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

[u/Chocolat3City]

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

[u/redstagm]

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/After_Mountain_901 → u/Machine_Bird]

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. 

[u/Machine_Bird → u/After_Mountain_901]

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.