Spamazon – Spam comes to Amazon

This hurts everyone except the crooks. Amazon and all other ebook sellers should act immediately and legit authors should be compensated. I know these are obvious statements but it’s all I can do and all authors should speak up. At the very least we should be getting a definitive statement from Amazon. Our brave new world is being corrupted and our dreams destroyed.

Great post, Steven. Copyright infringement is a serious thing. In a perfect world, Amazon would take back the fees it payed too the crook. If that’s impossible, then they should give 100% of their share to the legitimacy author since all proceeds were acquired illegitimately. If Amazon did not profit at all by publishing pirated material, they’d be a little more motivated to stem piracy on their site.

Of course, an unintended consequence of that may be that Amazon puts in such stringent rules that legitimate authors have to give up some of the ease of publishing and royalty amounts they have now. 

It’s just a shame that this is an issue, but it is. That’s life. It’s been an issue before Amazon and e-books and it will be an issue when the new reading technology is discovered. Crooks will always be crooks. 

Amazon really need to get their act together on this. They can’t just stick their head in the sand and do nothing. Infringement of copyright is an offence.

If I publish someone else’s copyrighted material on my blog they would sue the heck out of me, and as the publisher I would be liable.

Amazon can’t be allowed to sit back and say “It wasn’t us, it’s self-published” sort it out with the “publisher”. It’s their site and they should be controlling it better.

At the very least, any proven infringements should be taken down immediately and any monies retained. At best they should give all the monies, including their share to the rightful author.

Hi Steven, 

You say: “The illegitimate copies of his book are still on people’s Kindles, although Amazon has the capability to remove them.”  If you mean from people’s Kindles, then they as part of a legally binding settlement agreed not to do so unless so ordered by a court.  It seems they did exactly that with illegal copies of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, they were sued and eventually settled.  

It’s been written up in the papers.  Do a web search if you’re interested.  

The remote deletions of the Orwell books happened in July 2009, almost two years ago and the settlement was reached a few months later.  Previously they had remotely deleted other books once they found out they shouldn’t have been there.  But they didn’t get all the bad publicity as with the Big Brother headlines, so they did nothing.  

As I test, I purchased a book in the Kindle store that I was certain was a bootleg.  It was a collection of stories by Flannery O’Connor.  I knew she was still in copyright, and I saw a few other suspicious things.  It was called “Flannery O’Connor:  The Complete Stories,” although it was far from complete.  The book was poorly formatted, and there was no table of contents to get you to the start of each story.  Sure enough, a little later that book vanished from the store.  

(In case you’re wondering about my ethics, I did not read the illegal book, and when a lawful edition containing O’Connor’s stories was made available I happily snatched it up.)  

However, the bootleg did not vanish from my Kindle and it did not vanish from my archive. When I downloaded it I got it on my old K2.  Now, if I desire, I can download it to my K3.  I just checked, and it’s still there.  

This stuff has been going since the early days of the Kindle, and I think Amazon is doing a little more due diligence to see that obvious bootlegs of copyrighted works are not uploaded.  But they still let stuff get through such as you have described.  Taking two weeks to remove improper items from the store is unconscionable.  You might remember a dustup with Macmillan where they removed all books from that publisher — electronic and paper — from their store overnight.  So clearly they have the capability.