Stories Stolen From Lit

[oggbashan]

Library of Congress. $30.00 per piece.

That does not make any difference outside the US.

Stories written by Europeans (and US citizens) are covered by the Geneva agreements on copyright. Publishing an original work, as in posting to Literotica, is sufficient to establish your copyright.

However, enforcing your copyright requires a team of expensive lawyers and even they will be useless in Russia, China, and several other states.

Og

 

[Zeb_Carter]

This domain was originally hosted on a server in California, after a mass email campagine by a bunch of lit authors and Laruel the ISP shut down the domain. Unfortunatly, it was back up in a day or two on a ISP in China. If is now on a ISP in Russia that means Laurel and Manu got the ISP in China to shutdown the Domain. Looks as though he just moved it to another ISP in Russia.

 

[pop_54]

Alright for some... I even put up links to my stories... no fucker wanted them

On a serious note... as has been said, this has been going on for ages now and not just this one site... several story boards have sprung up hosting pirated Lit stories... and yes I'm proud to say... even mine

Cheeky fuckers never even bothered to change the name of the story in a few cases... I posted a little tome (Not fit for Lit), on another site a while back, and within a week it was being promoted as story of the month on another completely different site... I was quite proud of my story of the month title

 

[starrkers]

This site is now down.

The cynic in me is looking for its replacement.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Don't worry, Starrkers...These guys come and go. They'll be back in a few weeks...or days...or hours

 

[Darkniciad]

Enough complaints must have finally come through. Figures, I just opened up my yahoo and discovered an email from the dude running the site -- probably his last ditch effort to stay online after being informed of the abuse emails by the host. He was asking to keep the stories online, but link back to the original website. Sent at least three begging emails to that effect.

One more down. Eyes open for the next.

 

[slyc_willie]

Enough complaints must have finally come through. Figures, I just opened up my yahoo and discovered an email from the dude running the site -- probably his last ditch effort to stay online after being informed of the abuse emails by the host. He was asking to keep the stories online, but link back to the original website. Sent at least three begging emails to that effect.

One more down. Eyes open for the next.

Good for you, Dark.

 

[john-the-author]

Enforcing copyright

Actually, there are a few things we can each do and it can be highly profitable.

First, register your copyright with the Library of Congress. It's form TX and you don't have to register each story--you can register a whole bunch of stories at once as "The Collected Short Stories of {Melvin Morsmere or whomever}, Vol 1." This saves you a lot of money and should give you the same level of protection as I understand it.

While you do have a de facto copyright by having written something, you can't take someone to court for it effectively, because winning an unregistered copyright requires you to prove that you have been injured by the theft (hard to do) and you're only entitled to real damages from the defendant. The burden of proof is generally on you, the plaintiff. It's rarely worth the trouble to sue in cases like this because there's no money and little chance of winning.

However, once you've registered the copyright, you don't have to prove that there's been a financial loss. You just have to show that there was an infringement and the burden of proof is on the defendants to show that there wasn't. If, for example, someone's lifted your story wholesale--like we've seen happen a few times so far--this'll probably be a pretty clearcut case of theft. And here's the nicest part: if someone infringes a registered copyright, they are liable for $20,000 in statutory damages, without their being any actual financial damage. (If you can show financial damages as well, you could collect further: for example, if they published your story on a pay-per-read site or in a magazine, you could potentially collect on the proceeds.) IOW, stealing the story and publishing it on their website as their own without your expressed permission to do so could make you a whole lot richer.

I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV, so there's doubtless stuff that I'm oversimplifying beyond the point of usefulness... but I should add that one of my non-erotica books got plagiarized (the whole thing!) about 12 years ago. (I write books in real life in another venue; I've published a couple dozen at this point. It's a living.) The publisher pursued the infringer and we split the proceeds down the middle. Fastest fucking ten grand I ever made from any of my books.

If you do register your copyright, you will probably need to make a statement of permission to Laurel so that she's in the clear and you don't potentially weaken your copyright elsewhere. Laurel may care to weigh in on this and even assist with the set-up process for this, actually, as it'd also be in Laurel's interests to have a bunch of Lit authors who have the legal muscle to sue and collect from people like this.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

The publisher pursued the infringer and we split the proceeds down the middle. Fastest fucking ten grand I ever made from any of my books.

ah yes but you had a publisher to pay the legal fees!

 

[john-the-author]

As I recall, the legal fees were less than $1000 for the whole thing. So we still came out $19K+ to the good.

If we had a bunch of people with registered copyrights who could all go after a website together, we could possibly collect money (well, maybe not $20K each, because who's got that kind of money to hand? but something, almost certainly) and almost certainly shut the website down. And it'd be fairly straightforward for any lawyer.

 

[R. Richard]

The key here is for ISPs to require sites that they host to have insurance. Most of the thieves in the Internet have no real assets and suing them for everything they have is not practical. However, if they have insurance, then the insurance company might provide some money. Also, the real edge of the world guys couldn;t afford insurance in the first place.

JMHO.