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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

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Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#81

Post by QuantumG »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #74

This is so annoying. I've written multiple books and seen many types of piracy. The most annoying is piracy that Amazon could prevent with the work of an intern. They've shown little interest in this. Authors have little pull because Amazon is the only player for book selling. (I know there are other places to sell books, I've used them. Better to focus on Amazon for passive sales.)

> The most annoying is piracy that Amazon could prevent with the work of an intern.

Do tell. In the gigantic ocean that is Amazon's marketplace, what do you suppose a single intern could do that would not be immediately circumvented?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#82

Post by thaumasiotes »

qiqitori wrote: post #72
thaumasiotes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example book just has the same name. It should be defensible; you can write under any name you want. Amazon itself is the entity attributing the book to the more famous Jane Friedman. This is a case where the "impersonator" appears to be legally fine and Amazon is on questionable ground.

You can write under any name you want, depending on your intent. If your intent is to deceive, you probably can't. Here's an example of a literary forgery ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_forgery ) where the author ended up in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries ... But it would probably take some digging to see what particular action he was had for.

He stated outright that the author of the diaries was the same Adolf Hitler who led the Nazi party, and sold the diaries for over a million deutschmarks on that assurance. It's not very complex.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#83

Post by QuantumG »

crtified wrote: post #12

It's interesting as a lifetime low socioeconomic person, for whom (almost) the entire modern paradigm of social media and major web corporations are, and always have been, both socially and financially unaffordable. I watch on from the outside, researching, reading and watching as I please (and yes, that means I am some kind of perma-pirate, I guess*), and all this kind of crap - waves hand in general direction of FA…

Smug dropout is smug.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#84

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

opportune wrote: post #66
nomat wrote: post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

I think AI is going to make it harder to separate the signal from the noise, though. We’re already seeing this play out with sites like Amazon that are just full of cheap junk that’s blatantly ripped off and undercut in price, or Google as people are complaining about the quality of search results.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#85

Post by photonpsd »

mcphage wrote: post #70
photonpsd wrote: post #38

Instead of "working" with Amazon to get one of these books removed (sounds super fun), here's a solution I could help an author implement: attach an NFT to each "official" book sold. Either at payment (for digital copies; might require marketplace buy-in) and/or via an NFC in the book binding. Use the token/NFC as a means of authentication, and a way connect with the author, other fans, etc.

How does that help solve the problem, especially given it's a problem that the marketplace isn't interested in solving?

only "official" books that were written by the author would come accompanied with a token that verifies it; to side-step marketplaces (at least on physical copies), publishers could embedded an NFC chip into the book, consumer taps it with their phone to auth it; token also gets access to special discord, early release of author's next book, etc

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#86

Post by paranoidrobot »

kneebonian wrote: post #41
optimalsolver wrote: post #3

Pre-LLM content is going to become the most valuable substance known to man. Don't blame Reddit and the like for circling wagons around it.

If you think reddit is genuine human content I have same bad news for you buddy.

Depends on the sub.

One which are just image/video links? Large amounts of it is bot-generated/reposted content.

Locality and specialised subs it's mostly humans, even if some of them are astroturfing for some brand.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#87

Post by citizenpaul »

spicyusername wrote: post #47
nomat wrote: post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.

I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#88

Post by cycomanic »

imgabe wrote: post #49
ke88y wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course the actual entity posting the fraudulent books are probably overseas somewhere Amazon is an international, but is certainly bound by the laws of the United States of America. At least the ones it can't buy itself out of. "I didn't know" isn't an affirmative defense if your employees are on the record saying they know.

I think Amazon wouldn't say they didn't know, but that it's not their responsibility. For example if Random House published a book that libeled someone, and Amazon sold it, you would sue Random House and the author for libel, not Amazon. Likewise, Amazon would tell you to go sue the publisher, who is probably judgement-proof in some way.

The better example is a store that sells counterfeit goods (and continues to sell it even after being made aware). In most countries if they are a small shop they get closed down very quickly, now if they are Amazon ... crickets.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#89

Post by photonpsd »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #67
photonpsd wrote: post #38

Instead of "working" with Amazon to get one of these books removed (sounds super fun), here's a solution I could help an author implement: attach an NFT to each "official" book sold. Either at payment (for digital copies; might require marketplace buy-in) and/or via an NFC in the book binding. Use the token/NFC as a means of authentication, and a way connect with the author, other fans, etc.

How would that stop people from getting ripped off by fakes?

fakes wouldn't come with a token that verifies the book is authentic. They are doing the same thing with luxury watches and fashion items. i.e. the real Gucci purse comes with an NFT, (likely NFT + NFC) for authentication and coms with the brand.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#90

Post by fractallyte »

Books are published - either by a publisher, or by the author. That's the equivalent of a 'checksum'.

The author should be able to provide to Amazon/Goodreads a list of publishers for their book. Any publisher not on this list should be prevented from selling the title.

If someone wants to impersonate an author, they'd have to also impersonate a publisher - a much bigger legal risk.

Simple solution.

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