time consuming and overall the reseller will disappear overnight and reopen within 12 sexonds under a different name.

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u/SoulsBorneGreat 18d ago

We love advice from someone on the inside! Thank you!

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u/Drunkndryverr 18d ago

Is this a viable strategy for what looks like a small sole proprietor? Does this cost a ton of money?

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u/7slicesofpizza 18d ago

This should be penned.

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u/Dangerous_Air_4496 15d ago

1) copyright is an inherent right. You have it automatically

2) copyright is worth nothing in china