it finally happened.

rae121452

Literotica Guru
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Jul 18, 2017
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i found one of my old stories on a website that i'd never even heard of. google directed me there since they credited my screen name here. oddly, i feel like it's an affirmation.
 
i found one of my old stories on a website that i'd never even heard of. google directed me there since they credited my screen name here. oddly, i feel like it's an affirmation.
I can't tell if any of my LIT stories have been pirated. I feel slighted, ignored. Woe is me.
 
I can't tell if any of my LIT stories have been pirated. I feel slighted, ignored. Woe is me.

I can. I just search for "copyright oggbashan" :rolleyes:

But my stories have been on Lit for a decade and a half. Time will tell.
 
i found one of my old stories on a website that i'd never even heard of. google directed me there since they credited my screen name here. oddly, i feel like it's an affirmation.

All or parts of my "Unlikely Angels" series were lifted over and over. I've since taken it off Lit, though not because of that. I don't think anyone was republishing it for money.

I haven't checked in quite a while to see if others have been lifted.

Edit: I checked my stories from last year. Two out of five are on other sites, including the most recent. One of them (a Russian site) even kept Lit's format and just added some irrelevant pictures at the top.

It bothered me that Google actually found the stories on other sites before it found it on Lit.

Edit2: Found one for real. "Valentines for Cinderella" is on Amazon, supposedly authored by someone named Chan Shah.
 
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It bothered me that Google actually found the stories on other sites before it found it on Lit.

Edit2: Found one for real. "Valentines for Cinderella" is on Amazon, supposedly authored by someone named Chan Shah.
Yes, that's a bit of a worry, someone building a more aggressive seo driver.

Do you have enough ownership precedence evidence to get a take down on the published book?
 
Yes, that's a bit of a worry, someone building a more aggressive seo driver.

Do you have enough ownership precedence evidence to get a take down on the published book?

The story was published on Lit two years before it was published by Amazon, but I don't know how I'm going to prove I'm NotWise. I'm also not sure I care that much.
 
oggbashan said:
Hypoxia said:
I can't tell if any of my LIT stories have been pirated. I feel slighted, ignored. Woe is me.
I can. I just search for "copyright oggbashan"
You are too unique. Doing that with 'hypoxia' returns much medical material, but not myself.

But my stories have been on Lit for a decade and a half. Time will tell.
I just found a site that HAD my stories, all in chronological order, but "randystories.com" is only google-cached now -- it's gone under since 5 Feb 2019. No, I must admit that, even after six years, my words are not worth stealing. I shall discard any delusions of adequacy.
 
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Well, this site is stealing them from every website around. Whatever....

free-sexstories.com/
 
The story was published on Lit two years before it was published by Amazon, but I don't know how I'm going to prove I'm NotWise. I'm also not sure I care that much.

You can probably get it taken down without proving ownership.

On the Amazon listing, scroll down until you see this:

attachment.php


Click on the "tell us about a lower price" button and report that it's available free on Literotica, giving a link to your story. I'd have reported it myself, but I don't have an Amazon login.

One of the rules of Amazon self-publishing is that the price on Amazon has to match or beat the cheapest price for that work elsewhere. If it's available free on Literotica, then they're not allowed to charge for it on Amazon. They could still give it away there, but you're denying them the money from selling it, which is probably their whole reason for pirating it. Much easier to appeal to Amazon's commercial interests than to try enforcing an unregistered copyright.

(also, thanks for the reminder, probably just about time to add a piracy trap in the next chapter of my current story!)
 

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Click on the "tell us about a lower price" button and report that it's available free on Literotica, giving a link to your story. I'd have reported it myself, but I don't have an Amazon login.
Related question: what's the subtlety, does anyone know (as in hard knowledge, not speculation), of a complete book version of a novel or novella compiled with a cover, proper book formatting, downloadable e-book formats, registered ISBN, blah blah blah, vs the Literotica version which is text content only (and in my hypothetical case multiple chapters, thus not all content available in one place and not directly downloadable) - thus not the same saleable "product"?

Has anybody actually tested this? That is, argued that the Lit version of a novel or novella is not the same as, say, a kindle version because, well, they're demonstrably not the same product. One is a bunch of content, whereas the other is A Book which can be down-loaded. The corollary is that a bunch of spare parts isn't a washing machine, but a washing machine is. If that makes sense.

In other words, do authors taking their content to the marketplace actually have to remove it from Lit to preserve their Amazon price?

Note: this question sets aside the logic of, "Why would you want to leave it here if you want to sell it?" which is a separate can of worms. Curious minds want to know.
 
Note: after looking for info to answer electricblue66's question below, I'm not certain that the info I gave above is current. It was correct several years ago when I looked up their pricing rules, but since then Amazon seem to have made changes to their "lowest price policy", at least in Japan. Still wouldn't hurt to try the method I suggested, but I'm not sure whether it will still work as a takedown method - if you try it, let us know!

Here's the current info on Kindle Direct Publishing pricing. It's complicated and makes my head hurt, but it looks as if Amazon reserve the right to "price-match" i.e. lower the prices of e-books sold through KDP to match the prices offered by third-party publishers. However, it's not clear whether they will always do so, or if they'll sometimes let a higher price stand.

Related question: what's the subtlety, does anyone know (as in hard knowledge, not speculation), of a complete book version of a novel or novella compiled with a cover, proper book formatting, downloadable e-book formats, registered ISBN, blah blah blah, vs the Literotica version which is text content only (and in my hypothetical case multiple chapters, thus not all content available in one place and not directly downloadable) - thus not the same saleable "product"?

Has anybody actually tested this? That is, argued that the Lit version of a novel or novella is not the same as, say, a kindle version because, well, they're demonstrably not the same product. One is a bunch of content, whereas the other is A Book which can be down-loaded. The corollary is that a bunch of spare parts isn't a washing machine, but a washing machine is. If that makes sense.

In other words, do authors taking their content to the marketplace actually have to remove it from Lit to preserve their Amazon price?

The KDP pricing site talks about matching prices "for any digital or physical edition" so I expect the cover/format/blah-blah issues you mention aren't going to make a difference. In practice, it will mean whatever Amazon wants it to mean.

Note: this question sets aside the logic of, "Why would you want to leave it here if you want to sell it?" which is a separate can of worms. Curious minds want to know.

I actually do this, though it's through Smashwords rather than Amazon. If I had to choose only one, I would keep my stories on Literotica, because I value the reads and reader interaction more than the bucks I get from Smashwords sales, and I'm not interested in the promotional effort required to increase those sales.

I'm not sure whether having the stories up on Literotica helps or harms my Smashwords sales. On the one hand, people can read them for free without having to buy the Smashwords version at all. On the other, I get the impression a significant percentage of my SW sales come from people who read the stories free here and decided to toss me a few bucks, either as a tip or because they wanted an e-reader-friendly version.
 
I actually do this, though it's through Smashwords rather than Amazon. If I had to choose only one, I would keep my stories on Literotica, because I value the reads and reader interaction more than the bucks I get from Smashwords sales, and I'm not interested in the promotional effort required to increase those sales.

I'm not sure whether having the stories up on Literotica helps or harms my Smashwords sales. On the one hand, people can read them for free without having to buy the Smashwords version at all. On the other, I get the impression a significant percentage of my SW sales come from people who read the stories free here and decided to toss me a few bucks, either as a tip or because they wanted an e-reader-friendly version.
My thoughts exactly. As you say, whatever it means to Amazon, so far as sales on kindle are concerned; but I figure their price matching algorithms will be looking at other book sale outlets with a price attached, not a passive, non-down-loadable data dump at Literotica with no definable "product" and no pricing information at all.

Amazon's policy is to get the sale from the other book seller wanting the sale, or at least price match. It's not in their interest to price match to zero, because then there's no money in it for them. Also, for a niche erotica writer, they're not the only platform. I'm interested, obviously, because I'm launching my Arthurian myth novel to market (mainly because I want my own print copy on a bookshelf), and am discovering the ropes. It's actually less complicated than I thought, once you have one or two hard facts to hand rather than urban myth. Hence my question.
 
Amazon's policy is to get the sale from the other book seller wanting the sale, or at least price match. It's not in their interest to price match to zero, because then there's no money in it for them.

I wondered about that too. Obviously they don't make any money on that book if they price it at zero, but it might make sense as part of a broader strategy. Amazon don't just sell e-books. They also sell e-book readers (Kindle), and policy for one product is going to be influenced by policy for the other.

Part of Amazon's strategy is to establish a walled garden. In the early days, they sold Kindles for below cost. So you buy a Kindle cheap, and you buy Amazon e-books in Kindle format, building up a library. Eventually your Kindle dies, or you want to replace it... but you can't easily migrate that library to a different reader. Either you buy the new Kindle - which is no longer such a bargain - or you go to a lot of trouble finding ways to migrate the books you own, or you lose them. Even if you got them for free, it's going to be a pain rebuilding that collection.

Giving away free e-books helps keep customers attached to their Kindles, makes them more likely to stick with a Kindle when it's replacement time. Even for the customers who aren't buying the Kindle format, there might still be an advantage in boosting brand loyalty - if Amazon can tell those customers "we will always have the cheapest price, so no need to check our competitors' sites", there's less risk of losing them to the competition. And lowering prices can help drive competitors out of business - you take a hit in the short term, in order to increase what you can charge in the long run.
 
I reported to Amazon that the story was available on Lit for free, and gave them a directly link to the story. I don't know what to expect from Amazon. I didn't receive an acknowledgement, and I didn't expect to. I also don't know how long it should take them to respond if they're going to.

I do know that monitoring Amazon feels like a waste of time. Even if Amazon takes it down, there's a presence on Pinterest, and the story is for sale on at least one other site.

"Chan Shah" has quite a few stories on Amazon, and I'd guess that they're all stolen. Mine is a romance, but there are several incest stories that could easily have come from Lit.
 
I googled my name and at the bottom of the second page I found a link to one of my stories on a wattpad site One Thousand and One Erotic Nights. A straightforward copy and paste and whoever it was acknowledged that they hadn’t written any of the stories on the site. My name was on it and it was referenced as a Literotica story.

It didn’t do my ego any harm and it wasn’t an attempt to make money out of me.
 
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Thanks for the heads up. I never would have thought to just Google my name. I had to add some filtering words, but sure enough, most of the stories I posted on Lit have shown up on other sites. Including some that had some pretty nasty viruses in their popups.

I haven't tries searching for key phrases yet. So far all that I have found have kept the copyright notice intact. Made it relatively easy to find.

** sigh **

Not expecting to make any money writing spankware but it is disturbing that some of the stuff appears to have been lifted the day it was published here.

James
 
Hypoxia said:
I just found a site that HAD my stories, all in chronological order, but "randystories.com" is only google-cached now -- it's gone under since 5 Feb 2019.
Update: randystories is back and my LIT catalog is there... but I seem not to be otherwise burglarized. Should I be grateful?
 
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