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 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

You Think?

Cue the fanfare for the common creator of copyrighted works of music, art, and literature.
The Copyright Office has concluded that Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the Safe Harbor section) is unbalanced.

Over the last twenty years, the scales seem to have become weighted in favor of the tech giants OSPs, and in disfavor of rightsholders. It may come as no surprise that the biggest issues with Safe Harbor arise from a lack of clarity and legal agreement about what the criteria are for when an OSP has "red flag knowledge", and how many times and to what degree an infringer can infringe before he or she qualifies as a "repeat infringer".

This author has been complaining about those issues since 2005!

Legal bloggers Jason P. Bloom, Joseph Lawlor,  Lee F. Johnston,  and Wesley Lewis, representing the law firm Haynes and Boone LLP pen a very nice summary of the Copyright Office's 200 page report and major recommendations.

Original link:
https://www.haynesboone.com/alerts/copyright-office-finds-aspects-of-the-dmca-unbalanced

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=baab0441-e073-4c15-b736-44429fad801f

One can only hope that EBay and Twitter will take note. You think they will?

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday  

PS. This gofundme link has nothing to do with copyright, or big tech. Sharing it anyway.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/demolished-small-business-in-minneapolis-riot