Folks,
Recently I wrote three books about card tricks, publishing them through Penguin magic’s partner program (pdf file, instant download). I’ll not name them because I don’t want this post to look like an effort at self-promotion. Almost as soon as they were available at Penguin, I found that the books appeared on the websites of seven other magic shops: erdnase magic; magician palace; dl magic; good magic store; funny store; 6b magic; magic boom boom boom. The books were posted without my permission and for a fraction of what I sell them for at Penguin. I quizzed Penguin about the situation, and Chris was very kind and supportive, but he said this is inevitable in magic. My question is whether any of you Café members have encountered a similar situation with the things you’ve created or written? Is there anything that we magicians can do to protect ourselves? I should point out that I doubt the books will sell many copies, so the financial loss will not be great. However, the actions of these magic shops do depreciate the value of my original work. Who is going to pay more when he or she can find it for much less? Any advice will be much appreciated.
Magical things,
Zipper

Nearly all material is pirated immediately upon release, there's not much you can do about
it, these websites are located in other countries.

Luckily, most folks buy from non shady places, so it's not as bad as it could be.

The only way to protect yourself that I know of is to have a limited release, and you control
who you'll sell to, obviously at a premium.

The magic biz is almost invariably a "race to the bottom"

It's one of the major reasons that brick & mortar stores are so rare these days.

Magicians would rather save a couple of dollars per item than help keep their own community alive.

This is odd. I was just coming here to post about an experience I just had with my first release, and here I found this topic.

I put out an ebook of card magic through Lybrary.com recently. A couple days ago I googled to see if it was on the pirate sites yet, because it's inevitable. I found it at erdnase and another.

Knowing there isn't much to do, I reported them both to Google for copyright infringement so that, hopefully, they won't show up in searches (not that anyone is likely to search for my book, but still). Then I told Chris at Lybrary.com, because he likes to know when this happens.

We carried out a little operation, which I won't describe in detail here. It didn't get much, but it was a success. Chris was able to identify the Lybrary.com user who bought my ebook to supply to erdnase, and removed that account. And he identified two PayPal accounts to report to PayPal.

It's a small victory, but I'm happy with the result. It won't stop them, but at least it's a little thorn in their side. I'd encourage anyone who releases through Lybrary to let Chris know if you find your material on these sites.

Perhaps, zipper, the guys at Penguin could try something similar. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to know what we did.

Update: The request to Google has already taken effect. Bing shows my ebook at even more sites, so I've reported all of them to Bing. This is a fairly painless process and only took a few minutes, both for Google and for Bing. Duckduckgo was also simple, but their automated reply said the results are probably coming to them from Bing, so that base is already covered.

Reporting at Yahoo was not possible for me. Yahoo required that I enter my address, and only allowed US addresses, but I live in Australia.

I would like to ask that creators seriously consider reporting infringements against their copyright to Google. At present, no pirate sites show up when I search for my ebook, and lybrary.com (the only authorised retailer) is the top result. This despite the fact that my ebook is listed on a dozen pirate sites.

Nothing has happened at Bing yet, but I'm hopeful that will change soon.

The reason why it's important for more creators to do it is this. If enough infringements of copyright are reported, eventually the whole sites will get demoted in search results. At present, we have to report each individual listing. But if we could get, say, erdnase demoted with enough infringement complaints, then it will be hard to find even if someone googles something like "cheap magic online" or whatever.

Reporting only takes a few minutes to fill out a form. I have found it effective for getting pirated versions of my material off the Google search results. And if enough others do it, then we won't have to keep doing it.

Those sites seem to be from China from what I have been told. If it's true, then virtually nothing can be done about it. China doesn't respect copyright especially if it's from the West. They like to steal other people's ideas and profit from them. Obviously, it's not just magic, but for everything else. Their corrupt government is in on it (and usually encouraged it) so it's a fool's dream to expect justice to be served there.

They can sell them for a fraction of their price because they did not exert any effort to invent/produce them. Thievery and dishonesty have now been ingrained in their culture as sad as it may sound. This is why people there rarely produce anything original and noteworthy nowadays as they are now used to steal other people's hard work.

Morality has died there long time ago.