Clickbank & Copyright theft

Clickbank's Copyright Policy

[Panic_Man]

I am bemused, maybe someone could shed some light on this for me. Clickbank have a DMCA policy which I recently utilized to place a complain about a competitor who was using my page content on his website and some copyright protected material within his digital and physical product. I copied Clickbank in on all of the offending material and asked why clickbank was allowing this person to sell physical product using their system which is used solely for digital product sales. They responded saying that they could not control the content of the user's website or product... they ignored my question as to why this man can sell a physical product. I then responded asking them to explain. It transpires that they have given my competitor, who was a client of mine and bought my program in 2004, 2005 and agin last week, SPECIAL permission to sell his physical product through Clickbank as a 'test' and that they still are not prepared to take action for the copyright theft unless I can provide a judgment by a court of law! I then responded and asked to also be allowed to sell my physical product using clickbank and they have not responded.

If Clickbank have a DMCA policy which is regulated by law, how can they then ignore a complaint which provides clear cut evidence? They say the other party is contesting this but how on earth can he when he has only been in existence for 4 years and my rogram and websites have been there in excess of 7 years in their current URLs and formats.

What's the point of the DMCA if it doesn't work online unless you are prepared to use people through civil court who might be on the other side of the world? Its idiotic!

Any ideas folks? We are taking civil action against this man and I have notified Google, his hosts etc.

[martinibuster]

>>>and some copyright protected material within his digital and physical product.

1. Did you file a formal DMCA complaint or did you send an email?

2. Did the offending party use an amount of content that might be construed as fair use or is it a significant amount, i.e. entire articles?

[Panic_Man]

Martinibuster,

his product's principals are based on a principal I created for a CD within my program, but then he also used my other material as a reference as he 'accidentally'(I presume) neglected to delete two whole paragraphs from his manual in my words exactly which just can't have been written by chance. I wrote them on my laptop over 10 years ago! His accompanying CDs are just recorded versions of the manual content so the breach is repeated in speech on those. In addition, he has lifted substantial chunks of material off my web pages and pasted them ino his own and similarly with my payment pages (even being stupid enough to copy a grammatical mistake that I hadn't even noticed myself). I filed the DMCA complaint directly with Google adwords, Clickbank, his hosts and Paypal, all of which he is associated with... only clickbank responded as I outlined above! I can't believe there aren't more avenues to stop this sort of thing... let's face it, if it were my TV found in someone else's living room, the guy would be lead off in handcuffs! What's worse is that this person is my biggest competitor online and the guff he spouts about 'years of development and research' multiple, international offices, support staff etc. is incredible! He dominates the adwords advertising, but ultimately, his product has so little value and he pays his affiliates and clickbank such a huge cut, (because he has such small overheads) that every penny is profit! Our adwords spend has gone from 30p a click to £2 a click since he came along and his product is appalling, but it's cheaper than ours so it seem more attractive to unsuspecting and desperate people.

Thanks