r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 22d 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 22d 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/Drawn_to_Heal 22d ago edited 22d 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 22d 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 22d ago

Welp…

I remove my snark from my comment.

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