Affiliate Rant!

In case you hadn’t noticed, eBay is rife with copyright infringement. If you’re interested in monitoring eBay for your wares, have a look at SearchDigger. The key for free information providers is to restrict resale of their information. That won’t stop everyone, but it does give you legal recourse when approaching eBay and the legal authorities. The unfortunate fact is that most content authors never discover their stolen content and when they do they rarely do more than request that eBay remove the offending listing. A few well publicized lawsuits would probably do much to stem the tide of this growing problem.

Ars Technica, the popular technology site for PC enthusiasts, hosts a well-known free PlayStation 2 Repair Guide that instructs users how to deal with minor disk read errors. Dave Childs, the owner of ILoveJackDaniels.com, hosts a collection of equally free programming “cheat sheets” that help new programmers remember the commands of their chosen language.

Both sites were surprised to find out that not only was their content being plagiarized, but repackaged and resold on Ebay.

Sadly, though Ebay has become one of the greatest markets for selling legitimate electronic books (eBooks), its also become one of the most common methods for plagiarists to take freely available content, and package it for an easy dollar. Worse still, as scraping continues to fall out of favor with spammers, ebook plagiarism could become a greater and greater problem for Webmasters.

(Quoted: Ebay: Your Content for Sale Via Plagiarism Today.)