Internet Book Piracy

by Gini Graham Scott

  In short, a battle against book pirates is finally gathering steam, and writers are increasingly becoming aware of what they can do themselves. While writers may not have the resources individually to launch lawsuits to engage the pirates in hand-to-hand legal combat, at least they can start the process with cease and desist and takedown notices, as well as join with other writers and complain to the relevant authorities—from Google to Word Press to government officials—who might be able to take action. Additionally, by documenting what the pirates have done, and what they haven’t done when asked to cease and desist or take down the infringing book files, writers may be in a position to join a lawsuit undertaken by a group of authors or as a class action. They may also be able to join in the recent efforts by publishers to confront and stop the pirates. Plus, penalties for victimized writers can be in the offing as a result of the prosecution of pirates as criminals by various government agencies, if you have documented evidence of the stolen books online.

  CHAPTER 29

  What You Can Do if a Victim of Piracy

  WHAT CAN YOU DO IF you are a victim of piracy? How can you find out who the pirates are and stop your material from being pirated? How can you get compensation for your pirated material, particularly if the piracy has led to a large amount of lost income?

  There are various steps you can take. You can even hire services to help you find pirated material, and professional takedown services to get your material removed. While the focus here is on pirated books, these methods can help you find other pirated material as well. Following are some key tips:

  1. As a first step, learn who has pirated your books. There are several ways to do this:

  • Put your name in the Google search engine to see what turns up, which is how I found the first site with eighteen of my books on the fourth page of my search, which produced about one hundred thousand results. Put quotation marks around your name to direct the search on your whole name. To focus it even more, put in your name and various modifiers, such as “books,” and try out alternative spellings and combinations of your name, such as your first, middle, and last name and only your first and last name. Then, look through the list of mentions for any sites that are distributing or selling your books where you haven’t given permission. Exclude any legitimate booksellers, such as Barnes and Noble, from the list of likely pirates.

  • Put the name of individual books in the Google search engine to learn where that book is listed. If this is a short title or one with a phrase that might be used in other contexts, such as “Conflict Resolution” or “Resolving Conflict,” put in your full name or last name after that title. Again, search through the listings to look for possible piracy sites, and exclude any legitimate booksellers.

  • Check if your book is listed on any of the popular piracy sites, such as those listed in the resource section, if the site permits a search by your name or the title of your book. If your book is listed, note who uploaded it to be sure it wasn’t you or your publisher, since some sites with pirated copy also have legitimately uploaded copy for sale. If the uploader wasn’t you, your publisher, or a legitimate bookseller, then this could well be a pirated book.

  • Even though you, your publisher, or a legitimate bookseller didn’t upload the book, there is still a possibility that the book is selling there due to a placement by a third-party distributor to whom you or your publisher did give permission, and they are collecting funds for the sale that will then be shared with your publisher or you. If this could be the case, check with any distributors, such as Smashwords or CreateSpace, to learn about their sales affiliates and exclude these sites in your search for Internet pirates.

  • If you are not the publisher, check with your publisher to determine if they have a sales arrangement with this site or a third-party distributor, or if it is a pirated book. Also, for future reference, find out where your publisher or third-party distributors have listed the book, so you will know not to consider a book sold there as pirated.

  • If you have a publisher, ask them if they want to conduct the search for pirated books themselves or work with you to locate these sites.

  2. Create a list of the companies or organizations that are freely distributing or are selling your books. Note their website address and contact information, if available.

  • If the contact information isn’t provided on their site, you might be able to get it by looking at the website WhoIs Record. To find it, put in the name of a WhoIs search service, such as www.whois.domaintools.com or www.internic.net/whois.html, and then the name of the website without the “http://” or www.

  • For example, when I did this for BookOs.org, I found the name of the Registrant organization (Fundation), the country (Panama), and phone number for them. While you may find the company owner has a third-party administrator handling the site, at least this information is a start.

  3. If the website is freely distributing or selling your book without permission, note the number of times it is listed, since on some sites, there may be multiple uploads. If available, note the number of times the book has been read and/or downloaded for each uploaded copy. Also note what the website is charging for reading and/or downloading your book. Sometimes there will be an individual charge, or sometimes users can read and/or download up to a certain number of books for free, after which there is a charge, often stated as a monthly or yearly subscription or donation (e.g., ten downloads for free; up to twenty-five for $9.99; even more for $25 a month).

  4. Print out the homepage of the website, the page or pages with your pirated books, and the site’s “about us,” “contact” information, and “payments” pages. Alternatively, take a screenshot of each page (using the Prt Scr key on your computer; then copy and paste the screenshot into a Word document, which will turn the image into a JPEG). Or do both. Then, save a copy of the posting so you can subsequently prove infringement if there is litigation or law enforcement wants to pursue a copyright infringement case against this website.

  5. Check if the website has a piracy policy on its website about complying with the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) or a form for submitting a notice of copyright infringement, and you can use that. Such a piracy policy or form can be a good sign that the company, which has legitimate books on its site, is trying to avoid piracy when someone else uploads pirated material; or it may be the company’s way of evading a claim of infringement, when it is a repository for a vast number of pirated works. Sometimes you can only know whether this is a pirate site or not by the cumulative reports of piracy victims.

  6. Send the owner of the website and the hosting company a takedown notice, or have your publisher or takedown service do this for you.

  • If you engage in the takedown process yourself, you will commonly receive a return reply that the owner has taken down your material or prevented access to it, as when I got a notice back from support@booksos.org stating simply “removed,” or from info@booksonline.com saying “done.” However, this statement of removal doesn’t mean your books have actually been removed or access has been denied, since after I got the “removed” noticed from Booksos, an associate went there and downloaded one of my books. So go back and check, and if the site hasn’t removed your material, advise them again. Also, keep a record of this correspondence and any noncompliance, which can be useful in the event of a subsequent lawsuit or if a law enforcement agency takes action against that site. In the Booksonline case, when I checked the site five days later, the site itself was gone, suggesting that it might have been subjected to a series of piracy complaints. It’s likely that the owner closed the site, since if it was closed by law enforcement, it would probably have a warning that the site was closed for a copyright law violation. There is a description of what to include in a takedown notice and a sample letter in the Appendix.

  If your book is not self-published, ask if your publisher will send out the takedown notice for you. Also ask if your publisher wants to take other steps to pursue
any damages for infringement, such as filing a lawsuit or reporting the situation to law enforcement authorities. If so, work out arrangements on how to go forward together, such as sharing the costs for any litigation or hiring a takedown service. If not, ask the publisher for permission to take these steps yourself, and often the publisher will agree. You can then proceed as the copyright holder of the work, since normally the rights are only assigned to the publisher; if you do proceed on your own, you will receive any damages owed to you. For example, when I asked AMACOM whether they might want to move forward with me on any claims for the many of my books they published on the Booksos site, the president and publisher said the company would send out a takedown notice, noted that “it’s unfortunate there are sites like this,” and gave me permission to pursue any piracy cases on my own.

  If neither you nor your publisher wants to send out these takedown letters, which could be very time consuming if you have multiple books on multiple sites, you can hire a takedown service, such as DMCA.Com (www.dmca.com) or the Guardlex Takedown Service (www.guardlex.com). The way it works is that you provide the company with your name, company name, email address, URL of your stolen copy, and any URL where it might have been copied from, along with a detailed description of the infringement that took place. Then, the company will send out a notice to the infringer to take down the work from their site. However, with multiple infringements on different sites, this service could become expensive—for example, DMCA.Com charges $199 for one site, and the cost is a little more for a site based internationally. Guardlex charges $64.55 for sending out takedown notices and providing you with reports on up to ten infringing sites.

  7. Report the site and its infringement to websites that share information on piracy problems with other writers (such as Writers Beware (http://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware) or any writers groups you belong to, such as the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

  8. Report the site to the major law enforcement agencies that pursue copyright infringement cases, such as the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx), the National White Collar Crime Center (http://www.nw3c.org), or your local FBI field office (http://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field). Other agencies include the Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency (http://www.ice.gov) and the Homeland Security Investigations Tipline (http://www.ice.gov/tipline). The more tips the law enforcement agencies get from individuals and companies about infringement, the more likely they will be to take some action against it. Additional details are in the Resources and References section.

  9. Notify the major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, that the website has pirated copy. Then, especially if they get a great number of such advisories, the search engines will either lower that site in their rankings or remove it entirely, thereby reducing the potential for losses from users who might read or download your material on that site.

  10. If you feel your damages are sufficiently extensive, contact an intellectual property lawyer about pursuing litigation. In many cases, as occurred in the John Wiley case, a lawyer may be able to obtain a settlement by simply writing a letter with a settlement offer and negotiating with that offender rather than having to file suit. Or the lawyer might engage in a negotiation after filing a suit listing that defendant or multiple John Does, without further pursuing the suit in court. For example, in the John Wiley case, the average settlement was $750 per defendant, and in other cases, such as when the RIAA sued twenty thousand defendants, the average settlement was $3,000 to $7,000. To find a lawyer, look for lawyers handling intellectual property cases in your area. Use a search engine and input “intellectual property lawyers” or “intellectual property law firms” and the name of your city, or go to a “find a lawyer” site, such as www.findlaw.com or www.martindale.com, and put in your preferred type of lawyer and your city, such as I did in looking for a lawyer in San Francisco (http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/firm/intellectual-property-law/san-francisco/california).

  11. You can also take some steps to prevent piracy before it happens, although there are no guarantees, such as putting up an FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal on your website. Doing so is like putting up a warning sign in your neighborhood to alert would-be burglars and home invasion robbers that your home is protected by video cams, an alarm system that goes to your local police station, or a neighborhood watch group. But while a warning might deter many burglars and robbers, others may still seek to get into your house and do so successfully. Likewise, your efforts to warn book pirates might discourage many pirates. And at least you can use your anti-piracy efforts to support your case if you hire a private lawyer, or if the government agencies go after the pirates as criminals in your case. If you do want to put up the FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal, you can download it from an FBI download site to warn potential pirates that your book is subject to protection under the US Criminal Code provisions, which makes the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work illegal (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/download-the-fbis-anti-piracy-warning-seal). In addition, for further protection, you can register your copyright with the US government Copyright Office (http://www.copyright.gov), which you can do online through the eCO online system (http://www.copyright.gov/eco)

  Then, good luck. Your efforts should at least get your pirated books taken down from these sites. And if you go the legal or law enforcement route, you might get damages, too, and/or the satisfaction of seeing the pirate site taken down and the pirates arrested, convicted, and sent to prison.

  CONCLUSION

  What’s Next?

  AS THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS HAVE illustrated, book piracy is a billion-dollar industry affecting millions of books and millions of writers and publishers. There are hundreds if not thousands of websites with pirated material, and complicating the problem is that many sites include both pirated and legitimately uploaded books, with many of the infringing books uploaded by users of the site. Often these pirated books are available for free or for a subscription price for downloading multiple books, with any payments to the site owner, not the writer or publisher, who are potentially losing thousands of dollars on individual titles.

  The piracy problem has been further exacerbated by the widespread popularity of ebooks, which are available in electronic files or as PDFs that can easily be downloaded, so a single uploaded copy can result in hundreds or thousands or even more downloaded books. Meanwhile, writers and publishers have little control over the process, since it can be hard to know where one’s books are spreading. And many writers, suffering from reduced incomes due to piracy, may decide to stop writing, while their publishers may stop offering them book contracts due to reduced sales.

  While there have been some efforts to go after the Internet pirates through private litigation—and over a dozen federal law enforcement agencies, as well as some state and international organizations, have made arrests resulting in some pirates going to prison—for the most part, book piracy has been ignored. Rather, almost all of these cases have involved music, film, and software piracy, spearheaded by industry groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and big software companies like Adobe and Microsoft. But apart from some recent litigation from Wiley to target and work out settlements with the uploaders and downloaders of a few Dummies series books and a new Simon & Schuster database to collect information on pirated books, writers and publishers have remained largely on the sidelines, and law enforcement has not pursued book piracy cases.

  Perhaps a reason for the limited involvement of the publishing industry is that millions of writers have self-published books or books with small and medium-sized publishers who don’t have the necessary resources to fight back. Also, writers and publishers are likely unaware of the many law enforcement agencies that are now targeting the Internet pirates, since most of the arrests, prosecutions, and prison sentences receive little publicity, aside from a bi
g case like the Megaupload seizure and Kim Dotcom arrest. Thus, for the most part, if the writers and publishers take any action, it is to send out a takedown notice and hope for the best. However, their books may appear on so many sites or are repeatedly uploaded to an infringing site, so this whack-a-mole strategy may seem like a losing effort.

  Thus, given the vast scope of the book piracy problem, the limited efforts to combat it so far, and the emergence of many law enforcement agencies making intellectual property piracy a priority, there is a need for book writers and publishers to actively fight back against the pirates. To this end, the following actions are proposed:

  1. Writers and publishers need to more actively identify instances of book piracy and notify the site owners, website service providers, and search engines of the infringement in order to get their pirated material removed and the sites identified, so appropriate actions can be taken against them. Such actions might range from reducing their site rankings and removing their sites from search engines to targeting them for litigation or criminal charges.

  2. Writers and publishers need to become more organized in combating the pirates, much like the film and recording industries joining together through the MPAA and RIAA to pursue civil litigation and assist the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in pursuing piracy as a crime. Entering information about pirated books into the Simon & Schuster database might certainly help. But this piracy fight should not be led by just one company. Instead, there is a need for an organization that represents the industry as a whole to take up the fight. Such an organization might already exist, such as the American Booksellers Association, or a new organization might be formed, consisting of writers, booksellers, and all types of publishers, from the small independents to large mainstream publishers.