Occasionally, we get emails asking if a couple of people can go in together on one of our products and share it. For the record, we love this sort of question! In general, we’re absolutely comfortable with you splitting the cost of something we offer and sharing the benefits. From our point of view, it’s like buying a book and sharing it with a buddy.
That said, we don’t want to find ourselves in trouble down the road, so there are a few specific issues we’d like to address.
The Things that Scare Publishers
You may have noticed that a lot of publishers put DRM on their ebooks and other products. That’s because they’re afraid that people will just endlessly copy electronic files, rather than pay for new copies. It’s a legitimate concern, considering it takes all of one email attachment to make a new copy of a digital work.
We do work hard on our products and if they don’t earn us any money, we can’t continue to offer them. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to put draconian standards on you or anything like that. We want to work with you to find a good way for all of us to succeed. After all, if we help you make lots of money, you’ll want to buy more of our products, right?
What We Ask
- We ask you to think twice before sharing your copy. We don’t care if you give a copy to your mom so she can get a head start. We do care if you email a copy of one of our products to everyone in your email address. If you think it’s that great, we appreciate it and we want you to get full benefit from it — we can set you up with our affiliate program so that you can share sections in such a way that you might even make a little money off doing so.
- We ask that you consider the amount of work it takes us to handle additional members in classes or forums. We work hard to make sure that our community-based products are great, but that means that we strike a careful balance on how many members are actively involved at a time. You’re welcome to share your login information to let someone take a look around, but if we’re talking about something that involves feedback from us, we may not have resources for an unpaid member.
- We ask that you come talk to us about particulars of a situation. We like doing good things for good people, so if you’re looking for a way to share our materials with a non-profit or similar organizations, we can help you find a solution that works better than just forwarding on a copy of a product.
We’re a business, but we’re also real people. When in doubt, please contact us directly. We have yet to find a situation that we couldn’t come up with a comfortable solution for, at least in terms of making our products available to people who can really use them!
