Piracy - Arrr ye sittin' on t' fence?

Last year Forbes printed an interesting (if rather depressing) article on piracy—something that is becoming an increasing problem in the publishing industry and affects practically all authors indiscriminately.  If you've poured sweat and tears into your treasured book, someone out there wants to own it (whether or not they ever choose to read it) for free.  These people are effectively thieves, and our dilemma is: do we fight them, or not?  
One popular argument is that people who seek out free download sites for music, films or books would be unlikely to dig into their pockets to actually pay for the booty, if it were not available for free; ergo piracy does not affect your royalties.  On the other hand, research has also shown that those who pirate do spend more—at least on music—than 'non-sharers', so are we losing potential sales?  Should we become complacent and turn a blind eye to this scourge of the world wide web, or do our utmost to fight it?
Many authors prefer to do nothing, but one author group has been proactive in seeking out pirate sites and warning other authors as well as making their thoughts on the subject known wherever possible.  I was so impressed by author Rowena Cherry's articulate response to the Forbes' article that I asked her permission to quote this in full on my blog.  Here it is:
Piracy is not the saviour of the book industry. It's the bread and butter of Search and of advertising. The money in ebooks is being made by Google, and by those whom Google and Yahoo and Bing pay to display advertisements.
Unfortunately, the media --including Forbes, CNBC, and others-- promote and encourage and validate piracy and immoral business models. That is why public attitudes have changed, piracy is widely accepted.... and embraced. The law cannot keep up, and the lawmakers follow either the money (Google) or the wishes of the majority (who want free content).
Advising authors and musicians to turn themselves into street corner buskers is simply not realistic. If every author and musician were on the street (or on the road, or on the internet superhighway) giving away their content willingly, and begging for charity, the culture would be depreciated.
You might as well advise authors to buy stocks and shares in Google and Amazon and PayPal/EBay, and share in the profits from piracy.
Suggesting that authors and publishers give away more, or add additional content (why would that not be ripped off, too?) , or take more time away from what they do best to "engage" with the public is simply not going to improve the quality, depth and diversity of what is written.
It's killing the golden-egg-laying goose for its feathers. It's eroding copyright protection for content creators. Eventually, there will be no incentive for smart and original minds to invest the time to hone their craft and "share" their stories.
Shame on Forbes for lending its gravitas to the forced redistribution of property. Make no mistake, that's what piracy is --a forced redistribution of wealth-- real wealth, and intellectual property. The irony is that the wealth is being taken from the weak, the minority, the relatively poor and given to the rich.... Amazon, EBay, and Google.
So what do you think?  On which side of the fence do you feel most comfortable?

Report piracy: tips@disneyantipiracy.com 

 reportpiracy@rwa.org 

http://www.iprcenter.gov/referral 

http://www.copynot.com/ 

Pride & Piracy

Have you ever Googled yourself?  I must confess, I hadn’t until yesterday.  What prompted me to do so was reading several blog and web posts about marketing, one of which suggested getting a friend to create a Wikipedia page on yourself.  That prompted me to start looking around to see what information actually did exist about me.  Google yourself – it’s a fascinating and eye-opening experience. And sometimes you find far more than you bargained for!

I came across a site purporting to be about term paper sharing with an open request for one of my titles, dated about six weeks ago.  Intrigued, I clicked on it and found it to be a pirating site on which someone calling herself ‘housewife’ had requested a free download of one of my books.  This was made available to her and to anyone else – and a number of people availed themselves of the opportunity to download it for free.

My first instinct was to join the site and tell the desperate housewife and all the other free-loaders that if they were so hard up that they couldn’t spend $2.99 on a legit copy, they should contact me via this blog for a gift.  I mean, I’m just a struggling author – their need is clearly far greater than mine.

The book in question happened to be one I’d self-published, otherwise it would have been my publisher’s headache to deal with, not mine.  A good friend of mine, another self-published author, told me it would be impossible to take any action against the pirates – she herself had suffered at their hands.  Fortunately, my clever son (I know, I’m always talking about him, but he’s just such a useful person to know!) has not only a sound knowledge of the internet, but also of intellectual property law, including copyright infringement, so I followed his advice.

So should this happen to you, through Google, the first thing to do is contact them on the following link:  http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs.  You will have to complete a page of details but this is very straightforward.  I received an email from Google support a few hours later telling me they were removing the website from their search index.

Feeling more than a little hacked off by this website, as an added precaution I also contacted the web hosts informing them that their lessee had violated their terms of contract and should be dealt with immediately.  You can look up a website on: http://www.whois-search.com to find out who is providing them access, and then contact those people for action.  My email did not receive the courtesy of a response, but that’s not to say it wasn’t acted upon.  One or the other must have and, although I can’t be sure who got there first, the offending site became inaccessible remarkably quickly.

My advice to self-published writers is to Google yourself regularly and watch out for these cheapskate pirates.  Then take action – fast.  Many e-books cost far less than a cup of coffee in Starbucks, but you can bet your boots that Starbucks wouldn’t stand for the theft, so why should we?

Message now showing on Google:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Result!