Has anyone had their work ripped off on Dreame?

[AllenWoody]

Periodically someone rips off Lost Colony and publishes it online. As a result, every so often I do a search and when I find it I email the site and ask them to take it down. Usually I don't hear back and the site may keep the story up, but all eventually seem to go offline.

I did my usual search and found Lost Colony on a site called dreame.com. I sent them an email asking to take it down. Surprisingly, they responded with a bullshit pdf pretending to be a notice of copyright on the work. It's all boilerplate with redactions in every single field, including signatures, copyright holder, etc. At the very bottom there's a URL which I suppose must be where they're publishing my story.

I'll be honest and admit that I felt a twinge of alarm when I saw the pdf. Like, could someone just claim my work for their own? The pdf looks like bullshit, like they did take a pdf of a copyright and just blanked out all of the fields, but it still had me wondering?

Has anyone else had their works pirated and published on dreame.com, or had a similar experience?

AW

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I've had someone steal the first few chapters of my ongoing series and publish it to Goodreads.

I thought it was insane considering the darker nature of the story. I had it dealt with quickly. If I were you, I would send the company a strongly worded e-mail including screenshots of your original date of publication on Literotica, the Literotica copyright protection page, and inform them that legal action will be sought against them and the thief if they refuse to acknowledge the stolen work as plagiarism and remove your un-authorized content from their catalogue. They could assume it's a bluff, you'll be hard pressed to get legal aide for plagiarism without putting money into it, which I think is bullshit... but hopefully they'll do the right thing and acknowledge your ownership and remove it.

Situations like this makes me weary to publish much more here. I've been thinking of just outright doubling anything else I publish to Draft2Digital, to better establish my copyright claims. Outside of that the only thing else we can do is to establish more permanent copyrights.

Literotica really needs to take steps to prevent theft, or at the least have a team ready to support it's authors in making sure their stolen and plagiarized works are recovered when found... honestly, something as simple as taking the proper steps with HTML coding to prohibit copy/paste function on published works would do a world of good to protect authors from having their work pirated.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Literotica really needs to take steps to prevent theft, or at the least have a team ready to support it's authors in making sure their stolen and plagiarized works are recovered when found... honestly, something as simple as taking the proper steps with HTML coding to prohibit copy/paste function on published works would do a world of good to protect authors from having their work pirated.

This isn't at all "simple" though. There are options that will stop human users from manually selecting text for copy-and-paste, but AFAICT most of the pirate sites out there are using automated content scraping that's not going to be affected by those options. Anything that can be seen can be copied; anything that can't be seen can't be read.

Meanwhile, if I'm reading a story that looks familiar and I suspect it might be stolen, disabling manual C&P makes it harder for me to drop a few phrases into Google and check where else those phrases show up.

 

[MetaBob]

Periodically someone rips off Lost Colony and publishes it online. As a result, every so often I do a search and when I find it I email the site and ask them to take it down. Usually I don't hear back and the site may keep the story up, but all eventually seem to go offline.

I did my usual search and found Lost Colony on a site called dreame.com. I sent them an email asking to take it down. Surprisingly, they responded with a bullshit pdf pretending to be a notice of copyright on the work. It's all boilerplate with redactions in every single field, including signatures, copyright holder, etc. At the very bottom there's a URL which I suppose must be where they're publishing my story.

I'll be honest and admit that I felt a twinge of alarm when I saw the pdf. Like, could someone just claim my work for their own? The pdf looks like bullshit, like they did take a pdf of a copyright and just blanked out all of the fields, but it still had me wondering?

Has anyone else had their works pirated and published on dreame.com, or had a similar experience?

AW

Two of my published novels now appear on dreame.

Earlier this month I was paid $.01 when someone downloaded one, probably in April. According to their site, that book has now been "Read" more than 1K times and is "Authorized". The other has also been "Read" more than 1K times. At a penny a pop, does that mean I have 20+ bucks coming my way? Dunno.

I wouldn't have known that they were distributing my work if I hadn't received that one-penny royalty. Not sure exactly what this is: piracy, discounting, or something else. I'll ask my publisher what they know.

 

[jaF0]

There are options that will stop human users from manually selecting text for copy-and-paste,

Not really. We used to go through this nearly every day on a certain popular auction site. People would come to the forums and insist they found the perfect way to absolutely prevent anyone from ever copying their listing text. None of them worked. Not a single one. They weren't even difficult to defeat. Maybe it took a few extra keystrokes, but that was about it. They were amazed and dumbfounded when they saw bits of their listings posted in the forum threads as proof.

 

[swidger]

Bad Contract Alert: Stary (aka Dreame)
"At least sixteen apps operate under the Stary umbrella, of which Dreame is probably the best-known."

Is Dreame Publishers (also known as Ficfun and Stary LTD.) a Scam?
"Dreame is operated by a Chinese company named Huayue with its base in Shenzhen. But it pretends to be in Singapore. If a company makes up a story about itself and is afraid of showing the true face, it must be a trap."

About Stary Writing - Dreame and Ringdom
"Don’t do it. I have been writing for them for half a year and I have done nothing but cry through the last twelve months. To make it worse, I was signed as an exclusive writer there. I can’t write anywhere else."

Common Spam Messages on Wattpad
"Dreame, Ringdom, and FicFun These three websites are all lumped together because they are all owned by STARY PTE. LTD, based in Singapore. They are all built around offering stories, primarily paid. Similar to WebNovel, they offer a contract with a claim that they liked your novel. These contracts are also considered to be sketchy and unfair. You can read more on this blog post by christopherdschmitz or this r/writing post about Ringdom."

 

[Bramblethorn]

Not really. We used to go through this nearly every day on a certain popular auction site. People would come to the forums and insist they found the perfect way to absolutely prevent anyone from ever copying their listing text. None of them worked. Not a single one. They weren't even difficult to defeat. Maybe it took a few extra keystrokes, but that was about it. They were amazed and dumbfounded when they saw bits of their listings posted in the forum threads as proof.

Oh yeah, nothing's going to stop somebody with a bit of technical know-how, I just meant people who are relying on mouse/Ctrl-A Ctrl-C Ctrl-V level commands. There are still plenty of those around, but unfortunately they're not the ones doing the pirating.

 

[AllenWoody]

Bad Contract Alert: Stary (aka Dreame)
"At least sixteen apps operate under the Stary umbrella, of which Dreame is probably the best-known."

Is Dreame Publishers (also known as Ficfun and Stary LTD.) a Scam?
"Dreame is operated by a Chinese company named Huayue with its base in Shenzhen. But it pretends to be in Singapore. If a company makes up a story about itself and is afraid of showing the true face, it must be a trap."

About Stary Writing - Dreame and Ringdom
"Don’t do it. I have been writing for them for half a year and I have done nothing but cry through the last twelve months. To make it worse, I was signed as an exclusive writer there. I can’t write anywhere else."

Common Spam Messages on Wattpad
"Dreame, Ringdom, and FicFun These three websites are all lumped together because they are all owned by STARY PTE. LTD, based in Singapore. They are all built around offering stories, primarily paid. Similar to WebNovel, they offer a contract with a claim that they liked your novel. These contracts are also considered to be sketchy and unfair. You can read more on this blog post by christopherdschmitz or this r/writing post about Ringdom."

Yes, that’s them. The BS copyright pdf had a Singapore address. They never contacted me though, or attempted to get me to sign a contract. I only found it during a key-phrase search.

 

[jaF0]

Yes, that’s them.

You're responding to a spammer for the site. Just report the post.

 

[Bramblethorn]

You're responding to a spammer for the site.

How do you figure that? They're not exactly promoting it.

 

[jaF0]

Signed up this morning, made that one post 20 minutes later, added no context other than the links on a thread about the site.

Get used to it. This is the new generation of AI based spam bots. Scraping the web for keywords and posting relative nonsense. I've seen this stuff all over the web in recent months.

Even if they come back to deny it, that would only be a human attempt to justify the bot action.

 

[alohadave]

Outside of that the only thing else we can do is to establish more permanent copyrights.

Is 70 years after you die not long enough?

 

[SeraphNocturne]

Is 70 years after you die not long enough?

Probably not, my friend, especially with the bots gearing up to replace us.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Literotica really needs to take steps to prevent theft, or at the least have a team ready to support it's authors in making sure their stolen and plagiarized works are recovered when found... honestly, something as simple as taking the proper steps with HTML coding to prohibit copy/paste function on published works would do a world of good to protect authors from having their work pirated.

A site-admin is bound by the options the browser offers them. Unless Firefox, Chrome and Co offer them a way to suppress copying of text, a site admin won't be able to make one up. There are Javascripts to stop the context-menue from appearing when the user does a right-click, but not only can a user simply disable Javascripts in their browsers to make the right-click work as usual again, there is also no way to disable Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C (keyboard shortcuts are implemented in the OS itself, it's not something the browser offers or could influence).

The only real way to prevent people from copy&pasting your stories, is for literotica to display them as images instead of text. And then hope pirates will be too lazy to transcribe it.

EDIT: Why does Lit censor the word "Java script" now, if I write it without a space in the middle!?

 

[alohadave]

EDIT: Why does Lit censor the word "Java script" now, if I write it without a space in the middle!?

Probably the forum software filtering it to prevent Java script attacks. If there is a bug or exploit, it could allow code execution.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

A site-admin is bound by the options the browser offers them. Unless Firefox, Chrome and Co offer them a way to suppress copying of text, a site admin won't be able to make one up. There are Javascripts to stop the context-menue from appearing when the user does a right-click, but not only can a user simply disable Javascripts in their browsers to make the right-click work as usual again, there is also no way to disable Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C (keyboard shortcuts are implemented in the OS itself, it's not something the browser offers or could influence).

The only real way to prevent people from copy&pasting your stories, is for literotica to display them as images instead of text. And then hope pirates will be too lazy to transcribe it.

EDIT: Why does Lit censor the word "Java script" now, if I write it without a space in the middle!?

An author can dream, hm? Thank you—and everyone else—for the insight regarding anti-theft practices. I’m sure Literotica might always be hard pressed to stop pirating. I suppose hoping for help dealing with thieves might be too much to ask as well… but a gal shall hope, I hate to see anyone’s hard work be plagiarized.

That said if anyone on-site ever has to deal with thieves and needs someone to back their claims or shun the thieves and site hosting content if they aren’t compliant with a humble request for removal, feel free to PM. I don’t hesitate to lose my shit on people who deserve it.

 

[jaF0]

The very nature of how the web works prevents efforts to curtail copying. In my browser (and probably most others), CTRL-U brings up the source page. This is what browsers read to be able to display a web page in the fancy readable form. I'm posting it as an image here so the coding tags won't work. But in View Source, it's all raw text and I'm not aware of any trick to prevent displaying it or copying from it.





...

 

[alohadave]

The very nature of how the web works prevents efforts to curtail copying. In my browser (and probably most others), CTRL-U brings up the source page. This is what browsers read to be able to display a web page in the fancy readable form. I'm posting it as an image here so the coding tags won't work. But in View Source, it's all raw text and I'm not aware of any trick to prevent displaying it or copying from it.


View attachment 2245064


...

And it all gets downloaded to your computer. I used to trawl through my browser cache to find gifs to save, back in the dark ages.

Stuff like streaming or dynamic content like an Amazon page is a little different, but screen scraping is trivial to do.

 

[MrPixel]

The only real way to prevent people from copy&pasting your stories, is for literotica to display them as images instead of text.

Nope. OCR. I built an image-based OCR system 30 years ago. It's gotten... well... about two orders of magnitude better in the interim. If it's human-readable, it's machine-readable.

 

[onehitwanda]

Basically, if it can be observed, it can be copied - maybe imperfectly, but well enough.

If it's human-readable, it's machine-readable.

which can be easily observed by the growing number of out-of-print books that are now back-in-print.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Nope. OCR. I built an image-based OCR system 30 years ago. It's gotten... well... about two orders of magnitude better in the interim. If it's human-readable, it's machine-readable.

Corollary: long before you've made it unreadable to machines, you've made it unreadable to a lot of humans.

 

[darkride]

Not a story... though I've not gone looking! I know I'd be pretty mortified if I found someone posting my work as if it was their own.

That did happen to me though on YouTube. One day I found 3 other YouTube accounts that had been created in a similar time-span, and re-uploaded most/all of my content - nothing else, just my vids. The content was compilations from episodes of a TV show that has not seen the light of day for 30 years ie no VHS, no DVD, no TV, no streaming... (nawty of me, I know... There was so many people who commented how they'd love to buy the show on DVD/etc but it's never been released, so they can't...)

I guess I was mildly complimented at the thought - I could only assume they were trying to make money... even though most of the videos were only generating around 5k-10k views per year - not enough to bring in much ad revenue. (And - I made no revenue - I did not monetise any of them.)

I contacted YouTube, several times, and 2 of the duplicate channels ended up disappearing, though the 3rd hung around until Warner Bros copyright striked me (and probably them too) killing my channel.

Moral of the story... don't mess with WB... (I also used to make compilations of other shows, and if YouTube's filters rejected my content, I would argue the point with a polite reply about making content for fans only, and they would generally just monetise my videos for themselves. Everyone was happy...)

 

[darkride]

Ah - ok, revisiting this sooner than I expected:

https://erotom.com/post_56567

That's one of my stories... not on a site where I have posted it.

Thankfully (I guess) they haven't tried to reclaim it as their own - it actually looks like the site is a mirror of XNXX/SexStories... so they probably have all of my stories from that site.