Thank you for your interest in Nintendo and our products. This section of our website is designed to answer questions you may have about our Intellectual Property. Posting the wrong image on your blog can be costly copyright infringement penalties can range from 8,000 to 150k. Heres how to protect yourself from. Christal R. August 26, 2012 at 847 pm. For the record, it is illegal at the federal level to discriminate against this. Although you have government agencies with. Has Your e. Book Been Pirated What To Do Step 1. Sky-Warning-Torrent-925869.jpg' alt='Copyright Violation And Illegal Downloading Caught Up In You Lyrics' title='Copyright Violation And Illegal Downloading Caught Up In You Lyrics' />Pirated ebooks are a headache and a hot button issue for nearly every author myself included, and dealing with the pirate sites can be frustrating. This article was prepared by Kathryn Miller Goldman, Esq., in hopes we can help make the process to remove them clear. Molly found some of her books available for free download on a pirate site outlet and asked me how to handle the situation. Today, Im going to share with you the first step in the process of having illegal free downloads removed from an unauthorized site. Locating your work on piracy sites. Mollys books were found on a website called General e. Books. The ebooks that were being offered for free download were Blog It, Mark of the Loon, Paint Me Gone, and Rapunzel. Rapunzel is the previous title for The Last Fairytale with a different cover. As you would expect with a site that is designed to profit from the theft of the work of others, it is set up in a deceptive way while appearing to comply with US Copyright Law. Heres an annotated screen shot of the page on which Mollys ebook Blog It was found Note that below the cover image, there is a red bar for Reporting Copyright Violations. Beneath that is the description of the book with the ISBN followed by a gray box with Official links book stores. These are links that take you directly to Kobo, or Amazon, or Barnes Noble. This is deceptive because there would be no need to report a copyright violation if the links for the sale of the books are only to legitimate booksellers. People who are looking for free downloads will look further down the page. As an author policing the Internet for unauthorized piracy of your book, you need to look further, too. Beneath the legitimate links to Kobo is a blue link that says, GET BOOK. This is the link to the illegal download. If you dont scroll far enough down the page, you may not notice this unauthorized link. I clicked on this link and saved the URL, but did not download the book. The root of the URL was not general ebooks. Each of Mollys four books appeared on a similar page on General e. Books. You can see the cross reference to two of Mollys other books on the right side of the screen shot above. Mark of the Loon did not appear on the left side of the page because it had been removed by the time I took the screen shot. Paint Me Gone appears twice because it was entered into the database once as Paint Me Gone and once as Paint Me Gone Gen Delacourt Mystery 3. As far as this site knows, they are two different books. Reporting the copyright infringement. General e. Books is based in Washington State and is subject to US laws. With Mollys authorization, I used the Report Copyright Infringement button on the page for each book using the following text The e. Book Blog It is protected by United States copyright law. The copyright is owned by the author Molly Greene. I have been authorized to advise you that free downloads are a violation of copyright law and an infringement of her copyright. Remove all free downloads of this book from your website, any related URLs and databases immediately otherwise the appropriate legal steps will be taken. Fiber Optic Patch Cord Company Lighting. Kathryn Miller Goldman, Esq. Goldman Minton, P. C. 1. 50. 0 Union Avenue, Suite 2. Baltimore, MD 2. 12. After submitting the infringement report, this message appeared Within two days, I received three identical emails from email protected, which read Thanks for your reportLinks was removed. Kindly yours. The links had not been removed immediately, however. It took another day or two for the links to come off the site. A search for Molly Greene on General e. Books now shows nothing although it took a few days after the infringement report. A search for Greene, Molly returns an entry for Blog It. Clicking on the link takes you to the Kobo sales page. Mark of the Loon,Rapunzel, and Paint Me Gone are no longer on the site at all. But wait it isnt over yet. The content of the confirmation email, as short as it was, lead me to believe that the story isnt over. General e. Books may have removed the illegal download links from their site, but there is no mention in the email that the URLs where the illegal downloads can be found were disabled, or that Mollys books were removed from the database where they are being stored. Sure enough, when I copy those URLs into my browser, Mollys books are still available for illegal free download. General e. Books was not hosting the unauthorized ebooks, only linking to them. Illegal links to Mollys books can pop up again on another pirate outlet site. Research into the URLs hosting Mollys books reveals that the domain is owned by an Israeli company and is hosted by a Canadian ISP. More work has to be done to strip Mollys books from the database hosted by that ISP and I hope to report back to you on how that went in another post. Guarding against piracy requires vigilance. You should set up Google Alerts for your titles and your name to help you keep track of where your work is appearing, both legitimately and illegally. Kathryn Goldman is an intellectual property attorney who protects writers, artists, filmmakers, and businesses from having their work and art ripped off. Since shes a lawyer, she has to mention that shes not yourlawyer so this article isnt technically legal advice, but youre still invited to download her Digital Artists Rip Off Report. You can also follow her on Twitter Kathryn. Goldman. Enjoy this article Subscribe to my blogand youll never miss my weekly posts I will not share your email address with anyone thats a promise. If youre not already, please follow mollygreene on Twitter And last but not least, this original content by Molly Greene is copyright protected. Mwah Thank you so much.