Information Marketing: Copyright Infringement Protection

Copyright infringement can be a serious problem, especially for Info-marketers who are selling information, which other users can copy. It is important to know how to protect your work and how to make sure that the people you are working with are not plagiarizing anything they submit to you as original work.

As the President of the Information Marketing Association, I host a monthly coaching call for info-marketers who have questions and are trying to launch their infopreneur business.  Here is a question from Mike in California about how to make sure the writers you may use are not plagiarizing their material.  Since this is a common question, I decided to prepare an article about this challenge to help you.

I think the most reliable thing you should do when you receive an article from one of your writers is search for a couple of the key terms within the articles. It isn’t always our first thought when we get an article back from our writers that they might have plagiarized something, but it is something that we should think about before we publish their work as our own. 

One of the things to do when you are hiring a writer to do this work for you is to put requirements within the job description.  If you say in the job description that these articles must be 100% original content and that you will be searching and doing extensive due diligence in order to verify that these articles are 100% legitimate, writers will be less likely to plagiarize because of a sense that they might get caught. If you do happen to find that something in your article has been plagiarized, simply refuse to pay for someone else’s work.

A way to check the article for plagiarism is to go through the article and pick several sentences out of them. Make sure you select several sentences throughout the work because one unique sentence does not disqualify plagiarism in the whole work.  When you have selected the sentences, do Google searches for them.  If you happen to find the sentence somewhere, you know that they plagiarized the article.

 The same rules also apply to your work. If you are concerned, that someone might steal your work and use it, apply for a copyright on your material. I do understand that this is not free. It is going to cost like $60 to register your copyright.  However, even if you do not register it, you should put the words copyright and the year 2008 or 2009 on all of your work.

 Now if you do register your copyright, the benefit is you get three times your damages and attorney’s fees.  So, when you write the letter to somebody saying, “Hey, I been publishing this since 2008.  I see that you used substantially the same content and plagiarized my work.”  You can say, “I’m going to charge you three times my damages and recover attorney’s fee.” That has a lot more power than saying, “Hey, this is copyrighted, you need to stop.”

Regardless of whether or not you decide to register for a copyright on your work, it is important as an info-marketer to ensure that you hold the rights to your material and make sure that no one is being paid for your time, research and material. Always remember to check the writings of your hired assistants, because you never want to be on the receiving end of a copyright infringement letter.

There have never been greater, more diverse, more lucrative opportunities for everyone—experienced, successful entrepreneurs to rank beginners—in the field of information marketing. If you can name a topic, there is a market for providing information about it. People buy information about almost everything—from hobbyist topics like dog training, to business topics like how to sell over the telephone, to self-improvement topics like fitness walking. The key is to find a responsive market and then package information that customers want in convenient forms such as DVD’s, books, e-books, CD’s, magazines, websites, teleseminars, webinars, coaching programs, seminars, and conferences.  Watch a free video revealing several info-marketers created their products and became infopreneurs at www.InfoMarketingStartup.com.