Gini Graham Scott - Internet Book Piracy: The Fight to Protect Authors, Publishers, and Our Culture

Copyright 2016 by Gini Graham Scott

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-62153-485-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62153-495-2

Printed in the United States of America.

About the Author

G INI G RAHAM S COTT HAS PUBLISHED over fifty books with mainstream publishers, focusing on social trends, work and business relationships, and personal and professional development. Some of these books include The New Middle Ages, Lies and Liars: How and Why Sociopaths Lie and How You Can Detect and Deal with Them, The Very Next New Thing, The Talk Show Revolution , and The Privacy Revolution.

She has gained extensive media interest for previous books, including appearances on Good Morning America, Oprah, Montel Williams, CNN, and hundreds of radio interviews. She has frequently been quoted by the media and has set up websites to promote her most recent books, featured at www.ginigrahamscott.com and www.changemakerspublishingandwriting.com. As of this writing, she has about sixty thousand listings in Google Search Results.

She has become a regular Huffington Post blogger since December 2012 (www.huffingtonpost.com/gini-graham-scott) and has a Facebook page featuring her books and films at www.facebook.com/changemakerspublishing.

She has written, produced, and sometimes directed over sixty short videos, which are featured on her Changemakers Productions website at www.changemakersproductions.com and on YouTube at www.youtube.com/changemakersprod.

Her screenplays, mostly in the drama, crime, legal thriller, and sci-fi genres, include several that consider the social implications of science and technological breakthroughs and changes in society, including The New Child, New Identity, Dead No More, Tax Revolt, and The Suicide Party. Her first feature film, Suicide Party Save Dave , was released in 2015. A film by the same director, Driver , will be released in 2016.

She has a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley and MAs in anthropology, pop culture and lifestyles, and organizational/consumer/audience behavior, and recreation and tourism from Cal State, East Bay. She is getting an MA in communications there in June 2017.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I NTERNET B OOK P IRACY PROVIDES AN overview of the problem of piracy, which is threatening not only the livelihood of professional writers and the survival of many publishers, but also our culture, since many writers and publishers will stop writing and publishing because they can no longer afford to do so. Piracy has always been with us since the beginnings of writing, as one writer copied the writings of another. Just think of the monks copying manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Later, the development of the printing press made sharing the written word even easier. And in the last decade, the creation of ebooks has perpetrated copying and sharing material, as they can easily be duplicated and shared even when there are digital management locks since these can be broken, and printed books can be readily scanned. Thus piracy has become more rampant than ever, so that many millions of books have been stolen and made available as ebooks or PDFs for free or with payment to the pirates. The cost to individual writers and the book industry has been in the billions of dollars.

This book features twenty-three chapters, which describe:

The extent and cost of the problem both in the US and globally

The battles of the music and film industry against piracy

The slow response of writers and publishers to the problem

How some publishers have taken the pirates to court and won

How to find out who the pirates are

The new tools and weapons in the arsenal to fight pirates

How the copyright law protects against infringement

The procedures and penalties provided by copyright law

What law enforcement is doing to stop the pirates

How to get pirates to remove your book from their websites

Ways to protect your material from infringement

Strategies to use the pirates to monetize your material

And more

A final section lists resources and major pirate sites, so writers can check if their own books have been illegally posted and report violations to writers, publishers, law enforcement, and the pirate monitoring and takedown services. It also includes various writer organizers, government agencies, and Internet sources to turn to for help.

It begins with a brief introduction to why I was inspired to write this book, followed by a section of interviews, also contained in the documentary series The Battle Against Internet Piracy , which is planned for release to the educational, library, and cable markets in 2016. These include the following:

representative voices sharing the opinions of writers, self-publishers, and publishers who have been victimized by pirates;

researchers and students involved in obtaining pirated materials although they dont call themselves pirates;

a free-speech advocate discussing the competing claims of free speech and copyright protection;

an intellectual property lawyer discussing the problems of protecting Internet piracy and finding alternate ways to use piracy to your own advantage;

and a technology developer offering a platform to help writers and publishers offer their writing and make a profit.

These interviews represent a sampling of the range of experiences and opinions in todays struggle against the problem of piracy.

Discovering the Problem of Internet Book Piracy

I never thought much about the problem of Internet book piracy until it happened to me about two years ago in the winter of 2013. At the time, I was struggling with the many other problems confronting professional writers, making it harder than ever to make a living, turning more and more writers into a dying breed. One problem is that professional writers are being buried by millions of writers writing books and articles for free, so the value of their own writing goes down. Another problem is that the traditional publishers look to celebrities and well-known authorities with platforms, giving them the six-figure and million-dollar book deals, while the offers to other writers have dried up or provided much smaller advances or nothing upfront, since the publishers themselves are under seige with reduced sales and income. Some publishers have even turned to requiring authors to commit to buying a few thousand books. This high cost far outweighs any advance, if in fact there is one offered. And automated software is now writing simple books and articles, where readers cant tell the difference. In some research, readers even thought the machine-written content was created by the real writers, and the writing by real writers was created by the machines.