Embracing Piracy...

[PedroAndJobu]

Hi everybody.  I recently purchased on an ecommerce site which deals 100% with digital product.  Unfortunately there is a rather large online community who illegally share my products.  I was considering ways to combat this piracy (It's impossible to stop it completely) and then I started wondering if it would make more sense for me to post something to the forums & blogs that pirate my stuff saying...

"Although he disapproves of piracy, the owner of this product realizes that it is impossible to eliminate it completely.  Instead, he asks that you please head over to ####.com and like us on facebook, +1 us, etc.  But remember there are advantages to purchasing products on ####.com, here is a list of them... "

What do you all think?  Would the SEO advantages of doing this outweigh the time & money it takes to fight the piracy?

[AlanMosley]

They would probably remove it.

but you could put links pointing back to your page in them, and put a canonical tag in also, so if the dont take the canonical tag out it will point back to you, saying you are the original

[Malarowski]

Alan,

I think you misunderstand the situation, they don't seem to be stealing content, but actual products.

You could try the approach you suggested, but be ready to be 'ripped apart' by a mostly malicious community on this kind of pages. They usually do not take lightly to outsiders.

If you want to stop piracy, I assume contacting the admins for removal and filing DMCA claims would be the way to go.