It's Copyright!

This morning’s effort was seriously disrupted by the need to take some immediate legal action against an infringer of my copyright in an E-Book.

This book, “Just Numbers on a Screen,” has been available for over six months in Adobe format, for printing out or just viewing on the screen. Dealing as it does with a major fraudulent investment programme, it has generated a good deal of emotive response, especially from those who still believe that money grows on trees.

The book file is sold with no restriction on replication, since it is felt that sharing such a file with friends and family is much the equivalent of passing around the hard copy of the book and is to be encouraged. However, it is clearly subject to the laws of copyright.

The investment scheme at the heart of the book is a prominent feature on many Internet forums, and this morning I was a little surprised to see that one embittered investor had decided to take it upon himself to share the file, free and clear, with others, and was advertising that it was available as a free download on a website dedicated to the sharing of files, Ultrashare.net.

Unfortunately for him, he had failed to read (or had ignored) the fine print in his agreement with that company who are obviously only too well aware of the dangers of copyright infringement. They provide a sort of pro-forma letter of complaint to resolve any such abuse and so it took little time for them to pull the file from their site.

Now the only problem facing the gentleman who infringed the copyright is that he may well be asked to pay for the illegally downloaded files.

Often in such cases it is difficult to pin down the perpetrator but in this case, by placing himself in the public eye with his postings, he has exposed himself to the full force of the copyright protection laws.

And, of course, Ultrashare are only to pleased to cooperate in order to stay on the right side of the law themselves.

But he did succeed in wasting a good deal of my time today – I hope he can afford it.