How do you stop the pirates from uploading your book?

[Hannah]

Are you sure that the upload is your book? Did you upload it? Links for mine were not my own work.

[Hannah]

Is your wok copywrited? If so, you can sue those sights. Email them a legal sounding document or hire a lawyer. That works.

[Shuvom]

Wait, what's the problem?

SO MANY people want your book that they're going through all the extra effort of SPECIFICALLY searching it out on websites?

Considering that 99.9% of all indies authors never get 10 strangers to read their work, getting known enough to be pirated is...GOOD.

Your book is $2.99, not $10.99 like other pirated ebooks, so while it may rub you the wrong way ("They're stealing my effort!"), embrace and engage those pirate fans- if research holds, they're probably your most enthusiastic fans, who are spreading your work like a thousand little Johnny Appleseeds!

From another indie author, that's the only way to deal with pirates- use them.

[Jacqueline]

I get how your feel, Kevin, but Shuvon's right. Just let it go. It's a drop in the bucket. Very few people pirate. Most purchase as long as it's easy. I don't believe in DRM. I don't add it to any of my ebooks. Those that will pay don't care; those that won't know how to strip it.

They steal trad. published authors too. It doesn't perpetuate any stigma. It circulates popular work. Just have an announcement in your books saying how you don't support the practice and how writing is hard work and please support indie authors, blah, blah.

The karma will come back around. Don't waste your time stressing about things you can't control.

[Jacqueline]

No, I understand completely. I have a handmade jewelry business and my pictures get stolen quite often. (I can see my own hand in the pictures! And sometimes my traditional artwork) Pictures of one of a kind pieces. Chinese pirates claim they can make these designs and artwork upon order, thereby making money based on my unique designs. Seriously, I have some that I've never, ever seen anywhere else.

Point is, I message the wholesale website to punish the thieve, I have to sign up for an account, I get spammed by the wholesaler, and the thieve takes down the photo, signs up with a new account and starts again. Rinse, repeat.

There will always be people without talent or ethics who will steal from you. Always. You can spend your time chasing them forever and ever.

Or you can spend your time making new product, marking it so when people enjoy it they know who it's from and then make more.

This isn't about others making money off your work. This is about how to best expend your energy.

Your choice.

[Alesha]

Dang, they've got one of my books up there too. Offering it in epub, doc, and pdf formats.

Ah, well...

[Alesha]

Kevin,

I sympathize with what you're saying. We love the fact that people (if any at all, who really knows?) are downloading our books from that site, but the uploader is possibly making $$$ off of it.

At this point, I've got bigger things on my plate, and I never used DRM on my books, and don't plan to anytime soon. For you, the case may be different, and you may feel you need to make sure the site takes your book down and keeps it down. I do wish you luck, and I have no clue of how an author would stop this, especially if the book is back up again.

[Ros]

One thing you might try is making it harder for your book to be found on pirate websites via the search engines, to starve them of the traffic they need to keep making money. You might try writing a blog post that mentions words like "torrent" "free" and "download", plus the titles of your work. Another approach might be to write short stories or even novellas that feature those words in the titles. If the top results for those those kind of searches are all legitimate websites most people will give up and do something easier.

I don't buy the idea that piracy helps spread the word about little-known authors. Most torrent searches I find in my logs (I have a rant about this topic that's linked sitewide, so I get a few) are for specific authors and books: these people are already aware of the writers whose work they want to infringe.

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

Do the uploads also strip any copyright, front or back pages? If just drm stripped and uploaded, you may have more luck with readers helping. Putting a notice on copyright page (and smaller ones buried once in odd spot of book and end page) similar to the "if you've purchasd this book without a cover..." To "if you've downloaded this book for free ..." citing those sites specifically as not authorized to have your book, free or not; that your book is not available for free (or if ever free put a note directing them to your website to check for authorized download links). If stripping copyrights and such, that might not help either.

Very hard to handle internet piracy issues, particulalry since U.S. laws and DCMA not always applicable and even the FTC has constraints on foreign actions. Don't stop the cease and desist requests. Keep a record and keep filing FTC reports so that it goes to show persistenly ignoring (other poster was coreect in that a work got uploaded to a site, reported, taken down as requested is something okay — but if it keeps happening then the site is liable for not taking actions to prevent what was a preventable reoccurrence; I doubt the pirated version uploaded had drm protections intact where host site could not check a file uploaded that likely had a description saying it was your book). Persistence and documentation helps.

Keep at the site PTB, whoever owns the services, whoever is hosting the website, check any available contact emails in case you get lucky and it's an ISP provider like att for something like "support.thievingb*#^tardssite@att.net", pacnet, hotmail, whoever. Check their sites for where to report abuse or intellectual property theft. If not found try abuse@, spoof@, help@, support@, info@...

If anything lowpriced for sale via paypal or credit card lowpriced, burn a disposable credit card. Now you can tell the credit card company (visa/mastercard, etc. — you are really in luck if they took paypal because paypal is tough) and any merchant account service showing on credit card receipt or tracked by cc comoany. Do not annoy or persist with isp or email service providers, credit card companys or pay portals, merchant accounts, etc. - they just get a nicely worded letter thatyou have become aware that your property continually on thieving website in violation of copyright. and thievingb*#^tardssite.com are involved in an ongoing theft of intellectual property/piracy issue. It does hurt the thieving site to lose isp, site hosting, merchant accounts, etc. they'll just get new ones but annoying and likely to be at higher rates. Not sure how legal (no lawyer) but annoyance can be effective if not illegal.

And the message on the copyright page can spread word of the mouth that any copy of your eboook obtained free, unless a link provided by your website, ain't a legal one.

Individuals fighting piracy - uphill battle and little likely effective, certainly not quickly. Aything going to court or lawsuit route – look around for writers organizations, associations, that might have author copyright fight help. For other authors also victimized by site that might go class-action (not a lawyer, but I'm orettynsure that's actually the wrong word for copyright battle), do very similar worded complaints to FTC and other places.

Be careful about citing exaxt site names in public posts and groups. Not because they could sue you for your comments, but, because you can actually drive traffic to their websites from exactly the pirates..er..readers you don't want.

Don't stop persisting and have them say "gee, we assumed everything was okay since we hadn't heard from him in a while."