News
Unauthorized Fanfic Downloads

As feliciacraft kindly pointed out in the shoutbox, ebooks-tree.com has been downloading fics from AO3 (and perhaps other sites) and posting them for download as ebooks, without the consent of the writers.

How you can tell if they have your fic:

Go to ebooks-tree.com and in the top search bar, enter any username that you use to publish your fic. If it says "Searching "username" books (0)", then they don't have anything of yours, but if links show up with your fic titles, they do.

Do not bother trying to download any stories they have because you need to register to do so. During the registration process, they claim that they need your credit card information which is incredibly shady. DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION!

What to do if they have your fic:

Go to the contact page at http://www.ebooks-tree.com/info.php?contacts and make the subject line read: "DMCA Complaint". Use the following template with your information (it's recommended that you only use your username they have listed, not your legal name). The parts in italics need to be personalized:

A story/stories was/were copied onto your website without permission. The original story/stories, to which I own the exclusive copyrights, can be found at:

Link(s) to an authorized version of your work (whether on EF, AO3, tumblr, LJ or somewhere else)

The unauthorized and infringing copy/copies can be found at:

Link(s) to the unauthorized works (link to the pdf, the mobi and the page hosting all of it - just right click the links and hit copy link location so you can paste them in)

This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to effect removal of the above-reported infringement. I request that you immediately remove the specified story/stories and refrain from posting the infringing story/stories to your website in the future. Please be advised that law requires you to "expeditiously remove or disable access to" the infringing story/stories upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by me, the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I swear under penalty of perjury that I am the copyright holder.

Please send me a prompt response at the email address below indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.

Thank you.

/s/Your Name

Your email address

How did they get your fic: 

It seems that the site probably used bots to mass download from the bigger fanfic sites (especially AO3). AO3 is doing a good job of posting updates about the situation and trying to prevent it from happening again. However, there's only so much they, or any site for that matter, can do. The very nature of putting your work up on the internet makes you susceptible to this kind of thing.

How this affects Elysian Fields:

At this point, it doesn't seem that any work was taken from Elysian Fields, but we're a small fish in a big pond. Chances are we slipped under the bot radar since we're not a giant archive like FFN or AO3. All the story pages are protected under our robots.txt file, but so were A03's. Those files can be ignored by unscrupulous bots. AO3 has an option for authors to choose to only allow their fics to be shown to registered users, and I'm sure I can code something to make that feature available here as well. However, we already lock down NC-17 and AO fics, and we do take a bit of grief just for that. I figured I'd throw it out there as an option and see if it's wanted here. Also, I'm open to any other suggestions you might have to make authors feel more secure about posting stories here.



--Susan on April 14, 2015 06:26am 1 Comment
Comments

Here is some more info with an update.

 

http://hils79.tumblr.com/post/116371672514/ao3org-fyeahcopyright-update-below-weve

-- pfeifferpack on April 14, 2015 11:52am