When is a Saga really a Saga... :(

[drew]

Folks,

Just breaking silence for a bit, as I promised an update and an update is what you will get. Howdi doodily doo and all that.

I'm fighting a running (and losing) battle against pirates, privateers and ne'er-do-wells intent on flogging the Oolite Saga on Amazon. I've got to the point of sending a 'cease and desist' to Amazon regarding the appearance of the books on their sites. They've acknowledged it, but effectively admit they are powerless to prevent scammers from pinching free ebooks, uploading them and flogging them. It's something of an epidemic. It's becoming an almost weekly admin task for me to search Amazon for errant copies and get them deleted. It's wasting time I can ill afford.

I have two solutions.

1. Pull the ebooks from the 'net entirely in an attempt to stop pirates from having a source from which to upload. I'd rather not do this, and it probably wouldn't work anyway, given the almost infinite number of archives out there.

2. Publish them 'officially' on Amazon with big disclaimers about them being free elsewhere, get the community to badger Amazon about them being free elsewhere, and wait for Amazon to set the price to £0.00.

Tether, end, near, am, I. Half wish I'd never written the damn things in the first place.

Cheers,

Drew.

[Cody]

Tether, end, near, am, I. Half wish I'd never written the damn things in the first place.

Hi Drew... that's a great shame. I'll pester Amazon as well, though as you say, it's probably futile... bah!

[Gimi]

Drew
I saw your post on twitter, and left "found cheaper here" notifications and reviews with Amazon telling them of your free offering on your site before they were removed. I will certainly do so again if needed. So I would support your solution number two.

[drew]

Thanks guys!

I'm going ahead with '2' as I've no other way out of it. Atleast I'll have some measure of control. Once they appear I'll issue some instructions for the community to bamboozle Amazon into making them 'free'. Any monies received in the interim will be made charity-tastic.

The following disclaimer will be used on the ebook entries for Amazon.

NB : This is a free creative-commons licensed ebook, and is available as such from the author's website at http://www.wagar.org.uk in Kindle format. It has been uploaded to Amazon officially by the author in order to prevent unauthorised uploads by ebook pirates. This message will be removed once Amazon sets the price to £/$/€ 0.00 (request outstanding). Any monies received by the author in the interim will be donated to charity.

Cheers,

Drew.

[JensAyton]

I'll issue some instructions for the community to *** Amazon

Under the circumstances, I suggest that’s a word you really don’t want to be using.

[drew]

Amazon are actually being helpful. Got this from them this morning.

These items were listed on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing by a third party with the understanding that they had the rights to do so. Thank you for your message. If you believe you are entitled to compensation, you may wish to contact the party who made the title available for sale on Amazon.com. Here is that party's contact information:

yan qing ruan
CHAOWANGLU ROAD,HAIDING DISTRICT
BEIJING, BEIJING CN 311400
[email protected]

Regards,

I very much doubt anyone real is that email address, but I'll pen a note regardless. Amazon are still either unable or unwilling to vet entries uploaded to their site though, so my defence of being there 'officially' seems the only logical route.

Cheers,

Drew.

[drew]

And a blog entry on the subject...

Thanks for all help, folks.

Cheers,

Drew.

[Shipbuilder]

Drew - I very much respect your stance on this and congratulations on the E books.

I intend to download them shortly (from your official source with a donation to your chosen charity)

[drew]

Thanks shipbuilder, it's much appreciated!

Throughout all the preservation and continuance of this community and the game itself is uppermost in my mind, that and respecting the copyright of David Braben and Ian Bell as appreciation for bringing us Elite in the first place.

Cheers,

Drew.

[Disembodied]

Amazon's behaviour – especially given that they are profiting financially from every sale of these and doubtless thousands of other pirated works – is pretty disgraceful. They obviously aren't even performing minimal checks on what gets uploaded: if they had checked your copyright pages, it's quite clearly stated that these stories are noncommercial. Obviously, they won't want to start having to check everything (or even anything) that gets uploaded: I suppose the best we can hope for is that eventually they (or more likely someone else, with some nous) come up with some method of creating a unique identifier for ebooks, using (say) some algorithm-based sampling of the text. That way, at worst, you'd only have to demonstrate that you were the copyright holder of a work once, rather than over and over again. It wouldn't be a universal solution, but it might prevent this cut-and-paste parasitism.