Guest Post: "The First Pirate Hurts Most" by Addison Brae

Today, Addison Brae shares a debut author's rude awakening.

The first pirate hurts most

July 8, 2018
By Addison Brae

Digital piracy is rarely discussed in the publishing world, so seeing an unauthorized PDF of my book for the first time for free download was a shocker. Then add the extra punch that the site owner invites people to pay to join, and the first month is free. How did this jerk get the PDF? And what nerve to sell something that isn’t theirs.

The even bigger bombshell is how many authors have given up on chasing down pirated copies of their books. Last time best-selling crime writer Sue Coletta (http://suecoletta.com/) checked the pirate sites, her books neared 1,000. “If I wasted time trying to get every book off these sites, I’d be sending copyright notices full-time, with no time to write another book, never mind market my existing ones,” Sue said. “Sometimes we need to pick our battles.”

Piracy is cybercrime. It drastically changed the music, movie, and book publishing industries, and it’s spawned other industries to help stop it. But why does piracy continue?

My theory? No one’s looking. People do it thinking no one will notice or care.

A June 6, 2018 Digital Music News (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/06/06/muso-global-piracy-study/)  article says 53% of UK adults surveyed felt accessing media content illegally is wrong, but did it anyway.

It takes two. One steals the file and makes it available. You have a say in whether pirates are successful. Don’t download from shady sites. Besides, if they steal what they’re selling, they’ll steal and sell the personal information you provide.

Someone I know recently captured an unauthorized version of my book trailer (https://youtu.be/Mf-GlfxPzdY) from the web to play for a group. The intention was good, but the video quality suffered since it was pirated.

I found the first copyright violation instance with a simple Google alert on the book title and author name. I spent about an hour contacting the company that owns the site, and they disabled the link three days later, but hundreds of other titles remain. It was time I should have spent writing or doing something else productive.

Authors overwhelmingly use Blasty (https://www.blasty.co/) to monitor for copyright infringement. Monitoring is free, but the company charges $156 per year to blast the violator with automated notices about DMCA—the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It took me about a minute to set up a free monitoring account. Another author recently shared with an author email group, “They have taken down over 4k pirates offering my work in the last year.”

Wow. I’m not endorsing the service, but speechless at the number of people who will steal content for their own profit.

Please consider carefully before you swipe a book, piece of art, video, song, or anything without paying.

Think twice before you download!

A version of this post first appeared on Addison Brae’s blog (http://addisonbrae.com/piracy). Addison’s first novel is Becker Circle (Tirgearr Publishing, March 2018). Read more on her website (http://addisonbrae.com/).

Thank you, Addison!

Happy Easter... and Save The Date... and Safe Harbor

A very interesting situation may be developing around "Safe Harbor", the provision in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that was intended to shield internet service providers who act in good faith from liability for the misbehavior of their users.

Courts are now paying attention to the concept (in the DMCA) of "red flag knowledge", and whether an ISP can claim Safe Harbor protections on the grounds of "ignorance" (or lack of knowledge) when their employees or assignees "moderate" or "curate" or "select" the user-uploaded content that they will display, (as opposed to allowing the users to post everything and anything without interference or assistance or supervision.)

Perhaps (this author speculates) this may be an unintended consequence of certain sites trying to keep so-called "fake news" off their sites. Or porn. Or actual crimes being live streamed.

Armen N. Nercessian and Guinevere Jobson of the law firm of Fenwick & West LLP penned a fascinating blog about a case where the 9th Circuit reversed a district court.

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=845462af-ee94-46de-86ba-8342c6a303a3&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+General+section&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2017-04-14&utm_term=

Perhaps, if there are moderators, they ought to be able to recognize a watermark that indicates that a particular photograph is copyrighted.  This could be interesting. Apparently different Circuits have different views... this may go all the way to SCOTUS.

For those interested, (and I am sure that few of you are!) April 18th from 1:00 pm Eastern Time until around 5:00 pm, the Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force will be hosting a public meeting on Consumer Messaging In Connection with Online Transactions Involving Copyrighted Works.

https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/ip-policy/copyright/consumer-messaging-connection-online-transactions?utm_campaign=subscriptioncenter&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=

The problem is that consumers who download copyrighted works appear to have a poor understanding of what they can legally do with those downloaded copies. Indeeed!

This author will be listening in. It's been 22 days since I last logged in to BLASTY.co to check the current status of copyright infringement of my four works (Mating Net, Forced Mate, Insufficient Mating Material, and Knight's Fork). It appears that Amazon-owned Goodreads is being implicated for decoration of the pages.  The KROGER grocery chain is giving paid advertising support to a site called something like "colourpalette" that appears to be encouraging folks to infringe copyrights,
while deciding on perfect shades of colors for their artwork or websites.

If you do a Google search for ebooks (perhaps looking for a title and also for ".pdf" and "download" and "free"), there are multiple sites with gd.fs inside the url that appear to go to a page selling hardware. Huge waste of time!  There are also some "Very Dangerous" sites that either Google or Norton will block, if you have their help.

On the subject of warnings about internet nasties, authors who own Trademarks are often sent official looking notices through the mail that appear to demand that the Trademark owner pays a surprisingly large fee for overseas Trademark Licensing, or else for "SEO". Read the fine print. Usually, legitimate demands for Trademark renewal are sent to the Trademark owner's lawyer, and renewals are due every fifth year.

Mary Bleahene of the lawfirm FRKelly blogged recently about Trade Mark scams. If you own one, or are considering owning one, you might enjoy her expertise in "Trade Mark Scams - Beware of Unofficial Notices."

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=64a088e2-1649-4cec-8faf-d96f83c3fe29&utm_source=lexology+daily+newsfeed&utm_medium=html+email+-+body+-+general+section&utm_campaign=lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=lexology+daily+newsfeed+2017-04-14&utm_term=


All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Oh, Arrgh and Blasty!

There's a new service on the horizon to help authors locate and scupper pirate links on Google. It's in Beta, so is free to the patient and those willing to provide feedback... and to the impatient for a fee of $19.99.

It's Blasty.co
Note, it is dot co , not dot com!   
https://www.blasty.co/invitation/wr4dTA9d

So far, I am impressed. When I applied, I was asked to name one of my titles, and to give my author name. Once I was accepted, I was allowed to create a password, upload my covers, add the rest of my titles, and to start "Blasting" copyright infringing search results on Google.

The site only works with Google Chrome. One can apply without using Chrome, but the findings and the choice whether to Blast any given link or whitelist it only work in Chrome.  I am not clear whether the service actually sends a takedown to the hosting site, or only to Google so this service might be a supplement to a service such as Muso.com or DMCAForce 

However, even if it removes Google search results, that makes it harder for most pirates to be found by "valuable traffic" and to make money off other people's works without paying them. Many of the links go to sites that are obviously hosted overseas, and that have no intention of honoring the DMCA in any case. Some post the legal blurb that they are required to post, and warn copyright owners of severe penalties for sending a DMCA notice in error.

Many post a cover and some blurb and big "DOWNLOAD" links. Authors should understand that they only have to have a "good faith belief". The DMCA does not require that authors download malware or infringe other people's copyrights (where multiple ebooks are hosted in one place) in order to suspect that their ebooks are being published and distributed in violation of their rights.  There are scam sites that probably don't have any ebooks at all, but hope that people who know they are behaving immorally if not illegally will provide credit card information to "subscribe", or else will download ransomware in hopes of a free read of something erotica.

(If you look closely at the blurry pages sites that purport to have a certain title, you may see a tiny disclaimer that they may not have that title, but will have something related and equally interesting.)

Surprisingly, some Google results are .pdfs that are pages of live links to where ebooks may or may not be hosted.  Anyone trying this service will have to take the time to look at all the results before taking the decision whether to Blast, to WhiteList or to leave it for later.

So far, I've Blasted 54 links, and although one cannot believe the copyright infringing sites' boasts about how many happy people have downloaded each book, it looks like I could have lost tens of thousands of potential sales (which, if on Amazon, might have resulted in tens of thousands of returns, to!!!).

My bottom line: after trying this new service for four days, I am inclined to heartily recommend it.  I would suggest, though, that if any alien romance authors (or authors from any other genre, but I like to hit my metadata!!!) that you copy and paste the urls you find suspicious and email them to yourself , because once they are gone from Google, you might want to see if they are still on Bing and Dogpile and the other search engines. Or, you might want to send DMCAs to some of them.

Happy hunting,

Rowena Cherry