Stealing stories and charging for them.

[wallwalker]

For-profit site Ebooks Tree reposted a bunch of stuff from AO3 without permission, collects ad revenue. Search for your AO3 username and their url on Google to see if your stuff has been taken. Just confirmed this may not work.

Their DMCA info is here. This tumblr post (here) has a good summary of what to say in your takedown request.

Spread the word.

ETA: AO3 News Post on the subject, via yohjideranged.

ETA 2: The site appears to be a front for a highly untrustworthy company that has a history of scamming personal information and credit card numbers. Don't give them anything. (See link just above.)

Comments

[yohjideranged]

I am going to repost you word-for-word in my journal, just to spread the word...hope you don't mind. I will give you credit.

Writer has a story up there.... grrrr...

[wallwalker]

Good plan. I'll post a link to the AO3news post you found; I hadn't seen that one yet.

[sarasa_cat]

Thank you for posting this.

It seems they scraped four of my Ao3 stories plus stories from many people I follow. I just issued a takedown notice.

[wallwalker]

You're welcome. Quite a few of my favorite writers were hit by this, and I'm trying to let them know as soon as possible.

[sarasa_cat]

I've also noticed quite a few authors who were hit too. :|

[adraekh]

Thanks for the notification. Luckily(?) they only(?) scraped four of my stories. Sent them a ticket and all.

[wallwalker]

You're welcome. Hopefully something will come of all of this anger, like the ebook site being pulled down. (And I've seen people saying that even their deleted stories are showing up there. Wonder how that happened?)

Wondering if AO3 should maybe create an option for authors to disable downloading of their stories, or at least ask downloaders to ask permission first (the program sends you a message with a username, you click yes, it e-mails them the file.) I know they want it to be accessible, but there has to be some sort of happy medium to protect the writers too. This is the sort of thing that could potentially get an author in serious trouble, if the wrong person notices their work on an outside site before they do.

[adraekh]

Yeah, AO3's functions are skewed way in favor of the readers than the authors, and I think telling us to simply make our fics private if we're that concerned is a bit extreme. (Also, more or less indicative of AO3's priorities at the moment.) I wouldn't mind it if they made the download feature an opt-in/opt-out service as you suggest, or allowed the authors to decide for themselves if they want to use CAPTCHAs or not for downloads, but I suspect implementing these feature might take a lot of work.

[owlmoose]

Thanks for the heads up (although I reblogged the tumblr post, I actually saw this first). They have *14* of my stories, so once I get home from chorus I get to have a fun night of issuing takedown notices :P

I'd hate to have to lock down my fic to registered users only because I get a high proportion of anonymous kudos. Requiring a captcha or something to download seems like it would help, anyway.

[wallwalker]

You're welcome. (And yeah, I'm sending off a notice for fifteen of mine. Which isn't too bad, out of 200+, but still.) It sounds like lots of people are doing the same. Maybe the sheer volume of e-mails they're about to get will make a difference.

I can see why they want to avoid those captcha images, because I have the hardest time reading them, and as far as I know I am not a robot. (Although I don't understand why they can't use the ones that DW uses, the simple question that bots can't answer easily.)