(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)
An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:
(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)
I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:
IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.
You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:
HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:
First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.
Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.
Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.
In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.
In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:
I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.
In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.
Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.
Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!
NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!
I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.
Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:
But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.
Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."
As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.
DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.
I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.
I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:
The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?
No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.
Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.
No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.
Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?
Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.
That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.
The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.
But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.
You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.
This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:
Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:
When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.
This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":
While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.
This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).
In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:
Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:
This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Copyright law: making personal copies of copyrighted work
image sourced from a Cory Doctorow article on DMCA: X (recommended reading)
creating a digital backup (legally, it's called making an "archival copy") of software is explicitly allowed. but copying or alerting books, music, vehicle operating systems, movies, shows, and so on - even those you’ve legally purchased - gets complicated due to overlapping laws
under the doctrine of "fair use," we are permitted to make backup / archival copies under certain conditions:
copyright law allows you to make copies for personal use in case the original is lost, damaged, or destroyed; or to change formats to use on new devices; or to otherwise alter or repair the original for your own personal use
all this falls within fair use
however, making a copy of copyrighted work simply for your own ease of use could be construed as copyright infringement
furthermore, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) restricts this by prohibiting "circumvention of encryption" on devices like DVDs and Blu-rays
the DMCA criminalizes making and disseminating technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (aka "digital rights management" locks or DRM), and in fact criminalizes the act of circumventing access controls, whether or not doing so infringes on the copyright of the work itself
so, unless the original work you buy is unlocked, corporations that hold the copyright of that work can prosecute you for making legal archives of the material you own
and if the thing you bought is lost or damaged, or if the file format is no longer usable? you're just out of luck
You do realize some people are neurodivergent and may not know to fully read everything, I unfollowed you because you have started becoming increasingly rude and have resorted to bullying when someone was kind enough to ask. Nobody is going to want to use your dividers when there are creators on here who aren’t as strict as you. Getting angry at people when you don’t even create the dividers yourself you steal images from google
Hey anon 🙂
Was it your ask that I answered ? If yes, the ask itself states that "I didn't tag you PROPERLY bcz I didn't want to spam your inbox" which means you knew how I prefer to be credited.
If No.... I'm sorry but It's just the same ask over and over again. It's in my rules, FAQs, recently answered asks... it's everywhere and also the asks were about the same DAMN thing.
Now, talking about strict 🙂
There's ONE rule and you're calling it strict, freeloaders always think too much of themselves yeah? I just ask to tag me and if you don't want to...Go and use other beautiful dividers from other blogs without having the BIG TIME CONSUMING RESPONSIBILITY of providing credit 🙂↕️
Thank you for unfollowing me ! I do make a lot of my own dividers without having the need to use pngs at all. So, my work will go on with or without it.
But I think you know better how to create dividers. I wish I knew who you were... Bcz I will be waiting for your artistry :)
Also, if you call that bullying...Uhm🙄 I AM GETTING INCREASINGLY RUDE? That is the reason I answered everyone with patience, every time and I lost it just once... And I became a rude person overall.
Meaning I should look out for everyone while anyone can come to my blog and speak shit through asks but I HAVE to be sweet??? Sorry but I prefer to be rude than getting walked over by anonymous people.
i personally subscribe to his mask fusing to him horrifically and he started to patch wounds with bits of scrap so hes furry and the more blood he uses the further he is to being a rabbit demon
If I, as the author, narrator, and investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.
To put this in perspective: If you were to simply locate this book on a pirate torrent site and download it without paying for it, your penalty under copyright law is substantially less punitive than the penalty I would face for helping you remove the audiobook I made from Amazon’s walled garden. What’s more, if you were to visit a truck stop and shoplift my audiobook on CD from a spinner rack, you would face a significantly lighter penalty for stealing a physical item than I would for providing you with the means to take a copyrighted work that I created and financed out of the Amazon ecosystem. Finally, if you were to hijack the truck that delivers that CD to the truck stop and steal an entire fifty-three-foot trailer full of audiobooks, you would likely face a shorter prison sentence than I would for helping you break the DRM on a title I own.
Someone uploaded my scrubbed and copyrighted version of Accidental MerDer (Flotsam and Jetsam) comic on a uh... well an adult website lol. Shoutout to the person who just let me know!
But, yeah. I've filed a DMCA, but please know that if you find it on sites like Myreadingmanga, it's been stolen and reposted without my permission and I have the copyright claim to have it removed. I have the Flotsam and Jetsam version up ONLY on amazon at this time, and while I'm working to transition away from amazon to somewhere else (payhip maybe? I don't know.) While the Accidental MerDer version is only available on my social media, Webtoons, and Tapas.
