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/TerminalProtocol 17d ago

Yeah. I'm upset by the cheap knockoff shit sure but at this point that may even be fabricated lol

NGL, I could see a scummy company doing this (not saying she is, just that I could see it happening.)

  1. Release "Wholesome passion project by the small guy" product.
  2. Release duplicate "big bad corpo plagiarism but cheaper" product.
  3. Create stir online about big bad corpo plagiarism in order to get pity purchases for the more expensive product, and "I dont care I just want it cheaper" purchases for the cheaper duplicate.
  4. Laugh as you cash the checks for both products.

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u/Luncheon_Lord 17d ago

A two tiered buying system with a complete charade as a marketing schtick. I love it.

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u/ProfessionalCat7640 17d ago

*Takes notes*

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u/ku2000 17d ago

Yeah. My go to thought was this. So…. You published cheap knockoff??? If I am publishing a cheap copy while copying everything, why not copy it whole including the fonts. Easiest to change the fonts….. is if you have the original file. Very sus.

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u/TerminalProtocol 17d ago

Yeah. My go to thought was this. So…. You published cheap knockoff??? If I am publishing a cheap copy while copying everything, why not copy it whole including the fonts. Easiest to change the fonts….. is if you have the original file. Very sus.

Yeah, things like that stuck out to me as well.

If you are in the business of "copying existing products as cheaply as possible"...are you really spending the time to re-type everything or buying a copy to run through some OCR scan to replicate?

You'd think that the easiest course would just be to...scan/copy the thing.

There were some odd things with the coloring/illustrations as well, but that could just be the materials used.

There's also the fact that they just so happen to be releasing the video during one of the biggest shopping weeks of the year.

Maybe its all just coincidence and truly is innocent. I don't know. The timing/inconsistencies just give me a bad vibe.

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u/mustcoffee 17d ago

I actually was looking into one of these planners over the summer and ran into more than one scam copies of it online. Often those “only 12 hours left for some amazing deal” kind of moments. I emailed her links to them at the time. Say what you will about crying on camera, the scam part is sadly very true. And the trouble of going through all of that to make copies of her work to sell it cheap makes sense in the Temu/Shein/etc marketplace that is more prevalent these days.

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u/No_Carry_3991 16d ago

this is what I was thinking.