Thursday, March 1, 2018

Piracy

I am so frustrated right now. My newest book came out last week under my imprint of Emerald Arch Publishing. My book's in Kindle Unlimited and therefore exclusive to Amazon.

BookBub sent out its newsletter announcing it to my followers there. Good thing I follow myself. Look what I noticed in the email.


Say what? iBooks? It's exclusive to Amazon--you can get into lots of trouble with the Zon if you've got a book in KU that can be bought somewhere else. I clicked the link, and this is what I found.


Notice the publisher isn't my imprint.

I saw red!

I managed to find a number for iBooks (that was no easy matter). It took a while because the first person I spoke with wasn't sure what to do. Eventually, I got to someone who was able to register my challenge and sent me an email with a link to submit it officially.

I also had to track down a  number for Amazon to let them know the situation and that I was working on getting that pirated copy down.

And I submitted that url to Blasty to notify Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and the site hosting the infringing content.

I also took to social media to let others know. My book is one of three that were written in this world and released that day. One of them is also on iBooks under that publisher, so at least now she knows and can take action too.

I then took the afternoon off and came home to submit the copyright for that and three other books that I'd been meaning to but hadn't gotten around to. FYI--your work might be "copyrighted" as soon as you write it, but if you ever need to challenge it in court you'll need it official with the Library of Congress. I found this out when Rachel Ann Nunes began her (unfinished) journey against plagiarism.

Resources:

Submit a Copyright

How to Submit a Copyright Under a Penname

Indie Author Self-Defense: Piracy, Plagiarism, and Impersonation (Part 1 of 3)

Rachel Ann Nunes Lawsuit

I'll keep you updated.

11 comments:

  1. That sucks! I hope you get it taken down soon. If enough authors take action, then hopefully iBooks will block that publisher.

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  2. Scandal I say, scandal!
    Plagiarism is an everyday thing here in my neck of the woods, not only that we have a lot of sites (registered abroad) who scan our books and offer them for free download (and nobody can do anything about it since they have foreign domains) but it also happened often that Croatian publisher steal my translations that I did for Serbian publishers and then publish them under some other translator names in Croatia (we have the same language), and there's nothing I can do about it. And they speak the same language in Bosnia and Montenegro too, so only God knows how many of my translations have been circling around the Balkans without me getting zero monies :) or acknowledgement.

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  3. Sounds horrible. Can't imagine how angry is be if that happened to me. Good luck getting it shut down.

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  4. That is big time douchebaggery. Hopefully they can shut them down. Sadly it'd probably some overseas ring doing it.

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  5. Sorry that you had such a headache over this. I hope you can get it down and keep it down!

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  6. We got the heads up on my 20BooksTo50K group, so I visited the publisher's page on Apple. Your book is still up, unfortunately. Have you visited this page at Apple? https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/itunesstorenotices/

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  7. So sorry that you are going through all these headaches, Donna.

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