by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson
They're out there, in droves, just waiting for us.
No, I'm not getting paranoid - any more than usual, anyway.
Every day writers are being made into sitting ducks. I'm telling the truth, and
I'm talking about thieves. Call them pirates, call them freedomers, call them
file-sharers, call them plagiarists, call them anything you like, but they're
still thieves, talking our work without our permission and giving us no
compensation.
It's interesting that those who believe 'if it's on the
internet it should be free' or that we should be happy just to have our work
read and give away our work so freely have never published anything of their
own. When we call them thieves to their faces they are offended and hurt; why,
they ask, are we being so selfish? People want to read our books. People need
entertainment. We have entertainment. How can we be so small of spirit, they
wonder, as to deny people what they want when we have it. We want our work to
be read, don't we?
Of course, they never stop to think - or plain just don't
care - that we spend weeks, perhaps months, maybe even years writing that book.
We spend money, too, if we're self-published, on editors and proof-readers and
covers and formatters. That never seems to enter their tiny little brains. They
just want to be seen as a kind of Robin Hood, graciously giving to the
have-nots and never caring if it is at the expense of the ones who created the
books.
Now of course you know I'm not talking about a writer who
decides to give away a book of his own, either as a short-time sale, a
long-term enticement to a series, a gift promotion, or a whatever. I have my
own opinions about free books, but as long as the writer himself is the one
making the decision to give it away, that's fine. It's their property and they
can do what they want with it.
Another particularly slimy kind of thief is the one who gets
a copy of the book and then puts it up for sale in his store... but without the
author's permission and without any compensation going to the author. The
reader gets the book, the seller gets the money, and the writer, who created
the book, gets... nothing. Except for a very few mega-sellers, writers have
always gotten the short shrift in the publishing industry and it looks like
that's not going to change anytime soon.
A new wrinkle in this perpetual 'screw-the-writer' cavalcade
is the plagiarist. Oh, people have been stealing books and ideas from other
writers for centuries, but suddenly this kind of theft seems to have gone on
steroids.
Now these thieves take chunks of copy from several books of
similar genre, then mash them up into a new 'book' (perhaps 'manuscript' would
be a better term) and put it out as their own. Sometimes they don't even bother
to do their own 'mashing-up' but hire a ghostwriter to do it, so they can claim
to have written a book without even having touched it. Even worse, there are
thieves who take a book and leave it untouched except for changing the main
characters' names, maybe the location and maybe the industry in which they
work, then put it out as their own work.
And I have never ever heard of any legitimate writer getting
any of the money owed them after the scams have been discovered.
In order to defend his property the writer has to spend time
- time that should have been spent with his family, or writing, or whatever he
chooses - chasing down these thieves and sendings DMCAs, or he has to spend
money hiring a company to do it for them - money that should have stayed in the
writer's pocket. What's worse is that most of these criminals operate from
overseas, beyond the reach of law enforcement - if law enforcement would take
an interest in piracy, which so far it hasn't. In the rare instance where an
operator has closed down, you can bet within a month or so it will be back up
and running again on another website, gleefully continuing to steal writers'
property and profits.
I don't know where or how much farther this trend of
thievery will or even can go, but I'm absolutely positive that somewhere
someone will think of another way to rip off the poor writer who labors to
create something.
Sad to think that the internet - which has given so many of
us careers with the advent of self-publishing - is what has also given us this
rise in crime. I'm sure that there was plagiarism and intellectual theft back
in the day of gate-keepers/traditional publishing, but the purely physical
limitations of print publishing kept it to a minimum. The internet and
self-publishing has indeed turned out to be a two-edged sword.
I don't know what or how is to be done about this, but
something must be. Surely someday some hot-shot computer person will come up
with a theft-proof something or other that will give writers and writers alone control
of their works. Hopefully it will happen soon, because writers are tired of
becoming every crook's target.
