You have gone through all the trouble to create an eBook and are selling it on your website or wherever you have decided to sell this work and then one day you find out that someone is offering your hard work for free on a Torrent website or their own website. Or they may have had the audacity to print and bind their own physical book version of your own work.

If you registered this work with the Copyright Office, this part is easy. You may file a civil lawsuit in a federal district court. But first you should consult a lawyer. If your work is being infringed and sold for profit, the US Attorney has the right to initiate a criminal investigation.

Just about every book, film, or television show today is pirated and placed on a Peer-to-Peer system (commonly referred to as P2P) or a Torrent tracker. Whether or not anyone downloads your work without paying for it is unknown. But once your work appears on such a system, it's only a matter of time.

While having your work pirated is almost a given, there are methods available to decrease or lessen the effect.

First and foremost, you should register your work with the Copyright Office. That gives you the added benefit of having the US Government in your corner when it comes to litigation, if any pirating reaches that point.

You should also apply for an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Just about every book uses these codes. This would also help you in dealing with those who would dare infringe your copyright.

Make sure your eBook has contact information in it so that readers, even those who pirated your work, can find their way back to your site. If they enjoy their "free sample" of your writing, they may be tempted to legitimately purchase subsequent works from you.

If your eBook is to be sold via Portable Document Format (PDF) then you could opt to have the file password protected. Once the book is sold, you have your system automatically set up to send the customer the password for the eBook. This has the added benefit of having the would-be pirate jump through a hoop in order to pirate the work. Of course, your legitimate customers would have to also jump through this hoop and they could pass around the password as well. You can also disable printing so that it would make it harder for someone to print off copies and sell them bound together.

If the buyer has to go to a special page of the website after paying for the eBook, make sure the link for that page is a one-time link, or one that becomes inactive after the eBook has been downloaded. This is so that the original buyer cannot just distribute the link for the download. Make sure such links can only be activated after a sale. For an added benefit, make the link active for a limited amount of time, or a limited number of clicks.

Even by doing all of these things, your book could likely be pirated. There's nothing you can do about it, it will happen. There are quite a few websites and business that offer these methods of protecting your intellectual property, but none of these are infallible.

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