How We Ruined An eBay Thief's Day
Thursday, February 7, 2008
If you sell information products online or create audios, videos and other content to keep your website visitors informed, there's a good chance somebody is hotlinking to your files.It also could mean they're stealing your files.
We found out the hard way in October 2007. An eBay thief stole our bestselling eBook -- "20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online" -- and posted it in a fraudulent eBay auction. The eBay thief slashed our price by two-thirds and even used our graphics and other intellectual property in his illegal auction, linking directly to the image files on our server and using our bandwidth to power his eBay sale.
The eBay thief stole our product and our brand identity, using them to drive traffic to his auction and collect illegal profits from our hard work. He even received positive eBay feedback from customers.
Upon learning of the illegal eBay auction, we decided to create a piece of software to address hotlinking, digital piracy and the theft of intellectual property online.
HotlinkALARM was the result. It detects hotlinking and informs users instantly via email. When HotlinkALARM detects image hotlinking, for example, it replaces the hotlinked graphic with a special graphic that alerts a hotlinker's website visitors that the site is displaying unauthorized images.
HotlinkALARM has a broad set of features that enable users to maintain control over their intellectual property.
We've highlighted the basic features on a special, HotlinkALARM videos page:
http://hotlinkalarm.com/freeinfo/
Thieves could be pulling images and files off your site and serving them with your bandwidth. We found out the hard way on eBay and set out to do something about it. Hotlinking is a big problem -- not just on eBay, but on sites worldwide.
eBay is one of the Internet's great business success stories. eBay traffic is the envy of all online merchants. The site received 67.4 million unique visitors in December 2007, and its average visitor spent nearly two hours on the site, according to Nielsen Online.
That's an astronomical amount of traffic -- and, unfortunately, thieves and digital pirates can't wait to exploit eBay's success for ill-gotten gains. They know that people love eBay, so they set up shop there, literally hiding in plain sight.
If a thief is hotlinking to your images and other files on eBay or elsewhere, he or she is diluting your brand and stealing your profits. HotlinkALARM gives you a tool to deal with the unauthorized display of your intellectual assets.
Learn more about Hotlink ALARM by watching our videos.
Patrick Pretty
The "Most Beautiful Little Boy In The World" -- 1964
Co-developer of HotlinkALARM and owner of PatrickPretty.com
Labels: eBay feedback, eBay traffic, exploit eBay traffic, hotlinked graphics, hotlinking to files, theft of intellectual property online
posted by Patrick Pretty @ 8:10 AM,
