Gray area: my eBook piracy moral dilemma

It’s finally happened. One of my eBooks has been pirated and ended up for free download. I’ve officially arrived.

I’m not giving them traffic with a link but here’s a screenshot:

Now anyone can save themselves the bank breaking 99 cents that Beyond Amazon, eBay, and Etsy costs and download it for free… Or can they?

The link above advertises not only every possible eBook format for free download but also the audiobook.

Um… there is no audiobook. I keep meaning to record an audio version and for half a second I thought maybe they’d saved me the trouble but, no, all is not what it seems. Both the links to download the eBooks and the mysterious audiobook actually only download an exe file that isn’t my book at all… it’s a virus.

Now here’s where I’m having a little moral dilemma. I COULD track down contact info for the site and try to make them remove the page or take some other drastic action. But that seems like a lot of trouble and, in a way, isn’t this site doing me a bit of a favor? Someone tries to download an illegal copy of my book and, whammo, they’ll by punished with a virus teaching them a valuable lesson. So maybe the best thing to do is just sit back and see how this pans out.

I know. I’m terrible.

What would you do?

3 Comments

AnnaLisa on May 10, 2014 at 9:41 am

Woo! That’s a tough one…

The times I’ve tried to pursue plagiarists who’ve taken copy from my site, I’ve gotten nowhere. They’re really clever about hiding site ownership, bold about continuing to steal more and more, and my experience is that web hosts are completely uninterested in removing the stolen material from their servers or shutting down the bad accounts. This was true even with a site I went after that consisted of NOTHING original. I traced a handful of other people whose material, like mine, had been taken and reprinted with no permission and no attribution. We all complained to the site owner individually, and we all complained to the host when the site owner not only didn’t respond to our direct contact, but went on to shut down blog comments when we asked for help that way. The host was just as unresponsive. And the site is STILL out there, three years later, and STILL stealing articles from various people and republishing them with no attribution every single week.

So, I’m tempted to say, just do your best to let it go. It’s an empty pursuit.

I know, I know. That’s an infuriatingly lame solution!

Only thing is, there’s another party getting hurt in your case. I’m betting the victim doesn’t have any idea the title he’s clicking is an illegal download. There are so many fair, legitimate sites out there that create review articles for “the best free X” and link the items back to the actual page of origin. We’re used to seeing this kind of actually, really, intentionally free stuff in those lists. Unless they happen to notice the link goes to an exe file (and let’s be honest, many people just surf along without noticing such things)….

Hillary DePiano on May 10, 2014 at 10:23 am

I had some success, ages ago, with pursuing a site that was just taking my blog posts and copying them word for word but when I even started to look into the process for this site… just as you said, it was impossible to even find contact info to begin.

While it’s annoying, I actually blogged that entire book so many people have read it for free… but there’s a big difference between my giving it away on my blog where I have ads for my other stuff and at least get the traffic and someone else doing it.

Sigh.
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