Your gig is your intellectual property

[gajuseidi]

This forum is full of tips & advice for new sellers by new sellers, who are yet to make a single sale or show any signs of success. They mention 10 buyer requests every day, staying online 24/7 (which is a running joke at this point), being active in the forum, sharing your gigs with your friends and family through social media, and all the other nonsense.

My question is, what about the actual service you provide? What about the gig quality, communication skills, customer service, work ethic, and personal virtues? What about the actual foundation upon which you are building your business? Sure, some of these tricks might land you a sale or two, but for how long?

Some time ago I created a post in the forum titled "Any% permanent account termination speedrunning scene" in which I used satire to bring attention to sellers who go out of their way to infringe on other sellers' copyrights, misrepresent their identity or break the TOS in any other creative way.

Unfortunately, I have to go back to this subject. It has become a routine for me to check my niche for gigs who are shamelessly stealing my gig photos or my gig description. Sometimes, they steal a little bit and sometimes I have to wonder if my eyesight is not getting worse because I swear I can see my gig double in the search results. So far I had to take down 15 gigs and 8 profiles of sellers who do not grasp the concept of intellectual property. And let me tell you, it takes time that I would rather spend on something more productive.

If you're a new seller who's just starting out, forget about the tips & tricks and focus on your foundation. This will save me and countless other sellers, who take their work seriously a lot of precious time. There's no need to steal content that does not belong to you, you can do better than that.

 

Here's a reminder from fiverr:

Gigs and/or users may be removed by Fiverr from the Site for violations of these Terms of Service and/or our Community Standards, which may include (but are not limited to) the following violations and/or materials:

• Copyright Infringement, Trademark Infringement, and violation of a third party's terms of service reported through our Intellectual Property Claims Policy.
• Intentional copies of Gigs
• Spam, nonsense, or violent or deceptive Gigs (I wish this was implemented in the forums as well)
• Exceedingly low quality Gigs

[gajuseidi]

Once again, this post was in the "review process" for over 12 hours, so I have to bump it.

[ducktheunicorn]

The time it takes to comb through Fiverr to find all the users copying my photos and gig descriptions just isn't worth it. I wish there was an easier way. 

[gajuseidi]

9 hours ago, ducktheunicorn said:

The time it takes to comb through Fiverr to find all the users copying my photos and gig descriptions just isn't worth it.

In most saturated categories this is absolutely the case. It's physically impossible to detect copycats without using some sort of automated script. In my particular category there's around 240-300 gigs that offer similar service, so it's tangible to do a sweep every once in a while. As I do market research regularly anyway, it's a nice bonus to take out the trash along the way.

9 hours ago, ducktheunicorn said:

I wish there was an easier way. 

I wish so too. Although thinking about big companies, more often then not, users are left to their own and system updates are targeted with financial incentives in mind. Fiverr has zero barrier to entry, which means it's inevitable it will attract the worst possible customers to their platform. As in most cases, it's up to the creator to protect and take care of their intellectual property and if one takes their work seriously, I think it's worth doing whenever possible.