Maybe we DO need to worry about pirates after all?!

5547 Views 49 Replies 24 Participants Last post by RobertCharles, May 20, 2015

Silly Writer

Discussion Starter · Apr 5, 2015

I was on the 'don't worry about pirates, it's like playing whack-a-mole team' until Friday. I've seen my books on real pirate sites and scam sites since the month after I first published them... I came here, everyone said don't worry...so I didn't.

Until now.

A few of my books are in Select. I uploaded a new cover last week, and received an email from Amazon that said their software had detected my content (for FREE) on the web for free, and it was in violation of the TOS!! It was a rather long email that I had to respond to within 48 hours attesting my content was either public domain, or I held the full rights of ownership, or...can't remember the last option... So I of course chose the full rights of ownership (I have filed for copyright but it's a loooong wait).

So I'm still waiting for their response. Meanwhile, I've been searching. My books are all over. I didn't click on most because they looked like scam/malware opportunities, but there are several sites the entire book(s) pop up right on the screen. One had 64 tabs that included all 272 pages of my book that can be read without downloading anything... I know. I read through every page.

So beware... Looks like ignoring the Pirates is coming back to bite me (us). It will take me days and days to research all these sites and get cease and desist letters out.

If anyone knows of a cheap service that handles this for authors, please let me know.

1 - 20 of 50 Posts

Jake Kerr

· #2 · Apr 5, 2015

Amazon only scours retailers.

Silly Writer

Discussion Starter · #3 · Apr 5, 2015

But it's not at any other retailers... ?

G

· #4 · Apr 5, 2015

L.L. Akers said:
It will take me days and days to research all these sites and get cease and desist letters out.

The number of books that 'might' get read, or downloaded is going to be insignificant. However, the time, effort, stress, worry and money you are putting into fighting a ghost is going to depress you further and it's time badly spent. These sites don't give a monkey's armpit about your Cease and Desist orders as they are mostly beyond reach unless you can prove the losses are substantial enough to justify taking legal action. Think about the costs as opposed to just ignoring it. The possible loss of revenue is going to be insignificant in comparison. You want to prove a point, or make a statement? fine, but it will be wasted on those that count. You can make a bigger difference by keep on writing.

I do think demanding that Amazon show you which site(s) they are saying is offering the books for FREE might be worthy of your efforts. It's possibly something that would interest others who Amazon claim have breached their terms.

75814

· #5 · Apr 5, 2015

L.L. Akers said:
But it's not at any other retailers... ?

Were you on other retailers in the past? FlipKart, one of the sites Smashwords distributes to, is notorious for not taking books down.

Silly Writer

Discussion Starter · #6 · Apr 5, 2015

TobiasRoote said:
The number of books that 'might' get read, or downloaded is going to be insignificant. However, the time, effort, stress, worry and money you are putting into fighting a ghost is going to depress you further and it's time badly spent. These sites don't give a monkey's armpit about your Cease and Desist orders as they are mostly beyond reach unless you can prove the losses are substantial enough to justify taking legal action. Think about the costs as opposed to just ignoring it. The possible loss of revenue is going to be insignificant in comparison. You want to prove a point, or make a statement? fine, but it will be wasted on those that count. You can make a bigger difference by keep on writing.

I do think demanding that Amazon show you which site(s) they are saying is offering the books for FREE might be worthy of your efforts. It's possibly something that would interest others who Amazon claim have breached their terms.

I totally agree, Tobias. And I have no intention of using time or money to fight pirates or scam sites unless Amazon says I have to.

I am awaiting their answer (with abated breath) and if they say I'm in violation and freeze the book, then I'll ask where they found it. The email I received didn't give me opportunity to respond with words. It had three links to choose from, and after I chose, it put me back in KDP where I had to just check boxes.

Perry, no. This particular book has always been exclusive to Amazon. Funny thing though...when I went in to upload the civer, i unchecked the Select box. So as of April 27th, I was going wide. Quite a co-ink-a-dink I think. I've made changes to this book dozens of times before, but it's the first time I've unchecked that box and I get the email.

MacMcAdams

· #7 · Apr 5, 2015

There are so many black hat seo people using scraped content to churn out clicks. Nobody's content is safe. We have to hope Google wins the war against them. Every nickel they make from Adsense and redirects, gives them more incentive.

MikeDavidson

· #8 · Apr 5, 2015

This happened to me three times. This last time they removed my title and refused to put it back in select (and it cost me thousands $$$) and said if ever I transgress again I will be removed from select and have my account deleted. Yes my account will be deleted over piracy.

But my books that were pirated were being sold or given away free at other retailers. I had to do some copyright takes downs to get them removed. With baker and taylor it took weeks for them to comply. All while I'm losing money

Carol (was Dara)

· #9 · Apr 5, 2015

A lot of writers use a paid service called Muso to issue takedown notices to pirate sites. They're apparently not 100 % effective but help somewhat.

G

· #10 · Apr 5, 2015

MikeDavidson said:
This happened to me three times. This last time they removed my title and refused to put it back in select and said if ever I transgress again I will be removed from select and have my account deleted. Yes my account will be deleted over piracy.

Did they tell you where it was being offered? or are you being victimised blindly. If they have an issue that could effectively penalise your business you have a legal right to know the facts (regardless of their TOS). If you know which site it is you then have the ability to follow through. If it's just their software scouring the web and picking up something in error, then they must make all reasonable efforts to assist you in resolving it. We're all against piracy and Amazon must do their share of stamping it out, or stand aside and make no judgement at all. It costs them nothing for you to see the results in question.

It's another reason why I won't go exclusive with Amazon any more. I would HATE for my business to rest on their whims.

Carol (was Dara)

· #11 · Apr 5, 2015

Btw, L.L., I would definitely ask Amazon where they've found your book. A lot of times, retailers are slow to pull books that have been distributed to them through an aggregator, even though weeks or months have gone by since you opted out. If you've ever been in wide distribution at all, that's probably the first thing to check. No one hates piracy more than I do, but in most of these instances I've seen, the "culprit" in the end usually turns out to be a legitimate retailer the author thought no longer carried their books. I kinda suspect (although I could be very wrong) that Amazon already knows the major pirate sites and filters them out of their searches, realizing the author has no control over them. I imagine it's the real stores they're mainly concerned with.

MikeDavidson

· #12 · Apr 5, 2015

TobiasRoote said:
Did they tell you where it was being offered? or are you being victimised blindly. If they have an issue that could effectively penalise your business you have a legal right to know the facts (regardless of their TOS). If you know which site it is you then have the ability to follow through. If it's just their software scouring the web and picking up something in error, then they must make all reasonable efforts to assist you in resolving it. We're all against piracy and Amazon must do their share of stamping it out, or stand aside and make no judgement at all. It costs them nothing for you to see the results in question.

It's another reason why I won't go exclusive with Amazon any more. I would HATE for my business to rest on their whims.

Amazon informs me of one site then I scour the web and usually found more than one, and have them removed. It happens to me on rare occasion though. but it was three times this last year. It's nothing I can control being true piracy. I think amazon just assumes that you take on a different publisher name to cheat the system then cry piracy so you can get away with it. cynical they are.

My last title which was pirated was offered by the pirate on baker and taylor's BLIO and on SCRIBD. Took BLIO forever to comply and amazon refused to be understanding about it.

I choose to go select because I have never been able to get much traction on other websites. Lately I've been giving my email list more attention to see if I can change that.

MikeDavidson

· #13 · Apr 5, 2015

Carol (was Dara) said:
Btw, L.L., I would definitely ask Amazon where they've found your book. A lot of times, retailers are slow to pull books that have been distributed to them through an aggregator, even though weeks or months have gone by since you opted out. If you've ever been in wide distribution at all, that's probably the first thing to check. No one hates piracy more than I do, but in most of these instances I've seen, the "culprit" in the end usually turns out to be a legitimate retailer the author thought no longer carried their books. I kinda suspect (although I could be very wrong) that Amazon already knows the major pirate sites and filters them out of their searches, realizing the author has no control over them. I imagine it's the real stores they're mainly concerned with.

^^^ This is true. I think this happens to most people then after months go by they forget their books were offered for free at those sites, or they never really were aware where they aggregator sold them, so they couldn't verify everything was taken down before going select.

Mark E. Cooper

· #14 · Apr 5, 2015

TobiasRoote said:
It's another reason why I won't go exclusive with Amazon any more. I would HATE for my business to rest on their whims.

Exactly so.

Lady Vine

· #15 · Apr 5, 2015

Mark E. Cooper said:
Exactly so.

Thirded.

Briteka

· #16 · Apr 5, 2015

We certainly should worry about pirating. I don't buy into the whole, "Well they wouldn't have bought your book anyway," excuse that pirates use to justify their behavior. Pirating lowers the number of people that legally interact with the financial aspects of media.

That said, I know there's nothing that can be done, so I just accept it. But... I do worry about it.

I find it hard to believe that Amazon would send that letter about a book at a pirate site. It's possible but unlikely. If you had it up before, it's likely that it never came done at some obscure site that Smashwords or Kobo publish at. That's where I'd start looking first. Then I would look to see if someone pirated your book and uploaded it to a major retailer.

sela

· #17 · Apr 5, 2015

Just to clarify, is this the Amazon letter that asks you to assert that you have the right to publish the book, are the copyright holder or to confirm your pen name?

Here's an excerpt:

Thanks for using Amazon KDP. Copyright is important to us - we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within five days

I get that once in a while, usually after I've done some kind of edit to a book I have in select. I think it has to do with their bots scanning the net to make sure it's not available elsewhere and finding it on a pirate site. As long as you send an email affirming that you hold the rights and work under pen name (if you do) you will be fine.

Forget the pirates. You can't do anything about them. No one can. DON'T pay to have a service do takedowns for you. It's a game of whack a mole. The only entity that benefits from your time and effort and money is the company who takes down your books. The pirates will pop back up in another entity and it starts all over again. The people who buy from pirates or download from pirate sites were not going to buy your book anyway.

JMO

GoneToWriterSanctum

· #18 · Apr 5, 2015

I do not accept VerticalScope's Terms Of Service on Kboards, and have asked for my account to be deleted, along with all of my posts.

If you are here as a result of a Google search, leave now. The owners of this site are interested only in your possible ad revenue.

KelliWolfe

· #19 · Apr 5, 2015

Going after torrents is probably a waste of time because they're nothing but a distributed file sharing system. But going after the pirate web sites is a different matter. When we start costing them money they go away because they're no longer profitable to operate. If they're hosted in China there's probably not much you can do, but if they're hosted in the US or European countries which have strong IP protection it's a different story. Hit them with enough DMCA takedown notices and it starts to cost them.

One thing to note is that in the US at least it isn't only illegal to host files in violation of copyright, it's also illegal to even link to such material, which is why Google will remove links to pirated material from their search results if issued a DMCA notice.

The problem is that it takes a coordinated effort to make enough a financial impact on any one of these sites to make a difference. If the various authors' guilds wanted to offer another service that provided some value to their members this would be a good one. If the pirate sites knew that within 24 hours of going live they were going to be hit with a tsunami of thousands of DMCA takedown notices from SFWA, RWA, etc., the financial incentive to do this would dry up quickly.

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Silly Writer

Discussion Starter · #20 · Apr 5, 2015

Sorry...I was sleeping.

In answer...Nope, this book was never for sale at any other retailers. Never. But just in case, I spent hours searching for it, and only found it at pirate sites.

I've never used Smaswords.

I don't go after pirates.

This was the email:

Hello,

We're writing about the following book:

(name of book was here)

During a review of your KDP submission, we found content in your book that is freely available on the web. Before we can publish your book, you need to take one of the following actions within five days:

1. If you hold the publishing rights for all of the content in this book, resubmit your book for publishing following the instructions provided below.
2. If the book is in the public domain, please confirm the initial publication date of the work and the author's date of death. We will contact you if we need additional information.
3. If you do not hold rights for all of the content in this book, please remove the book following the instructions provided below.

If you publish books for which you do not hold the electronic publishing rights, we may terminate your account or you may lose access to optional KDP services.

Best Regards,

Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com
--------------------------------
Follow these steps to resubmit a book for publishing:
1. Log in to your KDP account at http://kdp.amazon.com
2. In the "Bookshelf" section, find the book you want to edit shown in "Draft" status, and in the 'Other Book Actions' column, click 'Edit Book Details'.
3. Check your book details, scroll down to the bottom of the 'Your Book' section and click 'Save and Continue'
4. On the 'Rights & Pricing' page, you need to reconfirm Content Rights.
5. Confirm that you have all rights to publish by clicking on the box at the bottom.
6. Scroll to the bottom of the page, 'Save and Publish'

It can take up to 24 hours for your book to appear as "Live" on the KDP Bookshelf. We will contact you if we need additional information.

To remove a book never published (no ASIN below title):
1. Log in to your KDP account at http://kdp.amazon.com
2. At the right of the book click the "Delete" button under the "Other Book Actions" column
3. Click "Delete"

To remove a previously published book (with ASIN below title):
1. Log in to your KDP account at http://kdp.amazon.com
2. Find the 'Other Book Actions' column to the right of the title you want to unpublish, and click 'Unpublish'.
3. Confirm the ID or ASIN shown in the confirmation window are correct and click 'Unpublish'

When you unpublish a book from the Kindle Store, it should become unavailable to buy within 24-72 hours. It will then be unsearchable from the Amazon storefront after a minimum of one week. It will not be available for purchase until you republish it.

------------

I answered the email.

AND I've now received the regular email you get after a book becomes live again, so... I guess it's over?

Carol, thanks for the name of the service.
Mike, crap. That's exactly what I was afraid of...sorry that happened to you.

My plan now is to call KDP and ask if I can get more details...i.e. were they indeed talking about pirated copies? And are they expecting me to stop these pirates? If I don't, will I have the same thing happen to me as Mike? (Which is totally not fair, btw) I'll update the thread when I get the info.

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