Internet Book Piracy

by Gini Graham Scott

  However, regardless of the apologists for piracy, these ICE investigations of two major operations show the ability of the government to successfully go after the big piracy operations, serving as a warning to those seeking to earn money on the piracy black market. And even smaller, more independent pirates aren’t safe, as numerous other ICE operations show, to be described in the next section.

  CHAPTER 27

  Arrests and Convictions of Independent Pirates

  ALTHOUGH THE BIGGER BUSTS, ARRESTS, and convictions involve more investigators, multiple suspects, and more media attentions, such as the IMAGINE, NinjaVideo, and earlier Megaupload cases, ICE and other investigators have gone after smaller IP violators on the Internet, too. In many instances, these cases involve only one or two defendants, and typically they plead guilty and are subjected to a few years in prison and restitution. These cases also commonly involve downloading copyrighted material, though the Internet is also used to take orders, such as in many DVD/CD infringement cases. However, in some of those cases the defendants used flea markets, storefronts, and personal contacts to make sales, but only the Internet sales cases are included here.

  While some of the cases in the ICE news releases only note the indictments and upcoming sentencing dates, trials are unlikely in most cases, since investigators have clear-cut evidence of the infringed materials and purchases. Moreover, the investigators have already shut down the sites and confiscated accounts, so these small-time defendants have little ability to mount a defense, unlike multimillionaire Kim Dotcom in the Megaupload bust. Most defendants have little money and little ability to earn more, once their sites are closed and their accounts are frozen. Often they have to face the consequences of piracy, usually spending some time in prison and paying back any ill-gotten gains.

  Here are some examples of these cases between September 2011 and February 2013: (http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/index.htm?top25=no&year=all&month=all&state=all&topic=12)

  1. After running a large-scale bootleg operation, Saidou A. Dia of St. Louis pleaded guilty to one felony count of copyright infringement, along with one felony count of failing to register as a sex offender. On November 10, 2011, he was sentenced to fifty-seven months in federal prison and a lifetime of supervision, based on an investigation by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, the US Marshals Service, and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Among other crimes, Dia created, distributed, and sold bootleg copies of movies from his residence, his House of Beauty business, and other locations where he received materials for making counterfeit movies and stored his inventory. During the investigation, the investigators seized about 6,400 counterfeit movies, ten DVD-burning towers that were able to produce nearly ninety bootleg movies simultaneously, and numerous counterfeit movie labels and related packaging materials.

  2. Two Seattle-area men, Sang Jin Kim of Everett, Washington, and Eugene Yi of Bothell, Washington, were charged on November 30, 2011, with operating websites that sold pirated copies of movies, TV shows, and software, after an investigation by ICE and Homeland Security Investigations. Kim and Yi received a profit by requiring a fee from the website users. Among other things, the investigators seized two of the websites, 82movie.com and 007dsk.com, and the servers supporting them. As part of the investigation, undercover agents posed as interested buyers, and Kim told them that when he got complaints from movie companies about his site, he removed the movies for a time, but put them back a few weeks later. Some of these movies were still showing in theaters or not yet released on DVD. The potential sentence was up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, though his actual sentence wasn’t announced in the releases.

  3. James Clayton Baxter of Wichita Falls, Texas, was sentenced on February 28, 2012, to fifty-seven years in federal prison and ordered to pay $402,417 in restitution after he pleaded guilty to copyright infringement. According to documents filed in the case, he infringed on the copyrighted works of Adobe Systems between June 8, 2006, and April 9, 2007, by reproducing copies of its computer software. The case was initiated in May 2007 after investigators working for Adobe notified ICE and HSI that they had purchased infringing computer software from TechKappa.com, a website that sold copies of software titles via Internet downloads. Around that time, the Wichita Falls Police Department notified the FBI that Baxter was selling pirated software, after they previously investigated him for credit card abuse and warned him that he could not sell pirated software on his website. But Baxter continued to do so anyway.

  The ICE and HSI investigation revealed that he owned and operated a half-dozen websites, which he advertised online, to offer backup copies of software from Adobe, Microsoft, and Autodesk, Inc. for sale at about one-fifth of the manufacturers’ retail value. He also provided counterfeit product registration serial numbers, so the customer could install the software. To further the scheme, Baxter used at least seventeen business names with accompanying merchant bank accounts to process credit card payments for software orders. Altogether, he sold more than ninety copies of copyrighted software and received more than $66,000, while causing the software companies an actual loss of $400,000 to $1 million.

  4. In another software piracy case, Quynh Trong Nguyen of Annandale, Virginia, was sentenced on November 9, 2012, to thirty-six months in prison, three years of supervised release, restitution of $2.5 million, and a forfeiture of $1.4 million, partially satisfied by $650,000 in already-seized liquid assets. As investigators from ICE, HSI, and the US Postal Inspection Service found over the course of 2.5 years, Nguyen sold $2.5 million in copyright-infringing software featuring popular titles such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, and Autodesk AutoCAD, using Internet websites operated from his home to defraud over two thousand customers. In addition, Nguyen falsely told suppliers that he was eligible to purchase and resell educational software in connection with George Mason University. Then, he altered the educational software by painting over labels and modifying the product packaging, so he could sell the software at a higher price.

  5. Still another computer software fraudster, Collier Bennett Harper, of Lakewood, California, was sentenced on October 16, 2012, to thirty-seven months in prison and $370,000 in restitution to Microsoft after he imported more than one thousand counterfeit Microsoft Office CD-ROMS and sold them on the Internet. As an investigation by ICE and HSI revealed, Harper contacted reputable dealers on eBay and hired them to sell his counterfeit software by listing the product as “new” and authentic. After the sellers paid him and gave him the customers’ addresses, he shipped the counterfeit software to them, reportedly selling nearly one thousand counterfeit software packages this way.

  6. In another ICE and HSI–led investigation, Naveed Sheikh of Baltimore pleaded guilty on November 19, 2012, to illegally reproducing and distributing more than one thousand copyrighted commercial software programs valued at more than $4 million, which he sold through multiple websites. Sheikh even told purchasers that the programs were not legal, because they were copies of the original software programs or they featured “cracked” codes to modify software to disable the security protections. So this software could not be registered with the companies that developed it. But buyers could obtain the programs by downloading them from the Internet, or Sheikh would send them a CD. For payment, he collected funds through credit card charges and electric funds transfers, using a credit card processing account for a defunct business his family previously owned, and he did not report any of this income on his tax returns. To obtain the software copies, he recruited and paid a number of co-conspirators to obtain infringing copies of the software for him, some from overseas and from multiple sources, including Microsoft, Adobe, and Quicken. While the server hosting his website was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he used remote computers in Bel Air, Maryland, and multiple Internet domains.

  For a time, the government engaged in plea negotiations with Sheikh during the fall of 2010, but he suddenly left for Pakistan. However, his departure enabled the Federal investigators
to further build the case against him from one hundred to one thousand infringed-upon titles. When he returned on January 31, 2012, he was arrested at Dulles airport, and he even had electronic media on him, evidence that he and his co-conspirators were responsible for selling the infringing software (http://www.forbes.com/sites/billsinger/2012/11/20/fugitive-software-pirate-nabbed-at-dulles-with-incriminating-evidence). Not too bright, since this arrest led to his June 28 indictment and November 19 guilty plea, whereby he agreed to forfeit $4 million—the same value as the software he illegally sold. Yet, while Sheikh then faced sentencing on February 19, 2013, for up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, he managed to delay that until June 6, 2013, when he was sentenced to eighty-seven months—over seven years in prison, plus three years of supervised release, along with forfeiting the $4 million (http://www.fbi.gov/baltimore/press-releases/2013/baltimore-man-sentenced-to-more-than-seven-years-in-prison-for-infringing-the-copyrights-of-more-than-1-000-commercial-software-programs).

  These cases illustrate the risk of engaging in IP piracy for those who end up in the crosshairs of the investigators from ICE, HSI, or other law enforcement agencies. While a great many pirates get away with it, especially book pirates who haven’t yet been the focus of any investigations, these cases show that those targeted and indicted commonly have their websites and illegal sources of income shut down. Additionally, most of them plead guilty and are sentenced to some jail time—typically between two to five years, along with restitution, and often two to three years of supervision after they leave prison, though more serious offenders like Sheikh get even more prison time. Although some targets, like Sheikh, are able to prolong the process, it is at a great cost, not only because they can no longer pursue their lucrative illegal business, but because they commonly have high legal costs to keep them out of prison, and then can receive even stiffer sentences. Ultimately, most bow to the inevitable, given the power of the government investigators and prosecutors, so they plead guilty and serve their sentence.

  While the book pirates as yet appear to have been ignored by government prosecutors, it may be only a matter of time before they are targeted, once writers and publishers play a more active role in providing leads and witness testimony, much like Adobe investigators contributed leads to government investigators in the Baxter case. Then, with the help of a growing number of government investigators from different departments, the writers and publishers will have strong allies to pursue these cases. The hope is that this contributes to discouraging other prospective book pirates from the increasingly dangerous Internet seas.

  PART V

  How to Fight the Pirates

  CHAPTER 28

  Some Strategies to Combat the Internet Book Pirates

  THE BATTLE AGAINST THE INTERNET book pirates is really a battle both publishers and professional book writers have to win to survive and thrive. While many piracy advocates defend their activities, these are all false arguments. Some common arguments are that the pirates provide books to those who can’t afford the higher prices; that people who download books for free wouldn’t buy them anyway; that the many downloads help new authors get better known; that they are only taking sales away from big corporations with plenty of money; or that information on the Internet wants to be free. In rebuttal, people can borrow books from friends or the library if they can’t afford them. People would be more likely to pay for books if not offered the chance to get them for free or for much less. The downloads don’t help publicize authors who hope to plan their own publicity with the help of publicists and their publishing company. And any reduced sale of legitimate books takes money directly from the pockets of professional writers struggling to earn a living. Moreover, it is one thing for the writer or publisher to offer by choice some information for free on the Internet but require payment for other copyrighted information. But pirates steal that opportunity for choice or earning a fair income from an intellectual property that a writer and others on their publishing team have spent hundreds of hours, if not more, to produce. So by any measure—piracy is theft!

  In turn, if writers and publishers don’t do something soon, their very survival is at risk—and in the long run, that will be bad for both consumers who want to read books and for society, too. Think of it this way. Hunters and poachers may go after easy but endangered game, because they can make a good living selling the hide, meat, or horns of the animal. So they keep hunting, and an underground market for what they are selling is thriving. But as they continue the hunt, there are fewer and fewer animals because they have been killed off. After awhile, they could go extinct, wiping out the very industry that the hunters and poachers were serving.

  So it is with pirates and writers and publishers. As sales and income go down, more and more professional writers may decide they can’t afford to write books, while more and more small to large mainstream publishers may decide they can’t afford to compete either. This results in more publishers consolidating with other publishers, leaving the industry, or producing fewer books with high-profile writers who have the necessary income to successfully challenge the pirates and win. Then, perhaps more and more non-professional writers—those who are writing for fun, for their friends and families, or to promote their business or themselves—will self-publish their books, and not care about the risk of piracy, because they will typically sell the self-publishing norm of fewer than 150 books. They aren’t in it for the money because they have another career or independent source of income.

  Thus, the victims of book piracy need to act quickly, using various strategies to defeat the pirates. A number of blogs and online articles now offer suggestions on what to do. For example, on the WikiHow site, an article on “How to Combat Book Piracy” recommends these key steps:

  • Make a record of the links where your files occur, so you have a copy to advise the site of the infringement, go back and check if it has been removed or not, and have a record for a future lawsuit for damages.

  • Search the site for all versions of your work, since if one book was pirated, there is a good chance others were uploaded as well. Check on variations in the listing of the title or spelling of your name, since sometimes book pirates shorten the title or misspell your name to trick the search engines.

  • Look for any link on the same page as your file that indicates the name, usually the screen name, of the person who uploaded the file. While some people may have naively uploaded the file, not realizing they have passed along stolen material, those who have uploaded dozens or more files are dedicated pirates. In either case, you can start with a cease and desist letter or takedown notice to remove the file, as well as collect the information for a possible lawsuit.

  • After you request a takedown, check to see if the file has been removed. Additionally, check on the site’s search engine to see that the book hasn’t been uploaded by someone else or by the same person under a new screen name. If your book is not gone in a week, be ready to take further action (http://www.wikihow.com/Combat-Book-Piracy).

  Some other strategies suggested by Stephanie Lawton include:

  • Write your own blog post where you embed the same terms pirates use in posting or searching for an illegal copy of your book, such as your name, title, and publisher. Then, potential pirates may come across your site and think twice about obtaining an illegal copy.

  • Contact Google and Word Press’s parent company, since both will remove illegal content and links to illegal content from their sites (http://stephanielawton.com/2012/06/24/for-writers-steps-to-deal-with-book-piracy).

  Here are several more suggestions shared by Jason Boog on “How to Fight Book Pirates” (http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/how-to-save-your-ebook-from-pirates_b24489):

  • Start a daily Google Alert for your name and the name of your book, since if your book is indexed on a pirate website, the alert will pick up most mentions of your book or your name.

  • Besides saving a list of all the sites where you discover pi
rated copies, so you can later check if the site has removed your material after you have given notice, send a list of all the infringing sites to your publisher. Many publishers seek to defeat the pirates, too, and will help you in the battle.

  • Send a DMCA takedown notice, which is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act form letter. (While you can find a copy of this online, you can also send a notice that includes the basic information that you are the copyright holder, along with your name, address, phone, email address, and a description of the nature and location of the content that infringes on your copyright.)

  Still another suggestion made by one of the commentators on the article is to join an email list dedicated to the fight against pirates and pool your information sources with others, so you can all inundate the Internet host sites with complaints and takedown notices. (http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/how-to-save-your-ebook-from-pirates_b24489)

  And here are a few last suggestions from Pavarti K. Tyler in a post, “Protect Yourself from Book Pirates.” As Tyler points out, a good strategy is to join with other authors who are committed to fighting pirates, such as on Facebook. Another is to become familiar with 17USC 512(c)(3)A, which indicates what should be in a notice of infringement. In addition, you might note the rest of this code at 17USC512, which states that the service provider isn’t liable if unaware of the infringement and acts diligently to warn the infringer, or takes down or removes access to the infringing material after receiving your notice. Also note that 17USC504 outlines the remedies for infringements, which include damages and profits (http://www.novelpublicity.com/2012/08/protect-yourself-from-book-pirates-theyre-more-common-than-you-think-and-theyre-out-to-steal-your-work/).