I think another important thing to remember is that it's the author's (or publisher's) responsibility to protect their copyright, not the seller/distributor. If one author proves their copyright and the book is taken down, no bookseller is required to take down all the other alleged violations by the same person. Those allegations have to be proven by the those authors. I'm no fan of Amazon, but every company of any size has to develop procedures that are both legal and efficient for the volume involved. Satisfying both usually means efficiency comes second, and efficient does not always equate to speedy. It really doesn't matter one whit how we think things should work, or how we want them to work - the matter at hand is how it does work and how to navigate that.
Yep. Having a protocol in place makes it more efficient for both sides, and helps protect against abusive take down requests as well, which are a problem. When I need to deal with this for a client, the first thing I do is look to see if the site has an established procedure for take downs, and if they do I follow it. My clients are paying for a result, and they're paying by the hour so it would be unprofessional (and unethical) for me to spend a bunch of time doing things other than what I know I'm supposed to do, and then lamenting that they didn't work. If I use the established process and the company isn't cooperative, then it is time to start looking at alternatives. But knowing how to deal with these things and not wasting time trying to deal with them in ways that aren't going to make a difference is important.
I can understand Amazon not acting on review comments, but if the discussion on the site is valid, at least 3 authors have now contacted Amazon with individual charges of copyright infringement. And it took only a few minutes for us to see that JB had stolen books for sale. So I just don't buy your argument that relies on hypotheticals that don't appear to apply in this case, even from a legal standpoint. Digital Millennium Copyright Act How does that differ for Kindle Books? This willingness to let Amazon off the hook disturbs me. I understand you and Steerpike believe your position is based on the law rather than on 'justice' and/or you believe your position is simply being fair to Amazon. I can only state my own point of view because I am not willing to adopt yours. Amazon is putting inadequate resources into solving this problem by choice. They likely have very little economic cost to allowing the plagiarism to remain for sale. Unless there is political and/or economic pressure to address the problem they will not act. The more I surf the bigger the problem appears to be. Gosh, I have to take a break but I promise to post more of what I'm finding after I spend some time earning money and writing more chapters.
You don't have much experience with these issues, or with fake take down requests, I presume. That's fine. But I don't think your approach is all that reasonable, and it's certainly not going to be effective with most marketplaces.
Sounds like they were selling software which allowed piracy - quite different than having books up for sale and then being notified they were plagiarized and taking them down. You're mixing apples and oranges. I don't see anyone letting Amazon off the hook. We're looking at it objectively, not distorting it with our personal like/dislike of the company. (I won't buy anything from Amazon, fwiw.) Ranting about Amazon's policies won't help the OP (or anyone else) get the books taken down.
Ah yes, the ad hom debate point: if I disagree with you I must be poorly informed. It may be you think Amazon is putting forth a great effort, all they can given the reality of the situation, and you may very well believe I just don't have a clue yadda yadda... That's one way to talk past my actual position, Amazon is putting inadequate resources into solving this problem by choice. Here again is what I said, with a bit more explanation: Amazon is putting inadequate resources into solving this problem by choice. - This does not address what Amazon's current policy is, it addresses their valuation of addressing the problem. You are addressing their current policy and saying you believe it is adequate. They likely have very little economic cost to allowing the plagiarism to remain for sale. - I haven't read anything that says you are arguing with this point. Unless there is political and/or economic pressure to address the problem they will not act. -If you believe Amazon has no greater responsibility to address plagiarized books than they are already exercising, then you will not care about pushing for a better response from Amazon. And this is where we differ.
I am looking further into the legal aspects but the ruling affected copyrighted material, it did not address only specific kinds of copyrighted material that I can see. But I don't claim at this point any certainty as to how the Act applies to Kindle Books. I am, however finding a whole world of information out there which is taking some time to digest as I've said. Quite the pile of stereotypical attributions you've applied to me here that are not accurate. Can you find anywhere I've posted anything about boycotting Amazon? Does taking the position it will take some political pressure to get Amazon to take this seriously only suggest to you the limited 'ranting and boycotting' avenue for action? If the problem is wholesale lifting of material and selling it as one's own, with no consequences other than being stopped and having to set up the scam again under a new name concerns me, can you think of no other problem than one author's outrage? If you have little respect for my insight here, try someone else's: Are eBooks the new Content Farms? While the discussion is about a side topic (you can read about that on the site), the problems apply to plagiarized books as well. There is the potential to have a Tragedy of the Commons outcome here. If stealing your books becomes easier and easier, think people won't just resale your books right off their Kindles? Why take from Wordpress when you can buy a $3 book and re-list it as your own? Amazon can put all the onus on the Indie author, and they can make excuses of 'impracticality' of other options. But Amazon has the power to address the problem while the Indie authors do not, except the power to pressure Amazon, that is. Here are the suggested solutions from the above blogger: That doesn't suggest poor little Amazon is impotent to me. It suggests they have not taken actions they are perfectly capable of taking.
Can you find anywhere that I said you posted anything about boycotting Amazon? Perhaps I'm not the only one who may have problems with inaccurate attributions... At any rate, as I did state, rants and complaints about how things are currently done is not helping the OP. Explanations of how to work within their system do.
I'm sorry but I am sensitive because I get sick of hearing it. I think it was reasonable to believe you were saying this to me directly: Just like Steerpike assumed: I have some strong personal views about corporate social responsibility. That doesn't mean I'm a socialist, or an anti-capitalist. It doesn't mean I'm a flakey idealist, it doesn't mean I'm uninformed or naive. The minute I post anything remotely progressive, all the stereotyped attributes come out. It gets very tiring. But I will take your clarification as saying you didn't mean what you said to apply to me personally. You don't think this expanded discussion is on topic? The more I read about how widespread this problem is and the exponential growth of the problem that appears to be occurring suggests a single author getting a single stolen work taken down from Amazon won't even amount to a drop in the bucket.
GC - If you want to open a discussion about how people can force Amazon to handle take downs differently, feel free. But the OP opened this thread asking for advice on a specific problem. Going on and on about how Amazon is the bad guy and then attacking those who try to point out the flaws in your arguments just causes that advice to be lost in the shuffle - and it's advice that could help more than just the OP.
Are you speaking for everyone, shadowwalker? I was under the impression some people were interested in what I was finding out and posting about.
I never presume to speak for others. As to who is interested in what people are saying, the responses I believe speak for themselves.
Then I'll carry on. I have received a couple PMs confirming an interest in addition to a couple comments in the thread.
I have to wonder why we're all trying to debate this objectively, instead of trying to work together strategically? Is it wrong for me to believe that I find it appalling we're not trying to do something about this as a whole? Shouldn't we all be contacting Amazon, or something, in order to attempt to right this wrong? Considering Op's a fellow forum member? Or are we going to sit back and just 'talk' about it? GC, regardless of flaws in your argument, I commend you for trying to be proactive as fuck about the whole thing. I wonder what would happen if we approached this systematically? I wonder what would happen if we had a good % of this community contact Amazon at once? Or at least flood them with complaints about the offense?
My apologies if I've missed it - has anyone whose copyright has been violated with a Kindle book served Amazon with a full, proper DMCA takedown notice? As I understand it, that's the appropriate law enforcement mechanism. I'm not saying that it's all fine and dandy that someone can steal your work and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to fix it, but I am curious as to whether the bunch of paperwork has been tried, and if it's been successful.
Flaws in my argument? Hah! I am not sure yet what the best course of action is. The more squeaky wheels the better, so IMO, no letter, email, or contact going to Amazon is a wasted effort. However, I've found news articles and multiple complaints directly to Amazon going back at least to 2011. One thing is certain, only the "platforms" (aka Amazon) have the ability to address any of this on the scale needed. I have more investigating to do.
Still haven't gotten an answer back from Amazon. So... I guess my letter sucked? I don't know. I'm not really mad about it anymore because I know that anyone that is going to look into buying the story is going to read the reviews and all of the reviews link to the story being free somewhere else. If they ignore that and still give her money, they are just wasting their own money. Also, I DID post it for free (without a copyright... although I'm beginning to wonder if THAT would make this any easier), so there's an element of knowing stuff like this could potentially happen when I do post it. But the reason I wanted to do that in the first place is I wanted feedback of some sort. Something I've been recently doing is going to meetup groups in the Houston area. And I got the opportunity to show off another chapter of another story I'm doing in the same "universe" as this one. And I got some really helpful advice on ways to improve grammar. I'm really bad about using "could have been", "should have been" and stuff like that. There were a lot of places where I needed to show rather than tell. Some places where my descriptions could be better (I'll probably be asking for help on that when I get the time to work on my story again). But they also were very complimentary on how the plot flowed, things made sense that I wanted to make sense and was very interesting. I had one person wondering if I was going to turn this into a book. Makes me think that I should go back to this story, change a few things, maybe make it a little longer by adding in a few twists... and then I could try submitting it somewhere.
Here's the latest post from the Amazon discussion: Which is good because getting mad serves no purpose except to damage your body from stress hormones. Contrary to everyone thinking I'm somehow outraged at Amazon, I'm not. Realistically nothing is going to change unless people are motivated to act. One does not need outrage to be motivated. My concern is the wholesale nature of this theft and the potential it has to ruin my chance to have a platform to sell my book should no publisher pick it up.
It may take some time before they reply. When did you send it? Hopefully Bethany Hatheway's lawyer has some luck. I'll be following this thread closely for any updates.
A mass of protest letters doesn't mean proof of plagiarism. And only the OP has any standing in the matter anyway, as the OP is the copyright holder. One week, actually, if the date on the thread is correct.
[MENTION=11825]agentkirb[/MENTION]: Seriously, if you want to be an artist, you have to get patient about these things. I had my photos and stories stolen a number of times, and every time it took my complaint to get things moving, and even then, it would take few weeks and even months. The duration means nothing. You just need to live trough this now, next time, it'll be a matter of routine. As long as there are artists, there'll be art thieves. Luckily, today, pretty much a 100% of the cases are won by artists and thieves aren't as successful as they used to be. Everything will work out in the end, don't worry.
That's not what was said. However, your response does illustrate a point, which is that you're not interested in discussion or an issue or listening to what other people have to say. That's evidenced from a number of threads on the site. This kind of response is a perfect example of your usual approach to discussion. Of course, this is the internet, so I don't expect more generally, however I'd much rather discuss with people who listen and think about what is being said by those who disagree with them, rather than those who are just in a hurry to make their next point and/or to become defensive when disagreed with.
You didn't post it without copyright - you had the copyright as soon as you created the work in tangible form. As for your letter, it doesn't have to be anything special, but it should follow the requirements that Amazon has for such notices. If you're not getting any response from them, follow up with a second letter (by email and mail), and you might consider copying their general counsel (David Zapolsky). You might also send the hard copy of the second notice with proof of delivery. If you haven't filed a registration for the copyright yet, file it and attach a copy of your application to the letters. If you still can't get any result, you might consider having an attorney send a letter, if it is worth spending a couple hundred bucks to do it.
Absolutely true. Also true, but your prior statement actually answers your own argument. As long as there no economic incentive to do so, Amazon will not change their policies. As for political pressure, given the diverse nature of Amazon's markets, I see that as highly unlikely. And I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who has organized for advocacy before. However, if the problem is actually as widespread as it appears to be, then individual writers invoking the procedures that are already in place and being persistent will at some point rise to whatever critical mass is needed to spur Amazon to a higher level of attention. If you want to continue this more general discussion, then perhaps a spinoff thread might be the best idea. I think the OP was asking for specific advice for his specific situation, and I think [MENTION=18889]Steerpike[/MENTION] has provided that. I also think this thread serves as a "heads up" for anyone considering electronic publication.
