A customer recently contacted me to tell me that someone had uploaded my product (Rapid Action Profits) to Rapid Share for others to download.
Alarm bells went off in my head!
Rapid Action Profits isn’t sold with re-sale rights, and it’s illegal to share the code with anyone else. I could see my sales grinding to a halt. It didn’t matter that the download was outdated. Some people will take a free download (even with no support) rather than paying for a current version with full support included.
Rapid Share is supposedly a legitimate file-sharing service, and I have to admit they disabled the download as soon as I brought the matter to their attention – but I question the need for such a service (and, therefore, their true reason for existence).
Anyway, since the product download on my own site is protected, and I really didn’t think a customer would purposely share something for free that they had paid good money for, I decided to do a little digging to see if I could find out where this rogue download came from (Rapid Share wouldn’t disclose who had uploaded the file to their site).
Luckily, a friend of mine publishes a really great guide, “Download Hacks and How to Avoid Them“, so I got myself a copy and started researching.
I found yet another site with a link to a download of my product.
Note – this site appears to be a forum that was set up solely for the purpose of letting people steal other peoples products by encouraging that they post links that they find anywhere in their search for “free” product, so I didn’t hold out much hope of getting them to remove the link.
It turns out that one of my customers was outsourcing the installation of Rapid Action Profits to a developer, and had uploaded the zip file to their web site as an easy way for the developer to access the files. It got left there for 6 weeks in an unprotected directory, someone found it, and rather than just stealing it for themselves, published a link to the file on that public forum.
At the end of the day, I was able to contact my customer and get them to remove the file. That rendered the link on the forum worthless so I won’t lose any more sales because of it – but I’ll never know exactly how much that cost me in lost revenue during the 6 weeks that the link was working.
If you purchase someone else’s product, without resale rights… DON’T put the downloadable file on your own web site. That constitutes distribution and is illegal. A copyright infringement suit could cost you your home and several years’ income.
If you sell your own products, you might want to get a copy of “Download Hacks and How to Avoid Them“. I’ll never know (and don’t want to) how much it cost me NOT to have it.
