I've been getting 3-5 google alerts for this site each day for a couple months, and it's starting to bug me! d.hatena.ne.jp I assume it's some sort of... something... posting results about places that are pirating my books? Does that sound right? @NoGoodNobu, I think the text is Japanese? But I don't really understand what the site is from a technical sense... I don't really worry about piracy too much, generally... I just try not to think about it. But it's kind of hard not to think about it when I get 3-5 alerts per day! I don't want to shut down my alerts since sometimes I get valuable information that way, but this is aggravating! Anyone have an explanation?
Its a blog site - if you use the google translate tool to translate the whole site you get this ( thumb nailed them cos they are huge)
But what's a blog site? Like, each of those entries is a post from a different person's blog, and one or more of those people is the pirate?
Yeah its a collection of blogs , like blogger only different in that it displays them all on a master page..... somewhere in there someone may be using your swords, or quoting them or something..... i'd be inclined to file it under lifes to short.... even if someone is violating your copyright do you feel like trying to take a case to a japanese court
I don't have a google alert set up for every word in my books! Come on, guys. It's the titles and my author name. The bits I can read on the alert notification are enough to show that it's referring to my books and give strong hints that it's piracy. I just can't find the original sources of what's showing up on my alerts.
Back before MicroHorror shut down, there was someone who was copying and pasting my stories into posts on a Persian-language students' forum. I figured since I wasn't getting paid by MicroHorror, and they were attributing my name, it was just audience building, but then, that’s only hobby flash stuff...
I'm not sure BayView needs advice and information on piracy... she's pretty well acquainted with it, as a published author.
If you know which titles you could use the search bar to find them within the site - with google translate switched on you can type them in in English. I tried your author name but its giving a nil result (I couldn't remember all your pseudonyms) A search for male/male romance was a nul A search for gay romance was a nul A search for romance gave 8 results none of which appeared to relate to your books Probably the best thing is to search the specific titles mentioned in the alerts (search box is at top left)
Are you trying to find the specific pages? You can do that by searching the website address and then your pen name in Google and seeing what it comes up with. The pages are all behind a login but you can get to the content through checking the 'cached' link. Like this one, found using Kate Sherwood From the looks of it, it's got a lot of e-books for free download from some Russian site on there. They're probably just straight pirate links, but I wouldn't click any in case there's some virus shit hiding in there too.
So you do - some of them look to be from an Indian site too. I'd definitely concur about not clicking them - especially not with that ransom ware attack currently on going and thought to originate from russian servers
Yeah, Hatena diary is a blog hosting site, with free or premium membership. I clicked on some of the blogs, and it looks like some of the blogs have links to other pages or books, and then post some extracts with essay level citations (Chapter 1, Pages 175-177, the author Smith in. . . et cetera) that they use to back up their point or to discuss the sources in some way. I'm not sure if that's what someone might've done with yours, or if somewhere deeper in there there's someone posting your work as their own or for free or whatever. Also, forewarned: my Japanese is fairly basic—we just use household phrases or sentences with English embedded in, and my Kanji is abysmal. I only really read manga, which often has furigana for the kanji and the characters all speak the most casual or informal levels of the language. Edit: Ah. Someone else found people are posting pirates of your book on the site. That sucks.
I wish I could just shut the alerts off for piracy but keep them for reviews and the rest. I get pirated all the time, and it's annoying, but I can more or less ignore it... at least when I'm not getting daily reminders of it in my inbox. Oh well. Thanks for helping me confirm my suspicions, guys.
You can't shut the alerts off for piracy, but it looks like you can shut off alerts for that site. If I'm reading this answer right, if you change the alert to contain: -site:d.hatena.ne.jp It won't give you alerts for that site any more.
Can you not block alerts for that web address using -site: (edit Nige types faster than I do ... great minds and all that)