If you sell any type of digital product online, then it’s highly likely you’ve already encountered one of the Internet’s growing problems – online “theft”.

The fact is, online piracy affects all of us, regardless of whether you’re selling software, ebooks, video training courses, graphics packages, or whatever.

You may not even know you’ve been ripped off – unless you take the time and trouble to go searching for pirated copies.

We actually found a pirated copy of our own software, The Daily Goal Machine, and that was only by chance when we were looking for something else. How many more illegal copies are out there? Who knows?

So How Does This Online Piracy Work?

Well, typically, it goes something like this:

1. Someone purchases your product as though he were a legitimate customer.
2. He gains access to your product (e.g. a download link, a serial or licence number for your software, the password to your members’ area).
3. Then he cracks your product and uploads it to the Internet, to sites such as black hat forums, torrent sites, file-sharing directories, pirate blogs or elsewhere.
4. Hundreds of people then download your product for free!
5. And to add insult to injury, the original buyer then requests a refund!

So, not only do you lose the original sale (and if they paid by credit or debit card, you might actually end up out of pocket because of the processing fees you’ll be charged on both the sale and the refund), but you also lose hundreds of future sales because everybody is now downloading your product from the Internet – for free!

Yes, we appreciate this may sound like it’s all doom and gloom, but the reality is that this does happen, and it happens on a daily basis.

How Big A Problem Is Online Piracy?

And if you’re thinking that it’s not a particularly big problem, then think again! Recent studies have showed that millions of dollars are lost every single day to unauthorized downloads! Yes, you read that right – millions of dollars, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year!

Even if you could track down these illegal copies, there’s very little you, as the product owner, can do about it. Unless you have the computing power and skills of a TV CSI lab, the Internet is a very anonymous place, making it really hard to find whoever’s running these pirate sites.

And even if you do find the site owner, as most of us have neither the clout nor the legal department of a major company like Microsoft or Disney, complaining to them will rarely do much good anyway.

Sadly, most product vendors and self-publishers are completely defenseless against illegal file-sharing and free download sites.

The Good News

Yes, we do have some good news for you!

After searching for some time for a way to protect our intellectual property, whether it’s the software we mentioned earlier, or any of the books we publish, we’ve finally found a service that we believe offers everything you need at a price that’s a steal (pun intended).

The company is called ActiveDMCA, and what they do is track and hunt down websites that might be illegally distributing your product. In a nutshell, they go out to the search engines (e.g. Google), and they sniff around searching for keywords like “Your Product” + “download link”, “Your Product” + “serial number”, “Your Product” + “crack”, or “Your Product” + “free download”.

By conducting such searches (every single day of the year), both in Google and using their huge database of sites reported to be suspect, the people at ActiveDMCA can soon unearth where pirates are illegally distributing your products.

But they don’t stop there!

As soon as they track down any potential illegal download activity against any of the products you register with them, one of their expert “Take-Down Agents” springs into action.

They will investigate to confirm whether it really is a pirate site, and if it is, they will contact the site’s administrator, requesting they remove your product from their site. If that doesn’t work, they then escalate the issue to the site’s hosting company, domain registrar and payment processor, who will make sure the site admin complies – otherwise that site will soon be offline for good.

These Take-Down Agents will contact anybody and everybody who may be related to the pirate site, sending them an official and personalized DMCA Take-Down notice. This is a legal document who remit is to enforce the current Internet copyright laws.

The following short video explains further how the ActiveDMCA service works, and how it can help you protect your digital product against unauthorized sharing and downloads.

Visit the ActiveDMCA site today and find out how you can protect your products within minutes, and enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing you have a team of professionals watching your back, 365 days a year. Every day you delay you could be losing even more sales.

Update: As at 13 December 2012, one day after signing up for their service, ActiveDMCA have already found five pirated copies of our software, The Daily Goal Machine, and three of these have now been removed from the offending sites.