How do I protect my e-book from being distributed to people who haven’t paid for it?

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One of my readers emailed me and asked,

How do I protect my e-book from being distributed and downloaded by people who haven’t paid for it?

You can’t

Once you’ve sold a copy of your e-book to someone they could turn around and e-mail it to their friends. Or they could put it on their website and make it available for everyone to download.

And there’s really not a lot you can do about it. There are a few things that you can do but some of them are probably not worth it.

Include a copyright statement

At the very beginning of your e-book you should include a simple and direct copyright statement explains that your e-book is not free and may not be sold or otherwise distributed to others.

Doing this will decrease the number of people distributing your e-book.

Here’s what I usually include in the copyright section of my e-books:

This guide is copyright © 2010 Stewart Marketing Inc.

This report is NOT free.  You may NOT give it away.

[NO] Can Be Edited Completely
[NO] Can Claim full ownership
[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites
[NO] Can be packaged with other products
[NO] Can be sold
[NO] Can be bundled with other products
[NO] Can be broken into multiple chapters
[NO] Can be given away
[NO] Can sell Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Master Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Private Label Rights
[NO] Can be offered through auction sites
[NO] Can sell product as is without changing a thing

Make people register

One thing you could do is require people to register their e-mail address and create a password when they buy your e-book. After they have registered they can download the e-book and in order to open the it they have to put in their e-mail address and password.

And if they wanted to send your e-book to their friends or post it online they would have to include their e-mail address and password so people could open it. I believe this would deter people from distributing your e-book.

There are a few downsides to this:

First, it would require additional software (which may not be very cheap) and some technical expertise to set all of this up.

Second, it would annoy some of the people that purchased your e-book and may increase your refund rate.

Third, someone would likely create a “hacked” version of your e-book that did not require an e-mail address and password to open it. They would start distributing this “hacked” version.

What about the DMCA?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. In theory it should protect citizens of the United States from theft of their intellectual property i.e. the e-book you wrote.

Unfortunately they are several hurdles that you have to overcome for the DMCA to actually help you.

First, you have to identify who is distributing copies of your e-book. You can do a Google search and find some of them but many of them you’ll never know about. For example if Bob buys your e-book and e-mails it to Sally, Fred, and George you will never know about it.

Second, you have to find a way to contact the person distributing your e-book and ask them to stop. Tracking down contact information can be difficult here on the Internet.  For example if someone posts it on their blogspot blog there may be no way for you to get their contact information.

Third, you have to contact their website host (i.e. blogspot) and notify them that this person is distributing copies of your work and that they refuse to stop. Furthermore you have to get the host to do something about it which can be tricky.

If the host is located in the United States then you can threaten legal action. But I don’t think you want to pay an attorney $100 per hour to stop the distribution of $10 e-book.

Is it really worth it?

Let’s say for example that you have an e-book that you sell for $10.

And every month 16 people find a way to download it without paying for it. Of those 16 people you can only track down 8 of them.

Of those 8 people it is very likely that only 4 would have been willing to actually pay for it in the first place.

So by tracking down these people the most that you can realistically recoup is $40 (4 e-books at $10 each).

And you may spend 10 or 20 hours tracking down these people.

Is a really worth it? I don’t think it is.

Focus your time & energy elsewhere

In the amount of time that it takes to track down a few individuals and possibly recoup a little money you could instead write another e-book. And the sales of this e-book would be worth far more than getting a little money from people that steal your e-book.

I personally believe that tracking down people who distribute your e-book is not only a waste of time but in a very real way a waste of money. You can make way more money by spending your time and effort producing great content and additional e-books to sell.

Tagged as: ebooks