Showing posts with label alleged scams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alleged scams. Show all posts

Saturday, June 06, 2020

Jolly Rogers And False Flags

Let's start with the falsies.

I know, basically, that is Victoria's Secret.... falsies, that is. However, the piratical falsies are sites that promise to give away every book on Amazon or Goodreads, but what they really are after is the DMCA notice, where an author is so upset to find all her books being given away --apparently-- that she fires off a DMCA and gives the false pirates her name, address, email address, telephone number, signature. If they are lucky, she even tries to download a copy of her books for proof.

Such a site is Inamebooks.
It seems not to be legitimate. If you try to download a book, I hear, allegedly, you might instead receive malware and an entertaining image of a lady who encourages you to find her hole to keep you occupied while the malware does its embedding work.

Don't go there.

If you gave them your email address, watch out for emails and phone calls such as from 1-800-561-6189 purporting to be from Apple about a problem with your cloudflare or storage account. It's not. Don't bite.

The existence of sites like this, and others like it, owes much to the loopholes in the DMCA that holds OSPs and ISPs harmless for what they host.

Cloudflare.com, namecheap.com, safenames.net and amazonaws.com ought to be somewhat responsible but appear not to be.

There might be a remedy about to move at glacial pace through Congress. The legal bloggers Matthew Nigriny and John Gary Maynard III for Hunton Andrews Kurth opine on how much the DMCA favors ISPs and OSPs over copyright owners.
https://www.huntonak.com/images/content/6/7/v2/67187/copyright-office-finds-dcma-tilts-away-from-copyright-owners.pdf

Meanwhile, for more on bad behavior by Amazon:
https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/amazons-anticompetitive-history/

A real jolly roger appears to fly over the Internet Archive.  The brilliant and persistent --and real insight-sharing Victoria--Victoria Strauss covers the issue comprehensively.
https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2020/06/four-major-publishers-sue-internet.html

If your books are still being given away on an "Emergency" basis because the world needs free entertainment while authors do not need to eat and pay the rent during the same emergency, tell your Congressional representative or senator.... although, a little bird told me that Rand Paul and Ron Wyden are not sympathetic to ripped-off authors.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry