As usual, we’ve continued to be busy behind the scenes here at Mystical Life Publications, but we wanted to give you all a quick update on what we have been doing. We’ve made a renewed effort to deal with outstanding cases of copyright infringement of our published works, particularly from The Path of the Spiritual Sun by Belsebuub.
For a few years now there was a big effort in finding instances of plagiarism across the net, which many people contributed to. We wanted to sincerely thank all those who were involved and helped bring cases to our attention.
While we’ve been doing our best to deal with this among our other publishing work, we realized that we needed to reassess and create a better and more effective system to deal with and resolve these cases. So we’ve now come up with a plan which we have already started to implement with good results. We wanted to share some of the outcomes with you.
Overall we have about 530 cases to follow up, and have resolved about 370 cases so far (so about 900 total).
Cases range from copying short passages without attribution, to whole articles, and higher priority cases involving published books.
One type of case we’ve consistently seen are scam websites supposedly offering books for download, but requiring you to sign up and give them your personal and payment details first. These sites all follow the same format. Often they have a page with a generic DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) procedure, providing a facade of legitimacy, when in the first place they have no right to be posting any of the books they offer. Getting books unlisted from these sites can be a laborious process. Needless to say, we discourage anyone from attempting to download anything from these sites, as these websites could contain malicious software or viruses.
We are hoping that in the next few months we will have gotten through all of the outstanding cases of copyright infringement, and will have a new system in place to better deal with cases in a more streamlined way.
Our authors choosing to remove their free eBooks from distribution as well as disabling copy-paste abilities on their websites, and now almost entirely removing their most popular articles from the internet, has meant cases have reduced significantly over time. With these protections, the ongoing help of people reporting infringements, and a renewed effort on our part, we believe this will be less of a problem. We can then focus on developing what we publish and the reviving of the knowledge of the spiritual sun.
People can continue to contact us here to report copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Donations and supporting the websites/videos we produce is continuing to help us in all the ways we need right now. So thank you all once again for your continued support, we really appreciate it!
It’s great that so much progress has been made. It appears such an enormous task to find the information that has been plagiarised, and then the need to take action.
It’s a sad situation that so many are using this information for financial, rather than spiritual gain.
My wishes for a fruitful result. I will keep an eye for anything that you need to know
Nice to hear of this new focus and the success to date, may it continue to be successful!
Thanks for the update Jon. Sounds like good progress you’re making to define a new workflow to handle this in the future too. Good luck working through the rest of the cases.
Thanks for the update John. I’m glad to hear you and the team are making progress in getting open cases resolved and that a new system is being put in place to better deal with plagiarism in the future.
Thank you for the update Jon. I have always wondered what were those scam websites offering the books about, and if they even contained any in the end, so its been quite interesting to hear your experience with it. What a paradox they have that DMCA page there, isn’t it?
Its also inspiring to hear that you guys have developed a new, more streamlines process to catch these cases and that you are making your way through all the remaining cases.
Wishing you a lot of strength with it, and like others said I also hope that your uncompromising approach will send a clear signal to all potential plagiarisers out there.
I hope the new approach helps.
I don’t blame the author’s from having to retract these works, not only for all the hard work that has gone into researching, experiencing and putting it all together, but for safeguarding the integrity and completeness of the teachings to survive in tact for generations to come.
My wish would be for anyone who has wittingly or unwittingly plagiarised these works to correct the situation asap. I wish nothing but the best for everyone and I feel that each opportunity to correct ourselves and learn from it is a new page in the book of our lives.
Thanks very much for the update John.
Good to hear of the great progress you are all making in this very complex area.
I wish all those involved much strength to achieve your goals.
Best wishes to all.
Thanks very much for taking the time to post this update Jon. It’s really great to hear you’re making such good progress with this issue and that you will have a new system in place to be able to deal with it. Also it’s great the instances of plagiarism have recently gone down, but with what price… I hope the plagiarism will stop altogether so that you’ll be able to dedicate your time to your main work. Thank you also for the message of what help you most need right now.
Just as a side note that those websites where you have to subscribe with your payment details to download books always seemed dodgy and somehow dark to me. It seems so wrong that Mark and Lara’s works of light have been stolen to appear on them.
I keep saying it but perhaps it bears repeating, that it keeps amazing me how much you’re able to do with your very small team and very big amount of work. Thank you again!
I wish you the very best of luck and strength to deal with the remaining outstanding cases of plagiarism, and with everything else you do.
Thank you for the update Jon and team!
It’s great that you found a more effective way to deal with these case. I hope this will take a lot of pressure out and be able to focus on the rest of the things you do. But I also hope the removed material to be back again sometime and protected, so more people can reach this information and knowledge.
Thanks for the update Jon, and all the best in getting all the remaining cases resolved ASAP.
Well done to everyone involved and thanks for the update Jon.
Thanks Jon for the update. It’s good to know that the issue with plagiarism is under control, although it is a shame that the most popular content had to be removed. Thank you also for clarifying the ways that you need help.
I imagine it to feel unfair to have the labour of the pursuit of justice put on your lap. To have to go out of your way on a time consuming chase (while greatly wanting to focus on other things that are in dire need of support), a chase of which clear cut results can often be wanting and even when reached you only ending up with what was rightfully yours to begin with anyway…
But I can see why it needs to happen. You can’t keep blowing precious air into a hot air balloon while others keep pricking tiny holes into it from the other side.
Hopefully something can be gained from all this as well. Perhaps creating strong, capable and knowledgeable processes and force to deal with this issue and thus creating a good protected platform for current and future works. Hopefully, like Christos mentioned, the notice of the message that this stealing will not be left unpursued, as well as plagiarisers actually being faced with a the official publisher’s stern and capable follow up, can become a deterrent to some degree.
Anyway thank you for your hard work! It’s great to hear this positive sounding news, in the face of the ongoing reality situation of course, about your renewed effort and that it seems to be making a good start. Wishing you all the best with it. Also a big thanks to all the people who found these instances and sent them through.
Interesting analogy with the hot air balloon Karim!
As you and others mention, with the measures taken by our authors to protect their unique work, and the new system we are working out now, this will hopefully not be as huge a problem as it has been until now.
Even since posting this update there has been a further 90+ cases resolved with material being removed.
Thanks again to everyone for your support.
That’s awesome Jon, sounds like you’ll be able to work through the remaining cases in no time!
It’s really good to hear that over 90 cases of copyright infringement have been resolved even since you posted the update Jon. It’s good to know that as the prevalence of this issue diminishes, you and the team will have time freed up to focus on projects that allow the authors to release new material in a more secure way, without being so restricted by the impact of the ever-present plagiarisers.
That’s amazing, Jon. Sounds like you guys are making good progress. Good luck and I hope the remaining cases can likewise be resolved with ease.
That’s sounds really good Jon and it’s really wonderful to start seeing an end to this type of plagiarism. Best wishes to the whole team to continue making further progress to bring this sad situation to a closure.
Thanks for that update Jon, it’s great to hear and I hope things have been progressing well in the meantime.
Thanks for the update, Jon.
Glad to hear about a more streamlined way to tackle plagiarism coming soon.
Hopefully, these measures will give you guys more room to focus on the main tasks.
Wishing lots of strength to all.
That’s a lot of cases to follow up!
I would expect that unethical people plagiarizing would be discouraged due to actions that have already been taken. The updates you guys post convey a message that people that copy works published by MLP won’t get away with it and at some point or another plagiarizers will be revealed.
It’s been a real shame that so much information has had to be removed from public view, thanks for the update!
Agreed Craig,
the general public searching for answers are also a victim in this.