Violated, and not in a good way

[Member389]

So after reading a story from one of my favorite authors on here DreamCloud I went to his profile to find that due to theft of his works he has stopped posting stories, which is sad because he's a damn fine writer.

I took it upon myself to read up on the Amazon E-Book copyrights but none of my stories, that I'm aware of, have ended up there. (I guess I need to work on making my work more accessible to the thieves who could make someone famous from my work.)

My question to you my fellow writers is, have you had any luck getting your work removed from other websites besides Amazon with a DMCA takedown? I found three sites that have hijacked my work, word-for-word and posted them elsewhere.
http://www.eroticstoriesofsex.com/
http://unlimitedsexstories.com
and
http://wellsexstories.com/

As well as some clown that posted the first paragraph of one of my stories on Adult Friend Finder but didn't claim it as his own, my Lit name is on it and it says to read the rest here on Literotica, without a link mind you.

 

[Darkniciad]

Don't stress over it. It's a given when you post on a free site. No matter what controls are put in place, people will circumvent them and steal your stuff.

Chasing after them is an endless game of whack-a-mole, and you're more than likely going to encounter malware eventually clicking the links.

Most of these sites don't last long. They typically present the stories with such crappy formatting that they're damn near unreadable. Half of them only reprint the first page.

It's just not worth the time and effort for a momentary victory if you do get your story pulled or the site taken down. They'll just be back with a new URL in a couple of weeks, if they don't already have a backup site running, just waiting for the current main site to get shut down.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

As a child I learned REAL PRAISE is THEFT and PLAGIARISM.

Whatever I do well gets stolen.

Theft is honest flattery.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

I've done DCMA takedowns twice. Both worked. For a site owner, deleting one story takes seconds, but dealing with DCMA in any way, shape or form is an unknown amount of hassle and damage, and they won't risk it over one stupid story. I didn't have to release anything like full biographical details either.

My reasons aren't economic. I want all my feedback going to me, in one place, pure and simple.

JBJ's right in that theft is flattery; but he's also wrong because thieves don't seem to choose well, in my very limited experience. One ripped off Becoming Marie, my first story here, and very much a niche product, sci/fi/mind control/domination. It rated pretty well but it's not the sort of thing that's going to pull in many readers. The guy that ripped it off re-titled, and his choice of title screamed "I'm asian and English is not my primary language and I don't really understand what I stole and I can't even tell my title doesn't fit". My guess is if you rarely post stories ("he's not active, he won't notice") but they get the Hs ("obviously this is good, not that I could tell") - you'll be a target eventually.

There's no way to stop thieves. Even if Lit had some sort of locked down reader, thieves would just take pictures of the pages and OCR them. There's no stopping theft.

The best defense would be if Literotica wrote a script to grab random phrases out of random stories and Googled them, hundreds of times a day. On a hit, grab a few more phrases from that story to double check, and then flag the site for a human to check out. Not very hard, and you could even teach it to drop out character names to stymie thieves who search-and-replace on names. But having found them, what would Lit do about it? Maybe the author did it deliberately. So they'd be stuck with notifying authors, some of who would opt out of the notifications because they post lots of places. Meh. More work for Lit and little gain for them.

Maybe I'll write that script myself, and hand it out to anyone who cares. Hm.

 

[Bramblethorn]

JBJ's right in that theft is flattery; but he's also wrong because thieves don't seem to choose well, in my very limited experience.

Some of those thieves aren't even human; I've seen some stuff that was obviously ripped off by bots that were just set to trawl Lit for stories.

The best defense would be if Literotica wrote a script to grab random phrases out of random stories and Googled them, hundreds of times a day. On a hit, grab a few more phrases from that story to double check, and then flag the site for a human to check out.

Probably wouldn't even need to write it from scratch. I'd guess some of the existing anti-plagiarism products could be used for this purpose - not that the "sample random phrases and google them" bit is particularly arduous, but products like Turnitin do a good job of showing just how much has been pinched and from where.

But, like you say, legitimate duplication and the whack-a-mole nature of piracy would be problems.

 

[DreamCloud]

As a note, getting stories taken down from Amazon is a breeze. The problem is, they will never allow them to be sold there again. They are in "dispute" and Amazon has not the time or inclination to be a judge. The real author simply loses his/her rights because there's no money in it for Amazon. Can't blame them since they add 100s of thousands of books a year.

Yeah, I know. I could get a lawyer and probably solve the issue in time. Not enough money in it for me as well.

Now that the thefts are automated, I simply won't add any more fodder to the mix. It's a game of numbers. They will probably only make $10 on each book they steal but steal a few thousand and it begins to add up.

It's sad. I belong to a writing group where the authors struggle for years to get their work published. Here, we can have thousands of readers in a day and none of the hassles of trying to struggle doing signings and hawking your own books.

Just so you know, the bots don't seem to steal books that are in parts. They go for the easy HTML grab that doesn't require reassembly, just paging and scrapping. Either that, or my books written in parts suck.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

That's a very lazy bot. It'll follow pages but not chapters? They're probably afraid they'll scoop incomplete stories, but who says a one chapter story is complete?

Still, both of my stolen ones were single postings. Hm.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's a very lazy bot. It'll follow pages but not chapters? They're probably afraid they'll scoop incomplete stories, but who says a one chapter story is complete?

Still, both of my stolen ones were single postings. Hm.

I've had a bot steal chunks out of my chapter story, but they didn't even pinch a whole chapter, let alone the rest of the book. Even the bit they did steal ended up practically unreadable, full of %s. I presume that site was just trying to collect porn-y looking content in the hope of catching occasional web searches and then inflicting malware on anybody who clicked.

Somebody on Amazon did steal the whole story, but I'm pretty sure that was a human.

 

[Hypoxia]

Anything posted on the net can and will be harvested.

That's the reality. Don't like it? Don't post.

 

[DreamCloud]

Useless Update

A bunch of readers sent me emails today. Amazon may not let me sell my stories, but they certainly allow the thieves.

A bunch of mine, and probably yours.

I just got a notification of the first removal, now I have to spend an evening getting rid of the rest. This is the second time for most of the stories. This, after they told me they were in dispute and I can't sell them. Something fishy going on......

 

[Handley_Page]

US Copyright Law shake-up

Take a butchers' at this then:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/us_copyright_law/

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Take a butchers' at this then:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/us_copyright_law/

Hmmm...the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal leaning federal court in the nation. If you want a verdict that goes your way, make sure the 9th hears it.

Any good ruling that come out of the 9th are hidden away so you can't see them online or are silent verdicts.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (in case citations, 9th Cir.) is a U.S. Federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:

District of Alaska
District of Arizona
Central District of California
Eastern District of California
Northern District of California
Southern District of California
District of Hawaii
District of Idaho
District of Montana
District of Nevada
District of Oregon
Eastern District of Washington
Western District of Washington

It also has appellate jurisdiction over the following territorial courts:

District of Guam
District of the Northern Mariana Islands

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the Ninth Circuit is by far the largest of the thirteen courts of appeals, with 29 active judgeships.