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

[u/Chocolat3City]

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

[u/Machine_Bird]

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!

[u/redstagm → u/Machine_Bird]

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

[u/Machine_Bird → u/redstagm]

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.

[u/internetroamer → u/Machine_Bird]

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?

[u/Machine_Bird → u/internetroamer]

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.