Just yesterday, I noticed one of the members in a popular Webmaster forum, Digital Point, selling one PLR pack which looked exactly like the one I am selling here: Forex PLR Product Review Articles.
The title of the thread caught my attention as it was exactly the same to mine. Upon further investigation, the individual articles in the pack again bearing very close titles. What was even more amusing was the number of words for each article was a few words different!
What a coincidence!
I thought he was one of my affiliates. But the payment page told me otherwise. The payment goes directly to his Paypal account.
As I stated clearly in my Terms of Use that no one can sell any pack they bought from ReliablePLR.com as it is. In short, they can’t sell the PLR articles with the same private label rights to third party – regardless of whether they have or have not rewritten the articles. ReliablePLR.com is the ONLY place where I offer all my PLR articles. If you get it from anywhere else, you have been cheated and you are having a pirated copy.
(Note: Having said that, if you got any pack from somewhere else, you can report to me stating where you got the pack from and I will reward you with another PLR pack of your choice for free.)
What I did to handle this tricky situation
Sensing something was amiss, my first reaction was to post to the thread to warn the member of the infringement of Terms of Use of his purchase. And I further warned prospective buyers to be more alert and they might end up buying a pirated copy of the product.
To take it one step further, I notified the Admin of DP of this “scammy” thread and I hoped that they would take action to maintain the integrity of the Forum.
And when I did that, I didn’t know how effective it would be and what kind of action they would take. I just did what I needed to do.
A few hours later, the member replied in the thread:
“These are rewritted articles. Thanks for your concern.”
These were the exact wordings from him.
I retaliated by saying that the package looked very much the exact copy to mine. Even had he rewritten the articles, and as stated in my Terms of Use, he had no rights whatsoever to resell the articles. I further strongly urged him not to sell this package until the case is cleared and I challenged him, in order to prove his innocence, he should send me his articles for verification.
Surprisingly, he replied and sent a two-paragraph of one article to my Private Message inbox. Do you think I am convinced? Of course not! Two paragraphs out of 10 articles don’t mean a thing!
The cost of an unscrupulous act
While I was trying to cool off and think of ways on how to handle this situation, I checked back again the thread and the PM sent by the member.
But to my surprise, I was greeted with an error message:
Invalid Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator
I further looked for the member’s member page and again I was greeted with the same message. Only then it dawned on me that the Admin could have deleted the username and all his posts from DP.
Fortunately for me as some form of action is taken by DP to maintain the integrity of the forum as it doesn’t take long for one to notice that there are many hanky-panky activities going on there. Things look different after DP has implemented its new forum rules recently and I am happy for them.
Now why am I telling you this unhappy incident?
The objectives are two folds.
The first one is to tell you that taking a shortcut is not a smart thing to do. You might let off the hook for some time but eventually you will be caught and the price is too much to pay when you are caught. Also, the reputation you have been building so far goes down the drain in split seconds. This is what exactly happened to this member. Ironically he has actually accumulated more reputation points than I have on DP (don’t ask me how he did that!).
When you build your business without integrity, you are always on the run… trying to avoid being caught and change your name to hide your real identity. After a while, you get tired of doing all this running and hiding… which is to me a total waste of time and a silly thing to do.
Here’s what you can do if this happens to you
Secondly, if you are a product owner, there are certain things you can do to stop piracy.
Monitoring what people do and say is one of them. Now you may ask this: How on earth do I come to find out this “scammy” forum thread out of millions of new web pages created everyday?
There’s one little free tool that I use to track what’s going on on the web and it sends me email alerts whenever someone mentions certain words. Google Alerts is what I am talking about. It’s a simple but powerful tool. A real time saver I must say. I received a Google Alert for this post with keywords “Forex PLR.” You may want to try Google Alerts out if you have not done so.
Then, informing the person of authority (in this case Forum Admin) is the next step to keep piracy at bay.
I am not sure why someone would do this. Maybe I should take it as a compliment as that also shows that my PLR pack is excellent and above par… if I want to look at it from that angle.
I understand that we can’t prevent this 100% but some effort must be carried out to stop this nonsense from spreading as I feel that it’s our responsibility to safeguard our intellectual property and business assets.
