A Rant About Copyright Infringement

Currently, I am battling a site that is registered in France, China, and Russia. It is called wiredshelf.com and I understand that not only does it post e-books such as mine to entice booklovers to "subscribe" to a "subscription library" of 100,000 e-books (many of which are being advertised and possibly shared "free" without the consent, permission or compensation to the copyright owners) but it also allegedly abuses any credit card information supplied by would-be subscribers.

Wiredshelf.com looks legitimate. It turns up in searches on Google and Alexa. It is protected by various privacy-protect "fronts".

Wiredshelf is protected by Twitter. Twitter members may boast freely in tweets that they have added or uploaded copyrighted works, and direct all the world to wiredshelf.com. In response, Twitter insists on DMCAs for the copyright owners, takes two or more days about it, will not remove any link except those identified individually by actual copyright owners.

Moreover, Twitter threatens the very authors it is harming with exposure on Chilling Effects, and with lawsuits if they should dare to overstep the bounds.

EBay is awash with DVDs of e-books burned by amateurs and entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they can claim copyright on anything they can snag from a pirate site. EBay raises unbelievable hurdles to authors. Copyright owners must own specific types of accounts, they must be pre-registered, they must have access to faxes and printers... woe betide any copyright owner who happens to be travelling when she hears that her e-books are being illegally auctioned on eBay!

Copyright-infringing vendors keep their good reputations. EBayers who purchase illegal DVDs are not informed that they do not (as they were led to believe in the auctions) own the copyright to bestselling modern novels that they bought on EBay. Therefore, the same copyright infringing collections are sold over and over again in multiple auctions by increasing numbers of eBayers.

The same happens on other internet sites.

My works have been stolen, shared, sold without my permission, scanned, posted in libraries more times than I can count. My copyright has been directly infringed by SONY, AMAZON and indirectly infringed by Plunder, Astatalk, EBay, wiredshelf....

Congress and the Library of Congress must define what is a RED FLAG, and must oblige OSPs that want "Safe Harbor" to pay attention to and investigate warnings and reports from members of the public.



Something must be done to address the all-too-popular misconception that if an e-book is "freely" available on a pirate site or file sharing site, it must necessarily be "in the public domain". If the author is alive, she probably owns that copyright, in which case, no one else may claim copyright over that work.


Just because Google or Adbrite robots place respectable companies' advertisements on a site (for pay) does not confer necessary respectability on that site. It could still be infringing authors' and artists' and musicians; copyright.

Just because a hosting site has wording it its TOS and TOU that deplore and forbid copyright infringement and ostensibly threaten infringers with banning and loss of access does not mean that those sites follow through. It does not mean that sites like FILESONIC aren't paying a cash bounty  for every unwitting illegal downloader who visits their site and steals a "free" movie, game, or e-book, or for every new subscriber who signs up for a paid premium account so that they can download more "freebies" faster, before the greedy publishers and producers find out that their work is being given away free, and send a take down notice.

At the moment, creators cannot afford to sue pirates, and the pirates know it. They post "Guides" to that effect on EBay. Piracy pays, because pirates (and PayPal and Google and the advertisement aggregators) keep making money until the pirates are caught, and when they are caught, they simply have to change an email address and start again.

Sincerely,
Rowena Cherry

With a fan like this, who needs enemies!

Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe Sandra Brown and Katie Allen and Stephanie Meyers and Sarah Dessen truly do work for PayPal and for Yahoo and for Freebiemaster and are happy with a secret cut of the $2.00 per download that Freebiemaster charges for the "freely available", "free" books they "share".


I don't know. I cannot think that the authors' cut will be much after PayPal deducts its $0.40 minimum out of the $2.00, and Freebie Master takes his share. I wonder who pays the agents and the publishers.


FreebieMaster is within the law. He has a disclaimer:

Please note that we are not the 'hosts' of these books, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply find links to books, that were freely available on the web and share our findings with our members!

Pointing at ebooks and advising people to take them is a lot safer than pointing at money in a till.


Anyway, all these wonderful books come with a review. It is possible that the reviewer's copyright has also been infringed, and that the pirate site snagged her reviews illegally, along with the covers which were presumably posted without permission, and the ebooks themselves which are almost certainly not intended to be free, and may be assumed to have been posted in violation of the authors' copyright.

Here are a few excerpts from a very long page advertising "free" and "freely available" ebooks. I deem these clips to be covered by Fair Use, because this is only a fraction of what is on the page, and I am using the fractions to educate, and to illustrate critique etc etc

 

The Switch

I have been a Sandra Brown fan from day one. Her romance novels have been some of the best I have ever read. Her early mainstream novels are better than her recent ones. If you read the inside flaps on the dust cover of "The Switch", you will basically know the story and the author does not stray far from the review. "The Switch" was a fair read but could have been so much better.
For starters this book was too long! (469 pages) This story could have been told with 100 less pages. There were few characters and the information relayed between them at times became repetitive. I did not find any surprises. The murderers are revealed at the time of the murders and the reader is aware of the diabolical plot and just tags along for the ride. By the time you are halfway through the book you should be able to figure out Melina's "dark secret". I questioned it at the very beginning. And spicy sex scenes? Ms. Brown just does not write them like she once did.
In short I found this book to be an OK read although predictable and a bit long. If you want to read one of her better novels try Charade or Exclusive. The Switch seemed to have so much potential but did not deliver for me.

Maybe that's why this reviewer is apparently doing what she can to destroy the author's livelihood

Seeing Blind

Seeing Blind was so intense, I could not put it down. Katie Allen is a great author, I cannot wait for upcoming books. Five Stars!
Cassie thought that she had escaped from the psychic abilities that had haunted her all her life. After two years of vision-free bliss living on her small farm outside the tiny town of Napping, Cassie's only worry is her secret desire for the hot local sheriff, Ty.
But her quiet, anonymous life is destroyed when murder rocks the sleepy town and Cassie's visions thrust her into the middle of the grisly mystery. Reluctantly drawn into her own search for the killer, Cassie begins to unearth the town's tangled secrets with the dubious help of Napping's residents...and the sheriff whose mere presence is enough to make her blood boil.

Piracy makes my blood boil!

One-Two Punch

With 'Breaking the Silence' Katie Allen jumped to the top of my "must buy" list, and with 'One-Two Punch', she more than seals the deal. The writing is good, the plot is excellent, the romance is tender, and the sex is hot.
Where Katie Allen truly excels however, is in her ability to infuse her characters and writing with a sense of reality. I've been sitting here struggling with how to describe the extent of her talent. It's not that the plot is so true to life; let's face it, committed relationships between buff gym owners, beautiful former soldiers, and, well, how to describe Beth(?), aren't the everyday norm. The closest I can come is to compare it to a book I once read in which the main character, an author, infused so much detail and life into her primary characters that they came to life. (They ended up moving into her apartment and causing all kinds of trouble, but that's another story for another day.) Beth, Harry, and Ky really do jump off the page at you; and not only are they realistic, but they're people that you would want to know. Like Jenny and Will, (and who can forget Christian), from 'Breaking the Silence', the characters of 'One-Two Punch' would be welcome in my world. Of course, if I could be Beth or Jenny...
Rather than dealing with my bumbling attempt at description, buy 'One-Two Punch' and 'Breaking the Silence' and meet the characters yourself. You can never have too many friends.

"You can never have too many friends"????

The reason I posted two reviews of books by the same author is to illustrate a point. Many savvy authors and publishers may give away the first book in  a series, in the valid expectation that people who read the first book by an author they haven't tried before, will be hooked and will buy subsequent books.

Pirates don't buy the second book. They request it on or before release day. They go to almost any lengths to read it without paying for it. Here's publicly posted proof.

This site has Share This functionality embedded in it. So, it is public. It can be shared with all Twitter, all Facebook and 200+ more. The site invites "members" to share the page with friends and family.

Note for publishers, authors, agents.... if your book isn't being "shared" and falsely described as "free", this is bookmix 13. http://bookmaster.weebly.com/bookmix13.html

The same link with a substitution of number 13 for any previous number ought to take you to some of the other selections that have been distributed or the distribution of which has been facilitated by this commercial, book-sharing-for profit operation.

Open letter about copyright infringement to Allison Kelley, John Scalzi, Scott Turow.

Dear Allison Kelley, John Scalzi, and Scott Turow,

Thank you very much for everything you and your respective organizations do to defend authors' copyrights against copyright infringement. We very much appreciate having an address to which to send our complaints, and the comfort of knowing that you compile a database of the most egregious "pirates" and pirate sites.

Despite small triumphs, ignorance persists among honest readers; lies about the legality of "sharing" go unchallenged, and the problem is getting much worse.

Please Scott Turow, Allison Kelley, John Scalzi will you talk to one another, set up one powerhouse task force, meet regularly, share resources, engage your members, give authors one central "Go To" address where we can submit complaints, report piracy sites, blogs and yahoogroups, cc our take-down notices.

One forceful industry voice could shut down an entire account and insist on a hosting site complying with their own TOS where their TOS has been repeatedly violated, instead of individual authors taking down one file at a time.

Thank you.

Rowena Cherry
2010 EPIC Award, "Friend of ePublishing"

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