Now, this is a story all about how…I started my Teachers Pay Teachers store. 😉 I began professionally teaching (as in, I had all of my degrees and a teaching license) during the 2012-2013 school year. I used TpT as a buyer during that school year, and it was, I think, at some point during 2013 that I switched from being a buyer to being a seller and started my store. I’m not sure exactly when I started my seller account, but I didn’t have any sales until the last quarter of 2013 – I know that from my data. And, as much as I wanted to make some extra income off of my store, I never really took it that seriously.
The DMCA and Teachers Pay Teachers Sellers
I’m going to jump right into the nitty gritty on this one, because it’s on my mind and because I had to deal with it recently while I was doing work for one of my clients. Let me give you a bit of backstory:
For some of my wonderful clients, I provide the service of searching for copyright violations of their Teachers Pay Teachers products and then sending cease-and-desist emails to the violators on their behalf. This is a process that sometimes gets a bit involved, and I’ve even had to work with one of my clients’ lawyers for violators who weren’t responding to (or even opening) my many emails. When I most recently logged into my client’s “legal” email account (A.K.A. I made a Gmail account called legal.myclientsbusinessname for this purpose), I saw the following response from someone I’d emailed about her school’s website having posted one of my client’s Teachers Pay Teachers products: