The Glamor!

[rolanni]

So what I’m doing this afternoon instead of writing is putting together a DMCA take-down notice for seventeen novels and stories written by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller which have been scanned and made available for electronic download in violation of my copyright.

For each of those seventeen violations I have to tell the site owner:

1.  The exact title of the work infringed upon

2.  The exact URL of the infringing work

3.  The exact URL of a legitimate electronic copy of the work

Gosh, this is fun!

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[nephir.livejournal.com]

It sucks that someone did this to you and Steve. Sorry you have to take the time out of writing more good stuff to take care of the bad.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

Looks like you need a nice document with all your titles and copyrighted URLs, to which you can add offending URLS.

Cut and paste is ever so much easier.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

No, what I need is for people to stop stealing sh*t.

ARGH.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well we need the government to stop being populated by idiots, and businesses to start conducting themselves honestly and with some regard for the environment and the health and safety of customers, too. I suspect that these events will happen almost simultaneously with the end of stealing.

[herbmcsidhe.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I love eBooks, I own a bunch of them - but that's the operative word: own, as in purchased.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hope they're cooperative rather than getting all 'omg information wants to be free lol' on you! Have they even read the books? I can't imagine any of your protagonists supporting copyright violation.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

This is true. I expect that violating copyright would be a hell of a breach of melant'i, and will require strict balancing.

[amm-me.livejournal.com]

"3. The exact URL of a legitimate electronic copy of the work"

????

Yes, I know that most of your work is available, legitimately, electronically. But not all the chapbook stories, right? So what does the DMCA expect you to do if somebody has scanned such a work? Leave it up because there's no non-deed-tree alternative? That can't be right.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I lucked out -- one work was not available electronically, but! it is available for sale in paper from SRM Publisher, so I pointed to the catalog page as proof of copyright and asserted that I/we own the electronic rights to the work.

*.rar file type

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Sharon,

In case no one else has responded, *.rar files are a Win version of *.zip. Supposedly, you can open them with WinZip, which as a Linux user you may not have available. I have no idea whether the UnZip in Linux will do the trick or not. Google will point you to more info than you want, I'm sure.

Cheers,
Jack

[hapaxnym.livejournal.com]

It astonishes me that authors have to be their own private investigator, policeman, and prosecutor on this issue.

In my melant'i as a librarian, I actually am a Copyright Cop, and I have to continually point out that no, it is NOT okay to copy library CDs to your iTunes, print out Disney images for your party invitations, or photocopy entire books that you don't feel like purchasing.

Unfortunately, half the time I am pointing this out to my colleagues. :-(

[mardott.livejournal.com]

Grrrrr. This stinks. I'm sorry you have to deal with it, but I hope you get 'em, good!

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

I used to process these for LiveJournal, so if you have any questions about the process, let me know! If the books haven't gone away within 10 business days, it means that the other end isn't doing their job under the law, and you can go to their upstream provider (I will happily help with that -- it's a bit more complex than a comment can cover!)

You've probably already done the notification, but two things for the future, in case you don't know:

1. If all of the infringing content is on the same service, you can give 'em one letter with all the infringing URLs -- you don't have to do 17 separate notifications.

2. Your work doesn't have to be uploaded to the internet for the "location of original work" -- the law just says "reasonable information to locate the work being infringed upon". So, a US copyright registration number would work, as would the name of the work + the date of copyright + a link to Amazon, or anything that points at something that shows that you're the owner. Providing the URL is for things that are already uploaded to the internet and don't necessarily have a copyright registration number (since things are copyrighted the moment they're fixed in tangible form, whether they're registered or not).

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

...question coming in email.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

The exact URL of a legitimate electronic copy of the work?

Why? Do these nitwits think that if you've chosen not to exercise your electronic rights, that makes it okay for them to steal from you?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

In a word, yes. Well, I don't know about those particular nitwits, but I have seen that opinion expressed by a number of people. "It's not sold as an MP3 so I am free to rip it and distribute it as I wish." The same before that with paper books, if one is out of print then some people felt that it 'should' be copied and sold themselves. For that matter it's not a million miles away from Google's attitude to books, and their statements can be construed as encouraging it ("no, we aren't a monopoly, because anyone can scan books like we do").

Balance

[rcartwr.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could publish the offending web site and your paying fans can go and complain on the site about their boorish behavior, as the Chicago pols would say "early and often" Any runup of his hosting fees and overflow of his email from the increased traffic would be...unfourtunate.