My New War On Internet Marketing Ebooks
I’ve decided that I’ve had just about enough of these internet marketing ebook self dubbed experts and gurus making money off of their regurgitated information. So, instead of just warning people about it (since so many of them just don’t listen anyway), I’m going to go ahead and do something about it. From now on, when an ebook comes out, promising riches and traffic and whatever else they swear about, I’m going to buy it, summarize it, and post it.. for FREE. Then I’m going to refund it or charge it back. I may even go as far as posting the whole thing here or on WickedFire.com because I just don’t care to see them making money on it anymore. If you’ve purchased one in the last 90 days, refund it. Don’t let these assholes make money off of your foolishness and greed. I’ve never once come across a single one of them offering anything valuable or new that you can’t find for free on a forum or a blog.
I know this won’t put them out of business, but I hope it will seriously damage their current plans and marketing schemes.
So if you’re planning on making bank from an ebook, know that I’ll be watching out for it, and you can expect to have me post about it and let everyone know of all of your shitty information for free. I mean, it’s crappy anyhow, so why should people pay for it in the first place?
I have nothing to lose on it. They all despise me as it is. If they want to send me a C&D, that’s fine too, then I’ll gladly remove the pdf file, and just summarize the whole thing in my own words just the way they did in their ebook.
So with that said, bye bye internet marketing and get rich quick scheme ebooks. Your day has finally come, and maybe this war will make you change your ways and have you crawl back into your little holes never to be heard from again. But at least I’ll have some fun making your business lives miserable.
Take that you suckers!
PS- If you want me to post an ebook or let me know of an ebook that has just launched, email me at Jon @ wickedfire.com with the subject “ebooks suck” and I’ll get right on it.
PPS- I’m going to post some of the hate mail emails I get from this community as well, because there are tons of really amusing ones, including my first death threat! Woooot!! Keep them coming you cocksuckers, they do nothing but make me laugh. Those will be my “testimonials” for each ebook I publicize.
Great Move.
Back when I was silly enough to buy ebooks I was finding out that I already knew 90% of what was in them anyway.
Hopefully you’ll save others from wasting there money and kill the industry overnight.
Hmmm but what about the super affiliates who make bank off selling this crap to unsuspecting fools ?
Really, i’m beginning to like your way of seeing things
Only if you could also do something about the crappy sites these ebookers created (with these huge ugly fonts), i’d be even more pleased 
However, ted does have a point: i guess that in this branche, ebooks are a fact-of-life, and can at least give beginning affiliates a good start…
>I have nothing to lose on it. They all despise me as it is. If they want to send me a C&D, that’s fine too, then I’ll gladly remove the pdf file, and just summarize the whole thing in my own words just the way they did in their ebook.
While I don’t sell any internet marketing books, I do sell some ebooks online. For all books I write I file an official copyright with the US government for $45 and about 30 minutes worth of time it’s an easy way to protect your time. If someone has a copyright they won’t bother with a C&D but come right after you for a copyright infringement, which is going to put you in a pretty indefensible position. So I might steer clear of posting someone’s PDF file, and stick with summaries and reviews.
Thanks Jon,
Great move. I was considering a simular thing. But, I would have had a much smaller effect. Everytime there’s a new launch, my email get flooded. It’s just to the point of funny now.
jon (the older one, broker one)
I guess Graywolf has a valid point.. I guess I’ll just have to summarize the majority of it, which shouldn’t be all that tough to do, being that they are all the same garbage, over and over.
Just to really fuck with them too, I’m going to BH my way up on the SERPs for their site name keywords too, so that more people come and get it for free rather than buy it from their sites or their affiliates. Bwahaha.. assholes!
IANAL, but graywolf is correct. Copyright violation can be both a civil and criminal offense. Showing damages for a civil suit may be rather easy — simply the number of downloads times the retail price of the ebook.
BTW, I think summarizing will be rather easy. I wonder how many of them will take only a single sentence to summarize!
jon, see if you can summarize like this:
http://seoblackhat.com/2006/08/04/e-book-review-adsense-empire-sucks/
You better get started, you have a lot of ground to cover. Will you also be reviewing paid site memberships/ programs?
I bought an Adwords e-book a few years back for $10.00. It was called something “Adwords Secrets” something or another. It ended up being a 10 page summary of the Adwords Help Center. I got a refund, but not before they gave me a bunch of shit about it.
Hey Jon,
I’d like to to thank you for doing this. A couple of months ago I stumbled upon your forum and blog and it really stopped the habit of buying ebooks.
You inspired me to take action and to learn from my mistakes which is worth more than all the ebooks that have “cheated” me combined.
Keep up the good work. I’m going to be submitting some e-books that I spent $97 on from which I learned absolutely NOTHING new
cheers
What about those crappy software? Can I send the links to you?
Copyright. Hmm. Lot’s of opinion on here about that.
First, I’m a former old-media guy with a best-selling book available worldwide. I’ve spent hundreds of hours discussing copyright issues with clients, and attorneys.
Copyright infringement is a civil issue, Drew. Unless there’s some proof of a tangential crime tied to it, like fraud, there is no crime.
Copyright infringement is extremely difficult, and expensive, to litigate. A C&D letter is easy. But a full-on civil suit is very costly and difficult, and its quite unlikely that those e-Book sellers will reveal themselves in public court to protect their ‘work.’
In Jon’s case, he is absolutely free to ‘reveal’ excerpts from the book and criticize them as he sees fit. We have a constitutional right to do so and it’s called ‘Fair Use.’ You can Google it.
Copyright essential protects you from having your work copied and then profited from by others. It doesn’t protect you from criticism, nor does it say your work can’t be excerpted and posted publicly.
Book critics and reporters make livings from this.
Jon, your only real exposure lies in posting the entire work online. And even then, it would be extremely difficult for the author to win damages, unless they have four years and $100K in legal fees set aside.
Sorry graywolf and drew, your copyrights are not that bullet-proof. You all know that many, probably most, online marketers use pseudonyms or fake identities and that’s just the first hurdle of hundreds toward winning an infringement suit.
Interesting indeed!
It’s not that often I decide to subscribe to a blog on first sight, this should be interesting.
RevenueRockaer Agreed reviews with exerpts are one thing and he shouldn’t have any problem with them at all as long we don’t get into slanderous territory.
However if I’ve filed a copyright properly with the government, I’ve got a rock solid case. The only thing that’s going to act as a real impediment is if your overseas. Pseudonyms or not if your “known” in the industry you can be found, and if you’ve taken away or damaged someones ability to live off of something they created, crappy or not, there’s significant motivation to find and prosecute.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself, do I feel that safe behind my nickname, proxyserver, and anything else that you can dream up to hide behind. Chances are if anyone really wanted to find you today they could without that much trouble. Think you can stay hidden and underground? Can you do it for years, not showing yourself at industry conferences, parties or events, all because you wanted to publish a full PDF instead of a review?
It’s a good idea! However I advise you not to put the link to the PDF’s.
If your blog is shutted down, how will you do it?
graywolf:
There’s no question that a copyright is ‘rock solid’. When you create intellectual property, the Government protects it. At least on paper.
My point is that very few infringement cases are successfully litigated, and those that are, take years and many thousands of dollars.
If your actually register the copyright of a work, its not very difficult to go after someone. There is a particular stock image company that makes a lot of money sending out automated “bills” to website owners who post their images without licences.
Ok let’s assume hypothetically speaking someone publishes my copyrighted ebook PDF on a public website. Once word gets out I’ve lost my ability to profit from the work, and my best way to achieve compensation is to prosecute you. If you’ve also posted other people’s copyrighted works, thanks you’ve just done a great job of giving me more evidence against you.
I can drop it and lose time and effort or come after you and recoup my loses and maybe make more than I ever would selling the book. Having a copyright that’s “in order” might even make it possible for me to get a lawyer without having to pay up front. If not you can file to recover the court costs from the person you are suing.
http://editingpublishing.suite101.com/article.cfm/should_you_copyright_your_ebook
here’s a case about images
http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=ELECTRONIC:PALM%20READER%20EBOOKS:9780679642473:7.96&page=excerpt
Sure it might be fun to “expose” some jerks book but, I think a few years and sending a nice big fat paycheck to that jerk might not be as fun as it seemed when you started.
Stick with reviews, get the point across with much less headaches and trouble downstream.
Again, ‘going after someone’ means nothing.
I’ve spent decades dealing with intellectual property and have seen dozens of cases that go nowhere.
That stock image company you mentioned is betting that website owners will cave under the fear that they will be sued, and in many times they win they bet and get paid.
But there are many website owners out there that tell that stock image companies to piss off, and invite them to sue, knowing how expensive it is to sue someone that PUTS UP A FIGHT. Big difference between a fighter and a caver.
Today, Viacom sued Google/Youtube for a billion dollars, for copyright infringement.
Anyone want to bet a C note that this will be argued on appeal 4 years from now? I’ll put another C note on the legal bills being greater than $10 million for the losing side.
I hold copyrights on dozens of products, including the ‘hard copy’ book mentioned above. There are websites all over the world that have posted chapters of that book in stark violation of copyright law, and my attorney has advised me to let it go, unless I want to spend my retirement fund chasing a 14-year old kid in Kansas City, and dozens of other violators.
You can certainly sit back and *think* your copyright is enforceable, and technically it is. But on a practical it is not, especially with violators who are completely unafraid of lawyers or ‘bills’ from a stock company.
Been there, done that, friends. Your copyright protects you from most small fish, but a big player can rip you off blind and then bleed you dry in a protracted court case and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Sorry.
RevenueRocker, you make some awesome points. Someone posting your work may be copyright infringement, but it really only hurts you. Being a civil matter, the government isn’t likely to help you enforce it.
The burden is on you. Unless you have a full time legal team on your payroll that has nothing else to do, it’s not likely worth the time and resources to go after someone for infringement.
Now, when all the e book scammers get pissed and pool their resources to take a collective stand against Jon, that may be a different story.
Look, I don’t disagree with identifying these eBook scumbags for what they are, but I just find your proposed approach to be a bit unethical.
Basically, you are lowering yourself down to their level by taking their information that they are marketing and posting it on your site. It is not public domain content. Even if you have people’s interests at heart and aren’t making a profit, it still doesn’t make it right.
What I would recommend is to right detailed reviews, with comments and do research into the individuals who wrote the book. Expose them and their “work” (or plagiarism) for what it is. Provide beneficial authoritative links to the free content that is available and better than what they are peddling.
For a perfect example of this, you should go to John T. Reed’s site, where he writes reviews and exposes real estate and financial “gurus” and their get rich quick books. This is how to do it the right way and escape any and all legal trouble. Don’t sully your reputation trying to take them down. Take the high road.
Here is the site I mentioned with direct link to the reviews:
http://johntreed.com/Reedgururating.html
I agree with your assessment of Duvet Dollars. In fact, I sent an email out to my list a couple of days ago advising them to not buy it. It is complete crap.
However, as an ebook writer and publisher if I ever catch you posting my material on your website I will take you to court. Not the little small claims court where the judgement is limited to $5,000. I’m talking Municipal Court where the limit for copyright infringement is traditionally $100,000. More if one can prove blantant disregard of the rights of the copyright holder. I believe posting on a public forum that you intend to violate copyright and then doing it constitutes blantant disregard.
If you have one brain cell left from an obviously drunken disregard for your own financial future (”hey ya’ll watch this”) would hope you would remove the download link to this material.
You have my email address if you have any questions.
James
JJJOnes I agree 100%.
EXCELLENT post Jon. I have joined your crusade and have just made my first post to combat these jerks:
http://www.harpzon.com/articles/90/1/Dodgy-Marketers-Your-Time-Has-Come