Preventing copyright infringement on Bonanza

Good day, Bonanzlers! Today, we’d like to discuss an important topic for online sellers: copyright infringement.

What is a copyright? A copyright is a form of intellectual property law. This means it protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works. Some examples are books, movies, songs, computer software, and photographs.

We trust that everyone on Bonanza is here to make an honest living. However, even the best intentions can go wrong, and people sometimes break the rules, knowingly or unknowingly. For these situations, we have a dedicated Loss / Risk Prevention (LRP) team that enforces copyright rules.

Bonanza's LRP Team utilizes several tools to help remove and prevent copyright infringing items. They notify sellers of claims or items that have been removed, as well as work with brand contacts to remove listings reported by brands as infringing on copyrights.

In addition to these tools, we have a couple of tools in development right now that will allow our LRP team to proactively remove infringing items in bulk, as well as identify copyright infringement of images used in item listings. 

We get by with a little help from our friends

Despite our best efforts, it’s impossible for us to catch 100% of violations on our own. That’s why, in addition to our LRP team, we also have the Bonanza community helping us when possible. Anyone can report items or users for violating the terms and conditions (if you see something, say something!). Additionally, Bonanza has a Brand Protection Program. This allows authorized representatives of brands to directly remove items that infringe on their brand.

If you believe you hold a copyright that’s being infringed by one or more sellers on Bonanza, follow these instructions to report this. We are also in the process of creating a standardized form to make the submission process clearer and easier for brands and copyright owners.

How does Bonanza handle cases of infringement?

When situations of copyright infringement arise, we do our best to take action as soon as possible. In certain cases, the copyright requires us to remove all infringing items currently on the site, as well as prevent future items from being posted for sale. This happened recently with our eBooks category, which is why this category is no longer allowed on Bonanza, and listings for the sale of such eBooks (like PDFs or other electronic copies of textbooks) are strictly prohibited. This includes, but isn’t limited to, any eBooks published by these publishers:

• Cengage
• Elsevier
• Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group LLC (d/b/a Macmillan Learning)
• McGraw-Hill Education
• Pearson

For sellers who have items in categories that are removed because of copyright issues, we recommend that you revisit Bonanza's Prohibited Items resource page for a partial list of prohibited items and the User Agreement policy.