On May 21st, I spent an hour chatting with Chris Ruen, author of FREELOADING, which anyone interested can still hear on my archives page http://www.pwrtalk.com/page/r-cherry I was so outraged that I wrote a rant, but the next Sunday was Memorial Day, so I held off.
However, my anger is undiminished. I am reminded of the pervasive culture of apologists for looting, both by Senator Rand Paul's smug comments about SOPA (which he opposed) on Fox News this afternoon, juxtaposed with a blog on Trichordist http://www.thetrichordist.com about Bit Torrents,
http://thetrichordist.com/2013/05/28/bittorrent-not-designed-for-piracy-really-seriously-99-infringing/
BTW, on my MUSO account, I see that they are having considerable trouble getting a large collection of romance novels that include three of mine removed from a Kick Ass Torrent. I concede that there may be some Torrents that are legal, but most that I see are simply illegal compilations of massive numbers of infringing works. Presumably, those who take advantage of sloppy wording in the DMCA would argue that no one owns the copyright of a collection of 10,000 romance novels by various authors whose first name begins with R.... probably because some Seller on EBay said that they were GNU-Licensed and EBay allowed this lie to be published and distributed uncontested.
Back to the FREELOADING interview:
Chris Ruen told a story about Metallica that resonated with me, and with stories I hear from increasing numbers of authors. According to Chris, Metallica was in a recording studio, recording an original song (of theirs). They took a break between recordings, and heard the song they were in the process of recording, being played on Napster.
Authors are finding ARCs (Advance Review Copies) of books that they are still writing or proof-reading the copy-edited galleys and therefore of which not a single copy has yet been sold, being published and distributed on pirate sites.
If you see a book by a Random House author being "shared" illegally on Scribd or on a Torrent or on Facebook or Goodreads or any pirate site, you can now report it to Random House. Please do.
http://randomnotes.
Posts
That incident with Metallica is really sad and infuriating. The analogy with ARCs being illegally distributed before publication is quite apt.
ReplyDelete