AUTHORS PLEASE READ…
Do you have hard-copy books out, in or out of print? See this notice from Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has issued an alert on copyright infringement by the Internet Archive. Other professional writers’ groups taking notice include the UK’s Society of Authors, which has posted an alert on its website, and the USA’s Authors Guild and National Writers Union, which have alerted their members.
Strauss posts the full notice from SFWA. What’s more, SFWA will generate a “takedown notice” for you that you can immediately email if your book is included on the offending site.
You can search the site easily to see if any of your titles are involved. I found that searching for a character’s name within the book text generated the best response.
Possibly you may not be concerned at having a pirated version of your book…
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Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
Let’s hope that this isn’t just another email click-farm operation as we’ve run into in the past, Chris – one that collects email addresses of those authors who complain about supposed copyright infringement. Their IP address might lead to that physical location pictured in the original blog, but who’s to say this site is not actually being run by pirates in a basement somewhere in Russia or China? I’ve already been suckered by a “company” like this once and received no response from them whatsoever, but instead just a nasty computer virus after sending in the site’s “takedown” notice. What actually needs to happen is for the site to be taken down altogether because, like those other sites we discovered over the past few years, this one likely has nothing to do with infringing on copyright at all.
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Thanks for the heads-up! I had a look and they’ve listed a few of my old out-of-print titles from Random House there, scraped from Amazon or library database listings by the appearance, but no content. I’ll certainly send a take-down if I spot anything of mine – or a bill! I’ve seen it argued that piracy is good for authors because it’s ‘advertising’, but unless you’re a best-selling author, it also reflects lost income in a business where every sale counts in practical ways. The problem, of course, is enforcing those copyrights – particularly internationally. Bah!
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Good Luck with it, Matthew 😎
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Thanks, Chris. Thankfully, none of my books were there ❤
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GREAT, Tina ❤
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Thanks Chris for sharing Virgina Anderson’s post. I checked the site she mentioned and fortunately none of my books are on their free list. Have also posted on https://www.facebook.com/EurobodallaWriters/posts/1653818358018088 🙂
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Thanks, Suzanne 😀
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I had a wake-up call about copyrights after randomly using images from Google. I enjoyed the post!
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