Another problem I ran into was with a site that was famous for malware. They linked to one of my sites and I made a lot of sales, or so I thought. When I checked my stats, I found that people were buying the book, then demanding a refund on a few hours later. It was obvious they were stealing my work and I had to put a block on the site where most of the ‘customers’ came from to stop it.

As best we can tell, the majority of the folks who choose to get their material from these sources would never have paid money for the product anyway. We still get things taken down as often as it is possible to do so, but we’ve done our best to accept it as part of the downside of Internet Culture and move on. (Truly people have been photocopying material for years; but the reach was much more limited.)

On the plus side we find that the loyal fans of the author or artist of the material in question are both an effective police force (finding these sites and assisting us in getting them removed) and sometimes a countermeasure (“I was annoyed that someone would do this so I bought a copy when I otherwise might not have.”).