Back in April, a Guild member contacted the BA HelpDesk to alert us to what appeared to be pirated libretti and scripts (many of which were written by DG members) that were being sold on eBay by a highly rated seller. The Guild's Business Affairs team investigated the matter; it was determined that many (if not all) of these scripts and libretti were likely being sold without the author's permission, potentially infringing upon the authors' copyrights.
Upon such determination, the BA team took action on two fronts in an attempt to get the potentially infringing scripts removed. First, we contacted the seller directly, informing them that unless they either received permission from the author(s) or purchased the scripts/libretti from a legitimate retailer, and are subsequently selling these lawfully obtained copies, then selling the scripts and libretti on their eBay page would likely constitute a claim for copyright infringement by the author(s). The message encouraged them to remove any listings that might be infringing and also informed them that we would be contacting our members whose scripts were posted on their page.
After contacting the seller, we pulled the names of all the members whose scripts/libretti were listed on the seller's eBay page, alerted them of the potential infringement, and encouraged them to either send a takedown notice to eBay or to message the seller directly. We are happy to report that within hours of alerting our impacted members, all of the infringing scripts/libretti had been removed by the seller.
We want to thank the member who first alerted us to the potential infringement, as well as all of the impacted members who reached out to eBay and the seller. It is because of this collective effort that we were able to successfully defend the copyright of so many of our members.