ebooks/ software contract and copyright

[adam007]

Hello

I dont know if this is the correct forum to post this question. I currently have a website that sells instantly downloadable material such as software, ebooks, information etc. Most of these material have owners. Most of these owners are happy to put there items on my site for sale. We both agree on a set price, and i sell this item on my site at a slightly higher price thus making profit after paying the owner the agreed price. Im often faced with a question (from the owners) which i dont know how to answer and would appreciate any help or a lead to get me started.

How can we be sure how many of our products you are selling?
How can we be sure you dont have another website set up selling our product at a much lower price?

I totally agree with them. Say for example at the end of the month i say to the software owner that i sold 50 copies of your software but i really sold 100 copies. How can i assure the owner that this wont happen?

Thanks

[Jenstar]

This is one of those hard areas when you are selling something downloadable but where you need to pay the originating owner/author a portion of each and every sale.

One option, if you do not plan on offering any sort of affiliate program for resellers, is to set up an "internal" affiliate program, whereas each of the originating owners is set up as an affiliate, with access to full stats, downloading and ordering history. This wouldn't work with an external affiliate program, because people could easily bypass the code, and hence be earning the commission that should go to the owner/author.

There may be another option, but when I originally looked into this exact scenario, there really was nothing that was well suited to this kind of arrangement, when you still want buyers to be able to instantly download. I would be interested to hear alternatives, too, if anything has come out in the past year or so.

[Blue Gravity]

You can always set up security options for your products. A friend of mine sells a CD Burning software pack, and put on a security option that connects to the internet to make sure that only one person is using it per code, if there are multiple users, it doesn't load up. This helps stop piracy of the software or rather just cuts it down and makes it a lot harder for people to share or steal. It's also great for tracking because he is able to keep track of approx. how many are sold, and how many are still in use.