Filed against FREE books that are being charged for. Google Play, you naughty people!
Charging for books that aren’t yours, weren’t uploaded by the writer and are being hosted without his consent or permission.
Obviously I’ve told them, any money made on the sales of those books are mine.
I’ll let you know how those requests work out. And if I get any money or not.
They examined my DMCA request and found in my favour.
The offending title has been taken down.
This took 21 days from initial request.
I’ve filed numerous more requests now.
Hopefully those will be processed quicker.
Word back about the gay vampire story sent to Lethe Press.
Got a response back in less than a day!
A no but for two very good, well explained reasons. Excellent feedback, thoroughly nice chap by the sound of it.
Oh. And I’ve also had an email from Google. I’m in a queue to be processed, apparently.
I wonder if that’s why it’s so damn difficult to submit a DMCA request then. They’ve got so many?
I had another email about something else but I’ll tell you more about that when a concrete date is sent to me.
So I recently discovered some of my titles on Google Play.
I hadn’t put them there.
I checked them, the titles had been changed, as had the covers. The content was still untouched. My copyrighted content.
I read a sample of one. And then I worked out where it had been taken from.
It still had the Feedbooks metatags inside it. Thanks for making my job easier, thief!
So I embarked on getting them removed. Why was I doing this? For the following reasons.
1) I didn’t place these on Google Play myself.
2) The covers and titles were changed without my permission.
3) The books are distributed with DRM on them, something I personally don’t agree with.
Google Play aren’t charging for these titles. I just don’t like that someone took my books and put them on Google Play under different titles (and covers) but STILL under my name. I’m very proud of my covers, I make most of them myself. I’m also pretty proud of my titles, they take a while to come up with and generally reflect the content of the ebook.
I emailed Cory Doctorow, noted anti-DRM campaigner. He gave me this useful gem.
By law Google have to prominently display information about how to make a DMCA request throughout their site.
Thanks Cory, useful to know. Shall we see how easy it is to file a request?
On the book page, far underneath is this:- Report: Flag as inappropriate.
Clicking that link takes you to a 2nd page that offers you 5 different choices.
I want Trademark or copyright infringement.
You are then offered 2 more choices. I want the content removal form.
There are 5 more options. I want Submit A Legal Request.
Clicking that FINALLY gets me to the Removing Content From Google page.
So I’ve jumped through 5 different hoops for Google just to get STARTED on ONE DMCA request.
After clicking 4 more different things, you get to the ACTUAL take-down request.
9 hoops to leap through. Now I ask you, does that sound like it’s prominently displayed?
And I have to do that for each of the titles listed. Oh no, I can’t say “take down everything that’s got my name on it!”?
I have to tell them where it is on Google, where MY legal version of it is.
Then I have to listen to them threaten me with $100,000 fines for misfiling.
Read THIS:-
IMPORTANT: Misrepresentations made in your notice regarding whether material or activity is infringing may expose you to liability for damages (including costs and legal fees). Courts have found that you must consider copyright defences, limitations or exceptions before sending a notice. In one case involving online content, a company paid more than USD100,000 in costs and legal fees after targeting content protected by the US fair-use doctrine. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact a lawyer.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound REMOTELY intimidating, does it?
Good old “friendly” Google. And I bet you thought they were the nice guys, right?
raywriteswrongs 