piracy

Authors: Don't Scream "Piracy!", Then Turn Around & Pay Thieves To Represent You Or Your Work

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This post by Publetariat founder April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

It happens again and again: authors, both indie and mainstream-published, crying foul over piracy of their work. They grab their virtual torches and pitchforks and take to social media to spread the word and their righteous indignation over this or that file sharing site offering their ebooks for free download.

Imagine my surprise then, when I found at least a few of those same authors paying to list their books with a promotional service that steals intellectual property for use in its ads:

When the ad pictured above started showing up all over Facebook this week, I was both shocked and angered. I have censored the service’s name in the image because I don’t want to send any business their way or promote their service, even inadvertently. But if you’re on Facebook and regularly post or share about books, ebooks and publishing, you have probably seen the original ad yourself.

I was shocked by the blatant theft and use of Charles M. Schulz’s intellectual property for purposes of advertising a service that is in no way endorsed by the Schulz estate. I was shocked that the thief did not even bother to include Schulz’ signature, to at least give credit to the creator of the iconic image of Snoopy at the typewriter. I was shocked that this ad was being run in such a hugely popular online forum, showing flagrant disregard for intellectual property laws.

I was angered that an author services provider—a company ostensibly in the business of helping creators of intellectual property—would do such a thing. I was angered that many authors whose names are familiar to me (some of whom are quick to point the intellectual property theft finger at ebook piracy sites) have books listed with this service, and probably have no idea they’ve thrown their lot in with an intellectual property thief.

I was angrier still when, after sending a private message to this outfit’s Facebook fan page earlier in the week, today I received a response claiming total ignorance of what intellectual property was stolen, and from whom.

As some already know, I’ve recently started developing and releasing my own Android apps, and I’ve put in a lot of work creating my own, original artwork and images for use in those apps and a lot of money paying for artwork I’ve had custom-created for use in my apps. The same is true of my books, and I’m sure many of you reading this have also paid good money for proper use of intellectual property, because it’s the right thing to do.

AUTHORS: please do not throw your lot in with any person or service with so little regard for intellectual property rights. You are, after all, in the business of creating intellectual property and it’s incredibly hypocritical to let an intellectual property thief represent you or your work in any way, once you have been made aware of this situation. If you have a book listed with this outfit (and if you’re not sure, email me at indieauthor @ gmail dot com and I’ll share the name of the company) I urge you to immediately remove your books from their listings and demand your money be refunded, and then spread the word about this company to all your author friends.

 

Protecting Your Copyrights Online

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This post by Susan Spann originally appeared on Writers In The Storm on 3/13/15.

In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi refers to Mos Eisley spaceport as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” and adds, “we must be careful.”

Obi-Wan’s wisdom applies to the Internet too.

Regardless of your publishing path, if you write for publication, you should take steps to protect your copyrighted work against Internet-based infringement.

Today, we take a look at how to do that. While no single post can cover all of the ways to protect your work online, here are some tips on things all authors can do to protect and enforce their copyrights:

Perform Regular Copyright / Infringement Searches. Every author should search the Internet regularly (at least once a month) for: (a) the author’s name, (b) the author’s published titles, and (c) any other words, phrases, or marks which might reveal infringement or illegal copying of the author’s work. For example, my searches include “Susan Spann,” “Shinobi Mystery,” and the titles of each of my published works (as well as “Flask of the Drunken Master” which doesn’t release until July. Using quotation marks around the search terms returns only those results which contain the exact phrase within the quotes.

Internet searches are important even if you also use Google Alerts or another monitoring service. While effective, automated alerts don’t catch all infringement, and can’t be relied upon to screen for all uses of an author’s work on the Internet.

 

Read the full post on Writers In The Storm.

 

You Know What You Can Do With Your DRM

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 9/7/14.

Okay, folks. You heard it here first. I’M NEVER GOING TO BUY ANOTHER BOOK WITH DRM ON IT.

Yes, that’s me shouting. Do I hear you asking why?

I’m so glad you asked. But first, for those who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially, it’s an attempt by suppliers to ensure that only legitimate purchasers of electronic content (books, software, music etc) are actually able to make use of their products. Wikipedia’s description is as good as any other. Or you could read this one, which describes the restrictions imposed by DRM.

You might think DRM is relatively new. It’s not. The acronym might be, but the technique has been around from pretty much the time when personal computers exploded onto the scene in the early eighties. Products such as dBase III, word processors, spreadsheets and the like were protected with licences. Without the licence key, you couldn’t run them or do anything else with them. Other software companies came up with dongles – a hardware device fitted to the machine running the program. The idea was supposed to be that pirates couldn’t profit from the developers’ hard work.

Uh-huh.

Two things happened.

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

 

Three Reasons Why I Do Not Give a Fig Who Steals My Books

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This post by Patricia V. Davis originally appeared on the Women’s National Book Association San Francisco Chapter site on 3/18/13.

A few years back, I was in the audience listening to a speaker at a prestigious writers’ conference as he warned us about book piracy and how many potential sales authors stood to lose as a result.

“I know for a fact that people are pirating my work and even selling my books illegally online,” he said, clearly not happy about that.

He went on to inform a roomful of mostly new writers that he’d even caught some reviewers ─ legitimate ones ─ selling their review copy of his book on eBay after they’d reviewed it. “When giving out review copies of your books, be sure to write ‘review copy’ in it, to help prevent that from happening,” he cautioned. He continued in the same vein about illegal copies being obtained for his ebooks, as well, and I observed several audience members taking notes diligently on his piracy prevention suggestions.

The problem is, I’d personally never heard of him before that conference, and if you ask me even now, I couldn’t tell you the title of even one of his books.

What does this mean? I’m getting to that.

Let’s take another scenario:  Me, as a teenager at a neighbor’s garage sale. She had a bin of old paperbacks that she was selling at ten cents each. Obviously we’re going way back here, before the internet even existed, so in essence, her reselling of those paperbacks at ten cents each was that era’s equivalent of today’s online book piracy. I bought a paperback that looked intriguing ─ why not, at that price? ─ and took it home to read. I became so enraptured by the story, that I read it all in one sitting, then raided my babysitting money which I’d saved for something else, walked all the way to the local bookstore and bought another of her books at the full paperback retail price that same day. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly bought her titles, and sometimes, if I’m feeling famished for the quality brain candy novels that she writes, and something new she’s written looks particularly appealing, I won’t even wait for the paperback version ─ I’ll spring for the hardback price of 25 dollars plus tax. (Yes, even this day of eReaders and iPads, I still buy hardback books.) So, the novel that I bought “illegally” hooked me into becoming a lifelong fan of this author.

 

Click here to read the full post on the WNBA San Francisco Chapter site.

 

Scribd's New Ebook Subscription Service: Partnering with Publishers, Profiting from Piracy

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This post, by Michael Capobianco, originally appeared on Writer Beware on 1/9/14.

I was contemplating what to write for my first Writer Beware blog post, when a subject popped up out of the blue, packed with all kinds of fascinating questions.

Some of you may remember when SFWA tangled with the online “digital library” Scribd back in 2007. Scribd was loaded with unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material, but SFWA screwed up big time by sending a sort-of DMCA notice (it wasn’t really) to get works by many sf writers removed from the site. It was an embarrassment for SFWA, and over time made it less and less likely that the organization would do anything directly about illegal uploads, even though a plan had been developed to do so for members who had specifically authorized SFWA to act as their agent.

Since everything to do with online piracy left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth, I decided I would not go looking for illegally uploaded copies of my or other authors’ works, and I didn’t check to see if Scribd was following through on the promises it made at the time to provide real-time checking of works uploaded to the service.

Jump forward six years to now. The subject of Scribd came up on a SFWA forum as part of a controversy that I needn’t go into here, and I decided that it was finally time to check it out.

Six years has made a big difference. Scribd has set out to become a full-fledged bookstore to compete with Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and takes it one step farther with the addition of an all-you-can-eat subscription service that allows access to an unlimited number of ebooks for $8.99 a month. They are now partnering with HarperCollins and various other publishers, such as Smashwords, E-Reads, and Rosetta Books, with the promise of more to come. They cover a lot of ground; not only do they sell ebooks and subscriptions, they offer what look like unauthorized “previews” of many other books, with links to authorized retailers.

But finally, beneath all the new things, the old Scribd–offering not-necessarily-legal user uploads of copyrighted works–is still there. Only now Scribd has monetized them, since you can only see a “preview” of the material for free, and must be a paid subscriber to access the whole unauthorized upload.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Beware