A Few Questions for you CCIE types out there.

As the title suggests, we're looking for a little information from CCIEs in the community. Since we spend much of our day researching certification related websites, it was only a matter of time before we got to the CCIE community. CCIE is a much respected certification and we'd like to help keep it that way. Up until only a couple years ago, braindumps for the many CCIE disciplines were unheard of. Now, however, it seems they're just as available as any of the other popular certifications, but much more expensive.

We've actually known of the many CCIE sites that claim to provide "Real CCIE Workbooks" for quit some time now, and have done lots of research on them. Unfortunately, we've not been able to do much with the information we've found and most of that information leads to other sites in the "ring".

We have been able to classify a couple of the CCIE sites based on affiliation or by specific verbiage, but since we're not CCIEs, some of the sites are much more difficult to discern. We're not asking you to classify any of the sites for us, but we would like to get some information from you that will help us to further classify some of these sites.

Obviously, if there are "Real CCIE Workbooks" on the market, there would have to be real CCIEs that created them (or at least that's the vision these sites are trying to create). From the appearance of the sites, however, those CCIEs are in no way affiliated with them. Unless I'm missing something, this would mean one of only a few things:

• the workbooks were sold (anonymously) by the authoring CCIEs
• the workbooks were stolen from the authoring CCIEs
• the workbooks were falsely created and aren't even authentic CCIE material

So, are there CCIEs out there that sell their workbooks? Are the workbooks being stolen? Or are these sites all a scam trying to get money for something that doesn't exist?

This is speculative, of course, but if I were a CCIE and spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and thousands of hours developing my own study guide, I don't think I could give up that information for some of the prices I've seen on these websites. With that said, I wouldn't think selling your CCIE workbook is a common occurence, but is it?

Is there a market in selling CCIE workbooks and is it even legal to do so? I know it's your material and you wrote it, but for the candidates that purchase the workbooks and pass the material off as their own, this is still considered plagiarism.

I've scoured the Cisco Exam Policies, all policies seem to be directly related to the Cisco exams or candidates taking exams, but I've found nothing relating to the study materials written by indviduals studying for the CCIE exams.