I'm being plagiarized... advice?

Discussion in 'Self-Publishing' started by agentkirb, Jul 24, 2013.

  1. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    You have the copyright as soon as you create the work and set it down in a tangible medium (like on paper, disk, etc). But there are benefits of registering the copyright, and that's pretty easy to do. You can do it all online through the copyright office. It won't help you with this particular person, other than filing could get you in the door to a lawsuit if you were to bring one, but could benefit you for future infringements.
     
  2. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    The thing I find most worrisome is my idea of plagiarizing was one person lifting material from another. This looks like a wholesale theft scheme. Taking zip files made by scammers from the online posting sites, probably use some software ap to change a few names including the fake author's, it's like robo calls and spam. It doesn't cost these guys much of anything. All they need do, if it goes unchecked like it appears to be, is cut paste post and collect money. Get shut down, cut past post again.

    How much money could spammers and robocallers actually be making? I look at my spam folder that every day gets ~50 penis enlargement spams, ~20 get-money spams and a half dozen misc. ads that I think no one in their right minds would ever answer. I literally get 10 or more robocalls a day (yes I'm on the do not call list, it has become useless), and it's the same recordings over and over. These have to be costing the senders almost nothing to send, because the return on investment must be a fraction of a fraction. Did someone set up all those penis enhancement spams as a joke? I'm pretty sure they make money off of HUGE volumes. (Didn't mean that as a pun :p )

    Seeing that same money making model show up with plagiarized work, the flood gates look like they are opening.

    I don't think I'm paranoid.

    I haven't posted anything online except my one story in the short story contest and I plan to submit that after a little more editing to HuffPo. I just want the publicity if I get it published. So I'm not so much worried about any personal risk. But I do hate to see the spammer vultures moving wholesale into the plagiarizing market.
     
  3. agentkirb

    agentkirb New Member

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    But this story arch probably ends with Amazon and other websites making it harder on those people to do what they do. I don't know what they would do to make it harder, perhaps they would do some kind of check on new authors wanting to sell books online. But if this became as popular as spam, Amazon loses out because no one would trust purchases anymore if every other story they buy is stolen.

    But yeah, I'm going to do the copyright thing... if anything it makes it look more professional. And I'm about to have my own website, so I could put my stuff on there as well.
     
  4. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    24 hours, no action by Amazon yet.

    I see more people posted complaints and one started a forum discussion. I replied. :)
     
  5. peachalulu

    peachalulu Member Reviewer Contributor

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    Yeah, they're not really on the ball are they. A little scary to think they wouldn't just even put a freeze on the sales until things were
    worked out.
     
  6. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    Depends on whether the request was submitted by email. If by regular mail, they may not have it yet. Many sites won't do anything until they receive a submission from the copyright owner through their established procedure.
     
  7. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    I find that excuse pitiful. Come on, the person has 11 documented plagiarized pieces for sale. If Amazon is waiting for a formal complaint then they obviously don't care.
     
  8. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I disagree. If they have a formal procedure in place, they should follow it and so should authors. They need to follow it, internally, for their own protection.

    Of course, they're in a no-win situation on things like this. People already post fake reviews of other authors to try to build up their own work. Next thing that will happen (and probably already has happened) is people will submit false take down notices to try to get a competitor's work taken down. When that happens, people will be saying "Oh my god, don't they take the time to verify this before they take stuff down?"

    Amazon is actually pretty fast if you follow their process. As many take down requests as they get, it doesn't make sense to assume that their legal department is going to drop everything to focus on just one, no matter what the circumstances. And in my experience, if the complaint came through other than the established channels, it gets lower priority. The best thing agentkirb can do, if he hasn't already, is send a copy of his letter to the email address provided.
     
  9. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    I will try to keep an open mind, Steerpike. I'd like to think some corporations have a business plan that includes a conscience*.



    *Before I get a reply that claims the "fiduciary duty to the shareholders" myth, there is no such law and some corporations, though rare, have actually adopted a "responsibility to the stakeholders (which includes the community)" business model.
     
  10. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    A conscience goes both ways. I can think of legal claims to bring if a client were damaged by having something erroneously taken down. And I'd ask Amazon if they had a procedure for reviewing these request and whether they followed it. If they didn't, I would surely make something of that fact :)
     
  11. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Not buying it (also see my edit). You can bet that their contract with sellers, if it absolves them of liability for copyright infringement, also absolves them of financial damages for shutting down sales. They only need a reasonable policy and a human being looking at the evidence, not some technical attorney proof policy.

    I would think they had a tad more paranoia about copyright infringement than seller financial losses.
     
  12. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I should add - the process is extremely easy to follow, and in my experience Amazon.com is good about taking stuff down once they review a request and see that it is valid. If I were Amazon's counsel, I'd tell them to follow the established process, and I'm as against copyright infringement as anyone here.
     
  13. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    No, they don't. Regardless of what their agreement says, there are always ways attorneys can attack those provisions if a company has an established procedure and doesn't follow it. Faking a takedown request is simple to do, and it wouldn't be hard to make it look very convincing at first glance. They'd be irresponsible not to give them some scrutiny.
     
  14. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Do you have a link to their process? I believe they have one. I believe the worker bees follow it. I'm just not convinced it requires the technicality to act on that you are proposing.

    If I could see the policy, I'd be convinced. But if I were to write that policy (and I do write policies for businesses), I'd have a temporary suspension of sales step in the SOP when some basic evidence came to their attention until it could be investigated more thoroughly.
     
  15. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I think it was linked earlier in the thread. From a practical standpoint, companies follow them. I know for a fact that some companies won't even look at a request unless it is submitted in accordance with the policy. I don't know whether Amazon does that or not. A temporary suspension of sales before you review a request doesn't make sense to me when fake requests would be so easy to submit. You could just keep submitting them and keep getting the honest authors work shut down if they had such an automatic response.

    As authors, we'd all like to see things taken down the instant we submit a request, but with a company the size of Amazon, and as many requests as they get, that's just not realistic. I've seen stuff come down within a day or two, and that's pretty fast. I suspect they'll end up taking this down as well.
     
  16. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Out of curiosity, I left their legal department a voicemail question, did they act if someone other than the original author brought plagiarism to their attention if it involved obvious fraud such as 11 different stolen books for sale by one fake author?

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_14061711_claimcopyright?nodeId=201140760

     
  17. agentkirb

    agentkirb New Member

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    Eh, to be honest, the damage has already been done. I don't think people blind buy things on amazon.com without reading the reviews, and all the reviews say it was stolen with a link to the original. At the very least they aren't going to pay for a book they can read for free somewhere else.
     
  18. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    Yes, [MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION], that's their policy. As you can see, it has certain affirmations required by the copyright owner. That's once reason many sites won't take down without it. I understand the impulse to look at it strictly as an author, but Amazon has multiple considerations: 1) following their own established processes, which is legitimate in my view; 2) making sure infringing works are removed; and 3) making sure false claims are identified as such.

    Again, they do a pretty good job. Not all sites do. Their process is a good balance of these interests.
     
  19. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I don't think anyone else is going to buy them either, with those reviews there.
     
  20. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    But you are just asserting it is. You haven't posted a link to the policy have you? Nigel on Chat didn't say, only the original author can request an action. And the legal department has yet to call back.
     
  21. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Not true, at least in the USA. It could have been stolen before the first online appearance, or earlier online appearances could have been lost.
    That also is not proof. The US copyright office doesn't recognize any variation of :the poor man's copyright" as proof of ownership.

    Your best evidence, short of registering every first draft (generally impractical and potentially expensive), is to keep all your notes and drafts throughout the writing process. In the US you only need to register copyright before initiating copyright infringement litigation. However, a publisher will generally register on your behalf when your piece is accepted for publication.
     
  22. thewordsmith

    thewordsmith Contributor Contributor

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    From the IP standpoint, you have suffered damages in that this person's theft of your work has diminished its marketability. Furthermore, it would seem you are not the only one to be victimized by this person and so there is evidence of premeditation - a serial plagiarist, if you will. So, if you can contact the other parties victimized by the plagiarist, you have the possibility of a class action suit against the thief. If you can interest an IP attorney in handling the class action suit for the collectively damaged writers, he or she can agree to a percentage of any award. Also, bear in mind, this "woman" may be nothing more than a front name for a con game and may be the work of more than one person.

    Depending upon the state where the suit is initiated, the damages in such a case can go well beyond the cover price of the novels in question (not to mention, if you can "facilitate" media interest it could raise your profile as a writer and elevate your marketability for future works.)

    As a first stage assault, the person should be slapped with a C & D and a restraining order to force him/her to remove any copies of alleged plagiarized work from anywhere they may have posted. Secondly, all monies or gains made by the fraudulent posting of the alleged plagiarized works would be frozen, and an order should be put forth requiring the person to provide a financial record showing the amounts received, this verified by whatever website middleman-controlled those funds.

    After that, it would likely have to go into a physical courtroom and before a judge for further adjudication to determine whether the evidence provided by the injured parties is sufficient to uphold the allegations. Lastly, and here comes the good part, the judge (or possibly jury) gets to make a determination of damages as well as the punishment for the thief. Granted, the person or persons involved may not have enough to cover the damages award but, in some cases, even if they are given prison terms, a judge can freeze all of their assets, including real property, which can be sold to recover damages. And in cases where there is evidence of a continuous and repeated offense - in this case multiple plagiarized documents - it is not really unusual for a judge to take such drastic punitive action.

    So, as you see, there are a lot of possibilities in a case like this. But, it's difficult to obtain repayment if you don't take action.

    [As a post script, I was once, quite nastily, accused of plagiarizing someone else's work. A poster on another forum harangued me for quite some time about the fact that I was posting someone else's work as my own and they threatened to contact the true author of the work if I did not delete my posts carrying that person's work. I was also informed that the true author of the work was a far better writer than I could ever hope to be. Without verifying the veracity of the accusations, the forum removed my posts. Now, the funny thing about this was that, the 'true author' of the work was actually me. I had posted the work, a short story, under a pseudonym a few years previous but had forgotten about it until this amusing reminder. Obviously, however, in your case, it's a good thing readers and writers on the net are so diligent. In my case, it was just funny but I was still glad the person thought enough to attempt to defend the 'true author'.]
     
  23. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    An interesting related case:

    Contributory Liability Claim Against Amazon Based on Third-Party Photo Sales Survives
     
  24. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I think there is a lot left to do before you start going down this path. It's easy to allege diminished marketability, but it seems to me the fact the work was already online for free could impact that claim. Also, just alleging it isn't going to be sufficient - you need to have some evidence to support a claim for whatever amount of damages you're seeking. A copyright infringement case that goes all the way through trial can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one is going to take this on a contigency fee basis, based on the facts we know right now. And even if you could come up with sufficient damages to justify it, which I doubt, what do you know about the defendant. For all you know it could be someone sitting in a living room somewhere who could never pay a judgment in a million years.

    Agentkirb is already doing the best thing he can do, which is to attempt to get the works taken down. I don't see much chance of it going a lot further against this particular defendant, unless agentkirb wants to finance an infringement suit himself. If Amazon refuses to take it down and you had a potential claim against them, you might get more interest.
     
  25. Uberwatch

    Uberwatch Active Member

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    I'm just shocked one person is stealing all those stories and trying to make a profit out of it. I think Amazon needs to check for possible plagiarism before having these books up for sale.
     

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