Battling Piracy of Your Books and Stealing Royalties

 This is a warning to ALL authors out there, whether you are traditionally or self published. BEWARE of unscrupulous people pirating your hard work and stealing your well deserved royalties by stealing your books and e-pubs and turning around and hawking them on such sites as EBay, Youtube and other sites.

As I was meandering around the internet the other night I happened to look at my own book trailers on You Tube to see how they were fairing. Much to my chagrin under the title “Curse of The Salute” I saw where someone was advertising on You Tube a link to my and other e-pubs for people to go there and receive copies of said books. Needles to say I was quite UPSET.

A little further research, by googling titles of my books revealed on google other sites such as EBay and other links offering not only printed versions of my book(s) but e-pubs as well! Someone on EBay was selling one of my books for $18+ !!!!! Over twice what it is going for on Amazon!!!!!

These people are not only stealing ‘Indie’ authors’ works, but such names as Stephen King, John Grisham, and many others.

A simple way to determine if any of your books are being pirated is to first GOOGLE your titles, and scroll through all the listings. Also check out Youtube by inserting your titles into the search bar, and the same with EBay.

I am disgusted that this is happening, and it appears that it is beginning to be the ‘in’ thing to do . . . THEFT of copyrighted material. One of the sites mentioned something as ignorant and UNTRUE about ‘intellectual property rights” being expired. Well, let me inform you that has no bearing on a COPYRIGHTED work. Your copyright is in effect throughout your lifetime, and in most cases a good amount of years FOLLOWING your demise, so they are blowing smoke up someone’s tutu!!!

If you happen to find one or more of your books being pirated, there is a link that you can follow that will give you explicit (although lengthy) steps to follow to aid in combating this problem, as it seems that the only to achieve any results is to take the bull by the horns on our own. Most “Indie” authors cannot afford attorneys, or their fees, but if enough of us take the time to follow through with finding ISP’s for these thieves and getting them shut down, perhaps the word will get around that we are not going to stand still for PIRACY of our copyrighted works.

I know we all work hard on our writing and want to get our dues in the way of royalties so it behooves us to take action to ensure that these THIEVES are not countermanding our efforts.

If you find any of your works as mentioned above, and you really do not want to or do not have the time to follow through with these steps, I will gladly do the follow up for you, and provide you with the offenders information, but you will have to file the complaint on your own to the ISP provider, EBAY, YouTube, or whomever is providing the outlet for these thieves.

I am so outraged at this that I feel that we definitely need to do something about it. As authors we need to support each other and take action to ensure that our work is protected. If the legal system itself isn’t enough to scare off these mongrels, then maybe when their outlets are SHUT DOWN, they will get the message that we mean business.

This is the link to a PDF that gives explicit instructions on how to follow up on obtaining the information needed to report and shut down these thieves:

http://www.marketingdock.com/copyrights/dealing-with-copyright-infringement.php

Again, if you wish to illicit my assistance in tracking down ISP’s, whatever, please feel free to contact me via WordPress, or my email: anastacia55@cox.net

I will be more than happy to make these THIEVES’ lives miserable 🙂

Thank you and if you like please reblog to your author friends. Spread the word, and help stop pirating!!!!