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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

#471

Post by theptip »

Pxtl wrote: post #143
theptip wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the very least, if you look at my author profile on Amazon, these junk books don’t appear. It sounds like maybe this is not happening? If they are just appearing under the search for “AuthorName” I am not sure there really is a problem with Amazon’s system. IANAL, perhaps Amazon still has some liability if an author is using a fraudulent pen name for books they submit.

Amazon's software is odd here. If I click on the name on a real Jane Friedman book, it does not include the fake books... But this is not commutative. If I click on the name on a fake Jane Friedman book, it lists out a mix of real and fake books. For example, this is a blank notebook on Amazon Canada that a seller has stuck her all-lowercase name upon. If I click the author name on the listing, I'm taken to an author…

Good analysis. It seems in the inauthentic case on the product page they are just linking “jane friedman” to a search page for that term. Wonder if there is a way of setting up a merchant account with just a label/DBA vs an extra step of claiming an author account.

Agreed it does seem like a bug.

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

#472

Post by archon810 »

stevenwliao wrote: post #231
chii wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Delightful experience. compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.

> Search for torrent or download link, click, Hope that you didn't click a sketchy ad that looks just like the download link, because the site didn't police any of its ads.

It's not reasonable to expect site operators police every ad if they use a major ad network, like Adsense. There are millions of creatives, and new ones get uploaded every minute.

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

#473

Post by fragmede »

chii wrote: post #275
Qwertious wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…

> every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN. which is fine, except what happens if the author sold the rights to another company that then demand a different set of condition? Or are you saying that the owner of said copyright does not have the right to decide such (for exa…

Or partial rights. Movie, TV series, audiobook, podcast, blog; all to different entities.

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

#474

Post by tiborsaas »

wpietri wrote: post #55
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, my big concern about LLMs is not Skynet or a zillion people out of work. It's that the spammers and their ilk are now vastly more capable. The fact that generative LLMs are glib bullshit machines is a problem for most sane uses, but a plus for people who don't give two shits about the truth as long as they've got a chance of making some money.

There's already a WordPress plugin to auto-generate articles on schedule. Probable there are dozens already.

Authenticity will be a valuable currency in the future.

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

#475

Post by staticman2 »

nofunphil wrote: post #464
warkdarrior wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one validate that the NFT was issued by the real author and not a scammer issuing NFTs in the same name?

Via a 3rd party NFT minting service. In order to create the NFTs the original author could set up an account with the 3rd party, KYC herself and then mint tokens for every book she sells. 3rd party verifies/authenticates the book + NFT

How does the book purchaser verify the third party NFT minting service verified the NFT was created by the author and not some skammer using the same name?

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

#476

Post by fineIllregister »

itsoktocry wrote: post #384
smithza wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I think Amazon brands are setup to eliminate competition due to their insider information in the market place. I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.

> I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market. They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?

Costco doesn't sell counterfeits of the third-party items they are competing against. Amazon's co-mingling practice is anti-competitive.

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

#477

Post by Pxtl »

eropple wrote: post #392
worldsayshi wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be some neat tricks you can use to allow verifying a human, using your id, without actually exposing your id though?

You can sign an intermediary certificate, but nothing stops you from then giving that to an LLM.

Well, if that cert can be traced back to its original creator, and that LLM is crapflooding, then that person can be blocked from user-contributed content systems.

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

#478

Post by LexiMax »

nofunphil wrote: post #466
LexiMax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm following your idea correctly, a prerequisite would be that we as a society would need to make it impossible to publish a book, digital or physical, without an attached NFT. It's also worth mentioning that the OP of this comment thread promised a solution that any author could implement without Amazon's involvement, presumably because Amazon is disinterested or disincentivized to care.

No. Not necessary. You only need the verified NFT linked to “authentic” books. 3rd party service does minting and verification. It’s the same strategy luxury fashion houses are using with tagging physical products with NFTs for authentication

I do not misunderstand what an NFT is theoretically technically capable of. The problem is that your proposed idea is non-responsive to the underlying problem that fakes and counterfeits are trivial to source on Amazon.

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

#479

Post by politelemon »

throwaway290 wrote: post #294
mavhc wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon don't want to pay Apple's ransom, Apple has no part in the transaction, has no costs, yet is acting as the Mafia, demanding their cut if you operate on their territory. Giving in to Apple's crimes would be immoral.

Crimes? It's market economy, man. Apple created great phones. Think Apple and its phones are bad? Don't offer your app on them. Oh but everyone uses these phones. So if you're amazon you now offer the app in a half-assed way to capture customers but avoid giving Apple money for further improvement of their phones... Cool beans! Way to take care of your customers.

This is completely wrong and sportsteamy. Apple set the scene by getting away with a light wrist slap for colluding with major publishers. That set the scene for the book ecosystem as you see it now. Twisting the situation to fit a brand loyalty is in poor taste.

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

#480

Post by LexiMax »

post-it wrote: post #457
scrum-treats wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NFT/NFC is locked so the tag is immutable, and only the seller and Amazon have the public key. Barring some hack on the NFT/NFC tagging software (which could happen in theory), you'd need both the private and public key to create a counterfeit object, along with a MFA token of some sort (e.g., biometric data, another OTP like Yubikey). And this would be true for every physical and/or digital print.

The counterfeit book won't have an NFT. Someone browsing Amazon will buy a counterfeit Jane Friedman book, and won't know to look for an NFT. The only people who know to look for an NFT will be those who read Jane Friedman's website where she talks about her NFT books, and they'll buy a book from a link on her website, so the NFT won't serve a purpose because they'll already be buying a real book from a trusted sourc…

> The counterfeit book won't have an NFT.

Or it might come with an NFT created by the scammer, which they might trick the reader into trusting with social engineering.

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