From Stealing Your Online Home Business
Written by: HBR Publishers
web site: Date Submitted: August 25, 2005
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.
"Has This Ever Happened To YOU?" "STOP...THIEF!" Let us say that you have been working on your web site on the Internet for awhile and have built up a pretty nice little home business [or two, or more] - on the Information Highway. One day you open up your email... You See An Angry Email...and not even from "your" customer. This person actually bought YOUR product from someone else not authorized to sell YOUR product! Here is an email from an ANGRY customer [not yours!] ...demanding that you... "send my order right now or else!"...and "where is it".... ...and "you scammed me!" and "I will turn you in for fraud." Wow! You are so upset! What in heaven's name are they talking about anyway? You have never heard of them before now. You have worked hard on your online home business customer service. You have always made sure that your customers are happy and completely satisfied. But just to be sure, you spend a couple of hours searching all of your previous sales records for th eir name.
That is what happened to us... Finding no record of the so-called angry "customer" in any of our business sales records or files, we then started emailing back and forth with them trying to find out "the name of the person" that sold them OUR software?
Who the devil has "scammed" them using our good image? Why would they want to ruin our small home business anyway? What kind of people are they?
We finally got a web address from this angry customer. When we got to the thief's web site...guess what...there was our Software Box eCover that we designed from scratch! No question that it was our unique and copyrighted work!
The thief had colored over our company name and copyright on our eCover. You could even see part of first letter of our name still on our eCover! Not a very thorough thief.
Yikes! Someone was STEALING "our" products right off the Internet! A thief is stealing our very special products that we spent months and months creating. They have no conscious about ruining our online small home business.
If you have ever heard of "Internet Stress" - this is it!
Well, this actually happened to us back in 2002. Luckily we found out about it. We eventually found out how to stop our software from being "pirated."
What an awakening we had!
Our basic honest and naive minds would never have thought that there were such unscrupulous people out there stealing OUR copyrighted materials!
Couldn't happen to US! Right?
WRONG!!!
IT DID!
Can You Stop Internet Thieves From Stealing Your Copyrighted Materials?
You absolutely can stop them. Start PROTECTING your small online home business today!
...so how did we stop the thief?
Well, we didn't want to contact the thief directly and just slap his hand! He would just close that web site down and move on to another one and still "pirate" our software anyway!
We needed time to think about what to do...
We belong to one of those "private web site clubs" that has a "member's only forum." We decided to post our problem on the forum and ask other members for some advice. Maybe they had similar experiences with Internet Copyright thieves! The members all said to "hire a lawyer."
...hire a lawyer?
We did try to hire an online lawyer and here is what he told us:
Here is what we found out: It costs at least $5,000 just to get a lawyer to represent your "copyright infringement" case in court. Of course it would cost only about $250 for them to send "one" letter to the thief!
Then we remembered that one of the members of our forum mentioned to us that we need to send a "DMCA Notice" to the thief's web host and that it would knock them off of the net!
What the heck is a DMCA Notice anyway? We went back to the drawing board and did more research...
Here would be another at least $250 for a lawyer to send a DMCA Notice on our behalf.
So, could we send one ourselves?
YES! And we did...and YOU can too.
Legally, the web site host has to honor your DMCA NOTICE.
And they have to honor it within 10 days!
You can view a sample "DMCA Notice" here: /DMCA_NOTICE.htm
If you want a free way to "encrypt" your web pages you can: Click Here to get a free copy of Encrypt Magic Software /EnCryptoMAGIC/index.htm Copyrighted 2005 by HBR Publishers aka The Author's Resource box MUST be included and left "exactly" as it is, if you use this article.
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