IMO, if someone can publish something for free which has similar value to what you’re charging money for, then your product clearly doesn’t have that much value. Maybe you should spend some time adding more value to your product instead of trying to shut down other versions which you yourself admit are not copies of your work.

What’s next? JD scouring the internet for anyone with the same “organization” as one of his blog posts and asking them to take it down because it has an impact on the banner ad traffic his site is generating? This site is valuable not because of any individual post but because JD connects with me and provides value above and beyond the hundreds of other personal finance sites that could exist.

Mark, I recommend you educate yourselves on the concepts of business models in the digital era:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090719/2246525598.shtml

I can’t even see how this is even a desirable situation for you. The typical person would:
(1) see this blog post, read that there was either (a) your version or (b) Dewey’s version.
(2) decide if they felt like printing out a PDF with all this stuff or just buy your version.

If they didn’t want to print out the PDF, they were your customer anyway and the existence of Dewey’s version would not impact you.

If they did want to print out the PDF, you “suggesting” it being taken down has created the completely new situation of not purchasing your version out of spite.

What’s the scenario of where you have helped yourself here? Someone is desperate for financial organization *right now* and since they can’t get it for free, they’ll just click on literally any other source with it immediately available? This doesn’t sound like a GRS reader to me.

You have shot yourself in the foot here.

Your hypothetical scenario of sliced bread is not at all apples-to-apples.

All personal/financial organizers share some common elements – such as documenting life insurance and bank accounts – by the very nature of their purpose and function.

However, this does not void the scores of important, original and proprietary elements in my books, based upon many months of tireless, difficult and grief-filled work. I firmly believe these deserve to be protected from copying.

“…While I agree Erik’s entire work is certainly not a duplicate copy of mine, there was enough to cause genuine concern.

Please take a moment to compare the table of contents for the free online document to the table of contents for my book….

Once you compare them, I think you’ll see very quickly it’s close to identical, copying the entire organization and thinking behind my book, which I devoted myself to for almost 15 months…”

I agree that fair competition is good. I don’t believe this was an instance of fair competition (though I don’t think for a second that it was put forth with bad intentions – as I wrote earlier, Erik is a very nice and intelligent guy).

Thanks for reading.

Respectfully,

-Mark

“his free book [The Big Book of Everything]might have a serious impact on demand for my books”

While I applaud you products and the work you put into creating your products, I also think the actions you took were inappropriate.

Every home maker should have a “life organizer”, and it should be standardized, if anything, but not commercialized. It may be profited from, but copyrights should not even be considered unless there is evidence someone made an effort to duplicate and redistribute an original work that goes along with the organizer.

Hypothetical Scenario:
You are the first person to sell sliced bread.
Someone who gives people instructions on how to slice their own bread.
What do you do?
A:Ask them to stop because you have to make a living.
B:Improve upon my product or create a marketing plan to keep it from even being a problem.
C:Both.
D:Something else…

I personally would choose B, because I am not afraid of change(A), and because in choosing C I would look like a jerk.

I think Dewey should keep offering his work, or even market it. It may even be god for your own business as more people become more aware of the importance of keeping records.

Fair competition is good. It leads to improvement.

*”12 Critical Things Your Family Needs to Know” (quick/easy version) and “The It’s All Right Here Life & Affairs Organizer” (comprehensive version)

I’d rather have something I can fill in on my computer anyway and then make digital copies than have to hand write all the stuff in a book. Does anyone else know of a similar, computer-based offering?

TIA!

I can appreciate that many people are frustrated about this, but here’s my point of view (which I’ve shared with many writers of very nasty emails I’ve received):

Every book, blog, song, film, speech, article and website stands to some degree on the shoulders of others – bits and pieces of others’ work are consciously or unconsciously incorporated into every “original” work. This is an important element of how ideas evolve – as John Donne says, “No man is an island.”

So the question we should be considering isn’t whether some elements of one person’s work are drawn directly from the work of others. The question is “At what point is the line crossed and too much taken?”

Two points to consider are: (1) Was the “heart” of the work taken?; and (2) Does the new work fulfill the demand for the original?

(see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html by Richard Stim, J.D. for a short-but-excellent read about principles of fair use)

While I agree Erik’s entire work is certainly not a duplicate copy of mine, there was enough to cause genuine concern.

Please take a moment to compare the table of contents for the free online document to the table of contents for my book. If you didn’t know, someone has found a cached copy and listed how to access it in the comments of the “Get Rich Slowly” blog entry.

Here’s a link to the PDF for my book’s table of contents:
http://www.affairsorganizer.com/Majr_Sections.pdf

Once you compare them, I think you’ll see very quickly it’s close to identical, copying the entire organization and thinking behind my book, which I devoted myself to for almost 15 months because of my terrible personal experience in trying to get through all these issues when my Dad died in 2003.

Please contact Erik yourself. He’s a very nice and intelligent guy and he’ll tell you there was no talk whatsoever about threats or lawsuits or copyright infringement.

I very politely and respectfully described my concerns about how similar elements of his are to the book I put all my effort into and that his free book might have a serious impact on demand for my books (including my new much shorter and cheaper one: http://12criticalthings.com/ ).

I asked Erik to please consider taking his book down and replacing with a link to my new shorter book and a code that would donate 20% to the charity of his choice.

Instead, he generously decided to take down his links because he didn’t intend to harm my little one-person business.

I’m not some terrible person – I’m just a guy who has put everything he has into these books and I’m trying to make a go of it, even though it’s a difficult struggle.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

-Mark Gavagan

Anyhow, I don’t think Gavagan is worthy of ire, though I do think this whole situation could have been resolved better. I wrote about the entire thing today at my personal blog: WIN-WIN vs. LOSE-LOSE: Two Approaches to Conflict Resolution.

I still have hopes that Dewey and Gavagan will reach some sort of agreement that benefits everyone.

Not only will I not be purchasing IARH, but I’m actively praying that the gods responsible for internet karma are swift, decisive and extremely punitive when dealing with Gavagan.

If anyone has a copy they downloaded and are willing to share, please email to andy (at) gin-n-tonic.com

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:RgvfuieE6A0J:www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.pdf+%22erik+dewey%22+filetype:pdf&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

(Google “‘erik dewey’ ‘big book of everything’ filetype:pdf” and click on the html link). You’re on your own for the formatting issues, though….

Another thing to remember about KeePass is that it allows file attachments, so if you end up using a spreadsheet or PDF to organize your information, you can save it as an attachment in KeePass.

I am getting married soon, so I have been putting thought into the best way to maintain any combined records. It does have a feature I want to investigate where you keep the file on a shared drive/remote server for multiple users. This may become the way to go.

We also have a safety deposit box at the bank, so a quarterly printout of information or even an updated thumb drive with the encrypted information on it would also be useful.

While somewhat off topic, People may interested in something like the IronKey (www.ironkey.com) which I use constantly. This tumb drive could reside in a desktop computer and be shared out to the network. If the computer reboots or the thumb drive is removed, the drive is then locked. Put a password screen saver on the computer, and a thief would have to bust in while you’re using the computer and copy your files. I suppose you could do the same thing with TrueCrypt (but I personally had issues with TrueCrypt corrupting files on a USB drive).

Do not want.

Marketing fail.

Go away.

Amazon has sold more than 7.5 million unique book titles up through March 2009.

A sales ranking of 109,000 – if that’s in fact the correct figure – out of 7.5 million is not exactly “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” but it’s not terrible either.

Here http://www.fonerbooks.com/images/sales.gif is a link to a graph by Morris Rosenthal that illustrates the meaning of the “Amazon Sales Rank” figure.

Lastly, more than 200 libraries across the country have made direct purchases of “The It’s All Right Here Life & Affairs Organizer” with a license for any patron to photocopy up to a dozen pages for their own personal use. If interested, search your library for ISBN:978-0-9800056-0-8

How would it be “copyright infringement” to send people files of a document that you had created yourself (or that a stranger on the internet had created on his own and had urged people to download for free) and which was in no way plagarized? If that is the way the law works, it’s nonsensical.

If authors can be so paranoid and threatening about “intellectual property”, even though they have published a book about a commonplace topic which has been written about by hundreds of others before them, no wonder our moderately “free market” system has gone to ***l in a handbasket.

I’m sorry that Erik felt he had to back down and take his own publication off of his own website, but the bullying author has not done his reputation any favors, and if I had to (although plainly it’s not necessary, since there are many books of this ilk out there), I’d spend 2 hours on amazon searching for a different book so that I didn’t have to buy the author’s.

The article is jointly written by an estate planning & elder law attorney (Elizabeth G. Clark, Esq.) and a physician (Jack P. Freer, M.D.).

It provides a terrific summary of issues and circumstances surrounding Advance Health Care Directives, even though it’s more than a decade old.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/faculty/research/bioethics/lwill.html

I definitely will NOT be buying It’s All Right Here — or anything else from that author and his publisher.

If anyone has this file in Excel format — or editable PDF format — please let me know via a follow-up comment.

http://www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.pdf

Well, as an attorney who actually practices IP law, that comment is dripping with irony, because while what he did is legitimate, people sending you copies WOULD represent “actual copyright infringement.”

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:Rn5gEAOG0lcJ:www.erikdewey.com/big%2520book.xlsx+%22big+book+of+everything%22+dewey&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us