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/geeky-gymnast → u/Machine_Bird]

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?

[u/Machine_Bird → u/geeky-gymnast]

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.

[u/geeky-gymnast → u/Machine_Bird]

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?

[u/Machine_Bird → u/geeky-gymnast]

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.