Hi Folks,
Good to see the forum back up!
As for this little saga, you can see the
trail of events here.
In essence, from a strictly personal perspective I'm awaiting Amazon removing the US (.com) entries at the moment. They told me it would take 3-5 days to disappear completely from their database, so if they're not gone tomorrow I'll be back on the email.
My first priority was to protect Oolite itself. I was majorly concerned that these books are now widely circulated enough that they might show up on the radar of those with an interest in the overall copyright of 'Elite' - and if they perceived someone was trying to make money out of it they might come down on the whole operation like a ton of proverbial.
Second I was clearly alarmed that it was possible for my books (and a bunch of others authors' works) to be 'published' in this fashion.
Third, someone was making money out of my work!
Fourth, they were blatantly (and amazon too) disregarding CC SA-BY-NC
The situation was a bit confused. Some of my books were published and listed as 'Author:Peter Michelsen', others were under my name and others were under 'Author:Drew Wager' (sic) !
I immediately asked Amazon to remove them via email, having failed to get in touch with them by phone. They responded with a request for documentation which I duly provided. Delay, delay...
In the interim, I immediately blogged, faced and tweeted about the problem, and many folks came to my rescue, blatting the books on amazon with negative views and virtual cries of 'Stop Thief'
Next I found that amazon had changed all instances of of 'Peter Michelsen' with respect to my books to 'Drew Wagar'. All fine and dandy, but bearing in mind my highest priority above, left me exclusively in the firing line. I wasn't entirely comfortable with this obviously!
Further emails threatening legal action were required before Amazon agreed to take them down entirely. .co.uk have already managed this, still waiting for .com
As disembodied rightly says, I can only do this on my own copyright. I can't help the other authors other than notifying them. Fortunately our 'thief' was rather inept, and had kept the thumbnail title pages intact on many of the books, enabling me to track the original owners. However, Amazon isn't treating these as a single event.
I can't force them to pursue the reseller and they won't release his contact information (probably fake anyway) to me, so I can pursue him elsewhere.
I've no idea how bad this problem is, so I set up a forum hoping to corral enough support to at least go to amazon et al with some positive suggestions rather than a flame war.
And that's pretty much where I've got to... Made for an interesting week!
Cheers,
Drew.
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