Piracy of E-books

[Baker]

Hmm. Can't remember where I came across it, but I read about a company in the USA whose only business is prosecuting people who pirate stuff. Their MO is to collect IP addresses and threaten to sue the person who used the IP at the time of the download. Yes, they do this to individuals. It turns out to be a nice little earner for them, because most people find it cheaper and less hassle to immediately settle than go through the courts. I don't think anyone has jumped on this bandwagon for ebooks yet.

[PaulaO]

RCE sent out a notice of a site with several pirated books listed for free download. It is not a torrent site but looks to be more of a "hey I found these and want to share them". They list the writers as "bards" and categorize the books according to Xena, uber, etc.

pdafiction.com

It could be mostly books/short stories from various postings online and claims to have the author's bard's permission. Several RCE author's are saying they did not. The only name from here I saw is Sandra Barrett's.

Just another site to keep an eye on.

[grewgirl]

pdafiction.com hasn't been updated in years. Everything there is or was previously posted online at The Royal Academy of Bards, Xenafiction.net, or other fanfiction sites. Some of the authors/bards have removed their works as they've gotten published, but many have probably forgotten. The woman who maintains the site will remove anything at the authors request, though.

Having downloaded stories from this site, I can tell you that they are all exact replicas of what the authors posted online. They're unedited, rough works and many are full of copyrighted characters (Xena, Captain Janeway, Borg, etc).

It's my thought that if you publish a story on a webiste (for free) you really can't get upset if it migrates to another site since that is the nature of the Internet.

There are a few rough versions of books that have gone on to be published - KG MacGregor's books, Radclyffe has a few there, Ali Vali, Kim Baldwin, Lynn Ames, TJ Vertigo, RJ Nolan. Vali and a few others have had them removed upon publication, though, which tells me that finding the online versions of your works is the authors responsibility.

[PaulaO]

Yes, I recognized several of the titles from being online. I was just giving a heads up. Thank you for the update.

I did notice that several of the author's links led to File 404 pages.

[sbarret]

Yep all of my stuff appeared online years ago and I think they even asked me before copying to their site.

[grewgirl]

And on another note...I've been sitting here trying to compare prices for eBooks that I want to read. The Internet is not helping. I type in the author name and ebook and I the first page of hits on Google is all pirate sites.

I know I could just buy it through my nook, but I find navigating e-bookstores so much simpler on my computer.