270 Literotica stories plagiarized by Jessie Morgan

[blin18]

Hi folks,

Jessie Morgan popped up on Amazon in around April, and has so far posted about 270 stories pirated from different Literotica authors - more if you count the bundles. The stories are copied word for word, the titles too in many cases.

Proof: I don't think I can post links to Amazon here, but here is my Literotica story: https://www.literotica.com/s/the-winsome-widow, and you can find the plagiarized version by searching "The Winsome Widow Jessie Morgan" from Amazon's search bar.

I've gone through and identified 11 other affected authors and am DMing now. I'd do more, but it's just so labor intensive.

I'm just about to report her to Amazon. Hopefully her account will be banned soon.

Belinda

 

[Bramblethorn]

AFAIK it's okay to post Amazon links in this sort of situation, just not for the purpose of advertising them. Unfortunately, the forum software is quite capable of mangling URLs even when the site is permitted...

Here's the link to "Jessie"'s profile, but you'll need to paste it and replace the "**" in the middle with percent-3. (Two characters.)

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-...&text=Jessie+Morgan&ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1

 

[blin18]

Huh, there you go.

Here's the plagiarized book: https://www.amazon.com/Winsome-Widow-Jessie-Morgan-ebook/dp/B07VQ1VWQM

Hopefully it shows up

 

[Bramblethorn]

Huh, there you go.

Here's the plagiarized book: https://www.amazon.com/Winsome-Widow-Jessie-Morgan-ebook/dp/B07VQ1VWQM

Hopefully it shows up

Yes, that link works.

As well as reporting it as a copyright violation, there's another thing you can do if you have an Amazon login. Scroll down that page to the "Tell us about a lower price" option, then use that to report that the same story is available for free on Literotica.

Amazon self-pub policy requires sellers to give Amazon the lowest price - hence, if your version is free on Literotica, they're not allowed to charge for it on Amazon. The advantage of this approach is that you don't have to prove ownership yourself. It doesn't stop them from republishing your story for free, but generally they're only in it for the money.

 

[blin18]

Scroll down that page to the "Tell us about a lower price" option, then use that to report that the same story is available for free on Literotica.

Yep, good tip, and noted, however I'm currently going scorched earth. I don't just want my book pulled, I want the author's account shut down. With the tax information you have to provide Amazon, it's nigh on impossible to restart a banned account restarted.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes, that link works.

As well as reporting it as a copyright violation, there's another thing you can do if you have an Amazon login. Scroll down that page to the "Tell us about a lower price" option, then use that to report that the same story is available for free on Literotica.

Amazon self-pub policy requires sellers to give Amazon the lowest price - hence, if your version is free on Literotica, they're not allowed to charge for it on Amazon. The advantage of this approach is that you don't have to prove ownership yourself. It doesn't stop them from republishing your story for free, but generally they're only in it for the money.

I'm not convinced that's ever been truly tested - Amazon sells books (ie: a discrete product), whereas Lit doesn't sell product and you can't take away an e-book from Lit. So you can say the content is available free, but you can't say a comparable saleable product is free. It's a subtlety, I know (content versus published product) - I keep seeing it asserted, but I've not yet seen evidence that Amazon will act based on Lit. It's not in Amazon's interest to charge nothing.

 

[RejectReality]

When the author is charging for it on Amazon, they use it as a hammer to get you to remove it from, or increase the price on other venues. They remove it from the store until you rectify the situation, rather than adjusting their price to the lower one.

That's why it goes down. You should also mention the plagiarism while reporting the lower price, though.

ETA I reported the first half dozen as being available for free elsewhere ( not just Lit ) and also reported them as "violating terms and services" noting that they're plagiarized from various authors on various sites.

If you wish to report them, use the violating terms and services option, rather than copyright, which asks to fill out a DMCA form, I believe. Obviously, if you're the author and feel comfortable doing so, fill out the DMCA form.

I'm not convinced that's ever been truly tested - Amazon sells books (ie: a discrete product), whereas Lit doesn't sell product and you can't take away an e-book from Lit. So you can say the content is available free, but you can't say a comparable saleable product is free. It's a subtlety, I know (content versus published product) - I keep seeing it asserted, but I've not yet seen evidence that Amazon will act based on Lit. It's not in Amazon's interest to charge nothing.

 

[NotWise]

I'm not convinced that's ever been truly tested - Amazon sells books (ie: a discrete product), whereas Lit doesn't sell product and you can't take away an e-book from Lit. So you can say the content is available free, but you can't say a comparable saleable product is free. It's a subtlety, I know (content versus published product) - I keep seeing it asserted, but I've not yet seen evidence that Amazon will act based on Lit. It's not in Amazon's interest to charge nothing.

I reported Valentines for Cinderella as being available for free on Lit. That was months ago. The story is still up on Amazon, but the pricing confuses me. At one point it says $0.00 and at another it says $2.99.

 

[KeithD]

you can't take away an e-book from Lit.

You can take all but a cover. You just copy it from here and paste it into a program of your own. You could even format it as a marketplace e-book if you wanted.

 

[shudai]

Thanks to Belinda

Thanks to Belinda for catching this and tipping me off. My story was posted as 23 individual books, and it was a huge hassle to notify the powers that be.

It's particularly annoying because I've been trying to post it on Amazon for a while now, but their system doesn't seem to be able to activate my account. It's nearly impossible to actually talk to a human being.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You can take all but a cover. You just copy it from here and paste it into a program of your own. You could even format it as a marketplace e-book if you wanted.

Yes, I know you can do that. Obviously content can be ripped from Lit. But whether Amazon consider Lit to be "selling" zero dollar e-books and thus forcing authors to bring the Amazon price down to nothing - that's my point. It's not like for like, in terms of the product - which for Amazon is a downloadable book in epub or mobi, which can be read on an ebook reader. Lit doesn't offer that, Lit offers dumb raw text.

As I say, I keep seeing it attested, but I've not as yet seen any hard evidence offered, that Amazon considers Lit to be a bookstore, albeit for zero dollar books. See NotWise's post.

Amazon makes no money on zero dollar sales, so it's not in their interest to ask for zero dollar pricing. Why would they do that? Like all on-line bookstores, what they claim is "for sale" is bullshit, so why is their "policy" any different? If you believe the number of shopfronts that claim to be selling second hand copies of my books, for example, there are hundreds of copies been printed. Which is complete bullshit.

 

[gordo12]

Here's an Amazon reseller lawyer and a list of decisions including book copyright.

https://www.amazonsellerslawyer.com/amazon-accused-of-copyright-infringement/

I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that Amazon is being willfully blind to copyright issues. A simple copyscape or other software check would have revealed the book on another free site. And when an author suddenly starts posting hundreds of new books that should raise a very LARGE RED FLAG.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I reported Valentines for Cinderella as being available for free on Lit. That was months ago. The story is still up on Amazon, but the pricing confuses me. At one point it says $0.00 and at another it says $2.99.

It looks to me if you have Kindle Prime, it's free otherwise it's 2.99.

 

[NotWise]

It looks to me if you have Kindle Prime, it's free otherwise it's 2.99.

Ah, so that's what that means. Thanks.

 

[KeithD]

I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that Amazon is being willfully blind to copyright issues.

I think it may be the authors who are blind to copyright issues in the United States. If they haven't registered the work formally in the United States, a court will not take their case. How many erotica authors posting to Literotica have filed for formal copyright in the United States? How close to the number zero do you think it is? Amazon has no legal responsibility to anyone who can't produce a formal copyright on a work in question and only a limited way otherwise to decide who it actually belongs to in a dispute.

I dare say my publisher has found the only convincing argument to Amazon short of paying for formal copyright. My works first appear on Amazon, before anyone else knows they exist. If someone else subsequently pirates and puts them on Amazon, it's pretty clear to Amazon who published them first.

 

[NotWise]

I think it may be the authors who are blind to copyright issues in the United States. If they haven't registered the work formally in the United States, a court will not take their case.

So, I guess ethics aren't really an issue for Amazon. Ethics must be expensive.

 

[KeithD]

So, I guess ethics aren't really an issue for Amazon. Ethics must be expensive.

That's not fair. Just because someone challenges a work having been published to Amazon is no proof to Amazon that the work is theirs instead. That's exactly why U.S. courts demand that a formal copyright be produced to go to the bother of adjudicating the matter. Try applying objective common sense to this.

 

[KeithD]

By the way, let me drop this little bombshell of reality on you. If the folks that Jessie Morgan has swiped these works from have not filed for formal copyright on them in the United States, legally, Jessie Morgan could even now, today, wrap them all up in one humongous compendium under one title, file for formal U.S. copyright, pay $35 (if that's still the fee; I haven't checked recently) and, bingo, they all would, in fact, belong to Jessie Morgan in the eyes and courts of U.S. law. I once bundled a six-novel series under one title, paid $35, and received formal copyright on the whole mess (I was the one who wrote them, of course). Formal copyright goes to whoever is first to file for it. That's not up for individual opinion or vote.

Again, I posit that it may not be Amazon that doesn't know copyright law here; it may be the authors.

Just wrap your minds around what U.S. law would support on this while you sat on your false assumptions of your legal protection in the United States on what you've written.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I admit I’m not up with US copyright law and this is probably naive, but I would have assumed that the publication date here would be the deciding factor.

But hey, somebody copyrighted “Happy Birthday”...

 

[NotWise]

That's not fair. Just because someone challenges a work having been published to Amazon is no proof to Amazon that the work is theirs instead. That's exactly why U.S. courts demand that a formal copyright be produced to go to the bother of adjudicating the matter. Try applying objective common sense to this.

In the case of Valentines for Cinderella, I can effectively prove that I own the story. The publication date on Lit is two years earlier than the publication date on Amazon. If they cared, then they could post a comment on the story. I can delete the comment, showing that I own the story.

 

[KeithD]

Amazon won't care what the Lit. publishing date is (and if your Lit name isn't your real name and you aren't willing/able to make a legal connection between the two, it makes no difference anyway). The point of it being on Amazon first is that they won't have a bit of trouble deciding what their own interest is in which one to keep distributing. They have absolutely no incentive to get embroiled in a "who owns what" brawl. Neither do the U.S. courts. Another reality here on the U.S. courts (which is your only legal leverage in fighting off a thief--bluff is your only other tool and sometimes that will work) is that you valued the work at zero by putting it on Literotica, so they won't take the case anyway unless you can prove monetary value in it. Rotz of Ruck with that.

Wake up folks. You gave it away and made it easily accessible for swiping by posting it to Literotica in the first place. If you do, that's the reality. Some of us are willing to live with that with our eyes wide open.

 

[KeithD]

But hey, somebody copyrighted “Happy Birthday”...

Which, happily, is out of copyright and into the public domain now.

And, yes, you made a false assumption. Most do. No, Amazon, any other distributor, or the U.S. Courts don't have to accept your claim over anyone else's unless you flip out your formal copyright certificate.

If Amazon does take the stolen works down, and sometimes it will, consider yourself damn lucky. They aren't doing it with legal backing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not convinced that's ever been truly tested - Amazon sells books (ie: a discrete product), whereas Lit doesn't sell product and you can't take away an e-book from Lit. So you can say the content is available free, but you can't say a comparable saleable product is free. It's a subtlety, I know (content versus published product) - I keep seeing it asserted, but I've not yet seen evidence that Amazon will act based on Lit. It's not in Amazon's interest to charge nothing.

That's not necessarily true. Obviously Amazon don't make a profit on the individual "sale" of an e-book priced at zero, but it can make excellent sense as part of a broader marketing strategy.

When I was a teenager, Gillette and Schick used to give away free razors to kids my age. Because once you start using that nice Gillette razor you got for free, you're going to need to buy Gillette razorblade cartridges... and if you ever lose that razor, well, you've probably still got a few Gillette cartridges lying around which can only be used with a Gillette razor, so it makes sense to buy another Gillette... and so on for the rest of your life.

Amazon's marketing strategy is that on steroids. The more e-books you have in Kindle format, the more tightly locked in you are to Amazon's walled garden. For a non-tech-savvy person who owns a hundred or a thousand free e-books in Amazon's proprietary file format, moving to a non-Amazon reader format is a huge pain - they lose access to their existing library, or have to put a lot of effort into finding ways to migrate it - so they're more likely to stay with Amazon products.

And then, when stuff comes out that isn't free, that person will buy that from Amazon too, because it's easier.

According to Jeff Bezos, they sell e-readers at cost because once somebody owns a Kindle they're going to buy a lot more from Amazon. I believe they've admitted to selling some e-books at a loss for similar reasons, though I can't pull up a link to that interview just now.

Self-published stories would cost them virtually nothing to distribute. If giving them away supports the overall strategy, there's not much reason for them to shy away from that.

As to whether an e-book on Amazon is the "same product" as the Literotica story it was stolen from, in practice Amazon gets to make that call.

 

[NotWise]

Amazon won't care what the Lit. publishing date is (and if your Lit name isn't your real name and you aren't willing/able to make a legal connection between the two, it makes no difference anyway).

Why wouldn't they care about the Lit publication date? It's a record. And the real identity behind NotWise seems irrelevant. NotWise can show prior publication and control of the owning account regardless of his legal identity. The person who published the story on Amazon two years later could not.

To me, it isn't a legal question about copyright laws. It's an ethical question that relates more to public relations than it does to the courts. Some US companies are more sensitive to ethical responsibilities than others. Amazon appears to be on the "we don't care" end of the spectrum.

 

[ElectricBlue]

To me, it isn't a legal question about copyright laws. It's an ethical question that relates more to public relations than it does to the courts. Some US companies are more sensitive to ethical responsibilities than others. Amazon appears to be on the "we don't care" end of the spectrum.

Ethics are inversely related to dollars, in my experience.

But trying to fight the behemoths like Amazon, Facebook and Google? Even governments can't do that. Canute had more joy with the tides, I reckon.