question regarding ebook and copyright - help appreciated!

[tr80_1999]

Hi,

I live in IL and sell an ebook on the internet. It is copyright. But some yahoo has copied it. some word for word but some in his own words. I am really angry and he has copied all the methods.

He sells it as another book under his own name. He is not reproducing mine. He has a totally different title also. is it possible to go after him? any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[divgradcurl]

What is the content of the ebook?

Copyright only covers creative stuff, not facts. If you have a book of poetry that you wrote, the poems are claerly creative, and the copyright covers the entire book. If the book is a technical manual or how-to manual, however, it's different. In that case, only the layout, pictures, and any "opinions" or other observations that you made would be copyrighted.

For example, take the phonebook. It would not be legal for me to take the phone book, copy the pages, bind it up and sell it as my own. That is a violation of copyright. However, I could take the same phone book, copy all of the phone numbers into my own "format" and publish this new phonebook on my own -- since you can't copyright facts, this would not violate copyright. (Feist v. Rural I think is the case I took this example from).

So, it depends on what type of book you are selling that would determine whether or not this other peson is violating your copyright. You mention "methods" which makes it sound like a cookbook or technical manual or something. As I mentioned above, facts are not copyrightable, soit may be that there is NOT a copyright violation here. However, this is fact-specific, so you should talk with a local copyright lawyer who can look at all of the facts and tell you if your copyright is being violated or not, and what you can do about it.

 

[tr80_1999]

Hi,

The book is mostly methods. It is on quitting smoking. Lots of it is how-to stuff like what to do so you no longer have the desire to smoke again. It is mostly do this and then do that. But you won't find it in most quitting smoking books.

But this guy has copied mostly all the steps (11).

It seems like I'm not going to be able to get him b/c he is not actually reproducing my book. He has just taken my information and repackaged it into a new ebook.

I look forward to hearing what you think. Thank you for all your help in this matter.