Authors - Guard Your Rights

... no author, or creator of any intellectual property deserves to be deprived of his or her copyright. Unfortunately, please be warned, there is a lot of this going on, and writers are being deprived not just of their royalty. A lot of it has to do with ignorance (since we are not all lawyers) and quite a bit to do with corporate greed and bullying.

Authors protect your copyright and know what your rights are! Some very sensible cautions for Malaysian authors on the Silverfish website.

Holden Caulfield Stays in Retirement

We've seen before that some authors chose to write a sequel based on an older classic, picking up the characters and taking them off on a new journey.

A Swedish author, Fredrik Colting (writing under the pen name John David California) has written a sequel to J.D. Salinger's 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye. But it isn't going to be seeing light of day after a judge ruled in favour of Salinger who sued to block publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Judge Deborah Batts ruled that the main character in was "an infringement" on Salinger's main character, Holden Caulfield.

According to Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times the book features:

... the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia.

The Catcher in the Rye has been a staple of the American high school curriculum over the decades although now it seems the younger generation are finding it harder to relate to Caulfield:

What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

I remember reading it decades back and liking it very much, but can't recall much else about it. I am though at the moment reading Salinger's Nine Stories (a copy of which I inherited from Dina Zaman) and am enjoying it thoroughly. (You can read A Perfect Day for Bananafish here - and lazier so and so's can watch the video here. The story blew me away. )

Salinger is now one of the world's more famous recluses, although he is reportedly still writing every day. Maybe one day ...

Winton's Fourth Miles Franklin

Tim Winton has won Australia's Miles Franklin Award - for the fourth time! (The first, when he was just 24 years old.)

Breath, a novel about surfing, was described by the judges as :

... a searing document about masculinity, about risk, and about young people's desire to push the limits.

(You can also hear Winton reading extracts from the novel.)

He delivered his acceptance speech via video link and launched a passionate defence of Australian writers and literary culture which is likely to be under threat if proposed changes to copyright are made law. (For more on the issue of parallel importation, see this piece by Peter Carey.)

Winton beat off some very strong competition :

Murray Bail - The Pages
Richard Flanagan - Waiting
Louis Nowra - Ice
Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap

all of which you can find out more about in Jasons Stegers's neatly named Five Males and a Miles in The Age.

Rowling and Others Angry Over Piracy

A whole bunch of authors, among them JK Rowling, Aravind Adiga and Ken Follett, are up in arms over the fact that their books appear on "social publishing site" Scribd.com, and can be read for free. Readers can also download the text and edit it as they see fit.

The text was probably scanned in an entered manually, because the titles involved have not yet appeared as legitimate e-books. (Though the message here is plain - e-books need to be made available much more quickly.)

The company says it is prepared to immediately remove copyrighted material when they receive notice from the copyright holder, but says that it relies on the community policing itself.

Nevertheless, internet piracy is one more thing for authors and publishers to worry about, and is a problem that isn't going to go away. No longer does copyright actually protect you before your material is ripped off.

Some publishers though, are using Srcibd to post first chapters of books they are promoting.

Blog Content Theft

It is deeply upsetting when you find that someone is stealing the content from your blog without having asked your permission, and even more upsetting when you know that they are harvesting that content continually using a bot so that they can make money from advertising.

It happened to me before and I managed to resolve it though it wasn't pleasant to have to have a ding-dong match with an Irish bozo who laughed at me for being stupid enough to have a Creative Commons License. (I changed the kind of license.)

Now it's happened again. This is the blog and although I haven't checked very far back, every single post I've put up here has appeared there. Other bloggers from elsewhere are getting ripped off too. And none of their work is being credited to them.

This post will no doubt be swept up and put there too, which is why I'm writing it!!!

I only discovered by accident this time that my posts were appearing elsewhere since his blog is hidden from Technorati. I strongly advise other bloggers to do regular checks by googling keywords from their posts.

Update :

A response from Tushar Mathur ... who says he is not the person stealing from my blog, but a victim too :

Everything Finance said...

Hi Sharon,

This is Tushar Mathur.

The website http:goodpfbooks.com is NOT my site.

A few months ago I was approached by the owner of that site via email asking for a link exchange. I agreed to that.

Now I see that he doesn't even have my link anymore. So I have also removed his link from my blog.

I have also sent him an email about removing your content.

Can I please request you to remove your post about me? Since its not true.

I'm a credible Personal Finance blogger and well respected.

My content gets stolen all the time. But now I have put mechanisms in place so that every post automatically gets my website link and copyright info.
Many big Financial companies contact me to review their products.

Thanks for listening,

Tushar Mathur

March 24, 2009 9:32 PM

Update (25/3/09) :

My content has been taken off the blog, which I'm relieved about. The perp (whoever it is) still continues to scrape posts from other blogs, and I'm sure there will be other unscrupulous people along doing the same.

Nother Update :

The owners of the Book Lovers Guide blog have realised that their work is being scraped by the same person. (Thanks Chet for spotting this.)

Hands Off Our Writing!

Ellyn Whyte, who writes the delightful columns Katz Tales and A Dog's Life for Star Weekender has a feature on a topic very close to my heart - the theft of online content, where one's newspaper articles or blog/ website posts are swiped wholesale.

As the article points out, many journalists may want to sell their articles on elsewhere, or, as in Ellen's case, may be planning to use them for a book and the reproduction of their work in this way immediately lessens its value.

Freelancers get paid very badly for that appears under their names in the papers (it certainly isn't recompense for the wear and tear on the brain and the amount of ink expended) so they are usually writing for the love of it and with a personal project in view. (For me the journalism is an extension of what I do on this blog, feeding into it and out of it, but of course I have my book projects too.)

My little burst of indignation at the guy who was helping himself to every single one of my blog posts to generate income on his own is recorded in the article, as is my solution :

“I sort of had the last laugh because I stalked him (the thief) back, know where he lives and learned an awful lot about his life!” Sharon says, adding meditatively, “I might put him in a piece of fiction, sad little man.”

But yes what can you do? Legally, you don't have much recourse, although the paper today lists some very sensible measures you can take to protect yourself. The ultimate protection is not allowing your work to be put up online, but that would be really very sad. We write because we want people to read us. We want everyone in the whole goddamn world to read us. We just don't want to be ripped off.

Shaming the perps into taking down the material is one recourse, and often the thieves are naive little bloggers too lazy to put up their own content and nourished in an academic environment where plagiarism too often goes undetected and unpunished, and where pirated videos are available on every street corner. These guys at least are easily shamed into taking the post down.

But funnily enough it appears that government departments are among the worst content thieves! Does no-one teach these civil servants about the morality of the cyber-world? Among the baddies that emerge in this piece are Pejabat Majlis Daerah Lenggong* who have lifted material from Jan Stuivenberg's waterfallsofmalaysia and the Perak Veterinary Department who are nicking Ellen's content. You may remember also that Caving Liz was having a long and frustrating battle some time back with an Indian travel agent who stole her stuff to sell package tours to Malaysia on her website.

There is though I think a real need to clarify and tighten laws regarding the use of content, as well as generally raise awareness about the issue, and I hope Ellen's article opens up the discussion about what is and what isn't legitimate use of material.

Meanwhile, if you think that you would like to use something that is on a website or on a blog - ask first! I usually do give permission for others to use my material, but I want to be consulted , and I want to hold on to the right to say no.

(*I wonder if this protest has worked already because the site has suddenly been taken down?)

My Blog Content - Stolen

There's a total w****** out there stealing my blog content everyday and posting it to his own blog. I'm not sure if it is a human being or a bot doing the swiping. I suspect the later as I saw this line in his page code:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,FOLLOW"/>

It looks as if stuff has been lifted from other blogs too.

The main purpose is to attract advertising revenue ... the page is stuff full of ads. There is of course no identity of the "blogger" or contact details and I will have to work backwards from his IP.

I have given no permission, of course for the use of my material and my work is protected by a Creative Commons license. I am prepared to take action against this person, particularly as money is involved. Google Adsense incidentally make it very difficult for complaints to brought against rogue advertisers - I've tried before.

I feel very used and cheated, especially as I do not blog for my own profit.

Maybe this is the answer?

Postscript :

Well, with some help from Chet, we've tracked the guy down.

His name is Aubrey Hall and he lives in Dublin. This is the crap he's posted on another blog about stealing content:

Technophobiac.com is part of Technophobiac Networks aggregation network. Technophobiac.com is intended to be a resource for techies. We do not claim any copyright over syndicated contributed content and although the content has being retrieved via xml & rss feeds the authors always have the right to request removal by e-mailing aubhall [at] yahoo [dot] com.

"Syndicated contributed content"? Oh I'm laughing at the sheer squalid cheek And why isn't his email on his blogs if "authors have the right to request"?

Okay, let's make this clear, Aubrey Hall. Before you take anything at all from my blog that's longer than a single quotation, you must ask me.

Postscript 2

Yeah, that's they guy. He admits it. Believes my creative Commons License gives him the freedom just to take my stuff. (That little tag on my blog is my attempt at signaling that I care about who swipes my content, but it clearly doesn't protect me much.)

Postscript 3 :

My material has been taken off his blog. I feel much better.

But I am still confused about how best to protect from this happening again.

Will Piracy Kill the Author?

Although this blogger has been (generally) gung-ho about e-books and stuff for free on the internet the pronouncement by Britain's Society of Authors that piracy on the internet could drive authors to stop writing gave me a timely slap on the face.

Illegal downloading, which has sent the music industry into a tailspin, is also now apparently causing havoc in the book industry :

Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, who also chairs the London-based organisation, said her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age

writes Ben Hoyle in the Times :

The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters, or in some cases, entire books.

Although some of the victims are prominent authors such as Jamie Oliver and J.K. Rowling, the authors of the kinds of books you tend to dip into are the most vulnerable, including authors of short stories, writers of cookbooks, and lesser-known poets.

Chevalier says that a new model of payment for authors needs to be found :

... possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.

But it is of course anyone guess how this might work in practice.

Meanwhile, Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading isn't so sure that Chevalier et al have it right.

Postscript :

This is how easy it is to get hold of a pirated e-book.

Mr. Pringle Meets the Publishing Pirates

As I'm sure I've told you before, I'm a sucker for historical reprints of old books about life in Malaya. In these first hand accounts, I can easily slip back in time and take an enthralling journey through the country as it was long before I came here.

I've collected many of the books in the Oxford in Asia series (some of them received as payment for work done for the publisher - great trade off!) and am sad that the books are now discontinued.

Happy I was then to come across the Malaysian Heritage series of 12 classic books about the country in Kinokuniya the other day. Reader, I desired them.

True, they are nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as the OUP books, which is something of a disappointment, but I care much more about the content.

Raman is also stocking the books and has featured them on his Silverfish website.

But it seems, the publisher, Synergy Press (a subsidiary of local publisher SA Majeed) may have been far less than scrupulous about obtaining permissions to republish the books.

One of the authors featured in the series, Robert Pringle, writes on Raman's website:

The publisher of the Malaysian Heritage Series did not get permission from anyone before reprinting my book, Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke Rule. This is unfortunate because I am in the process of arranging a legal reprint, with a Malaysian publisher, which will include a badly-needed new introduction commenting on the implications of this history in the light of what has happened since 1970, when it was published, and also correcting some errors in the first edition. That endeavor will obviously be complicated by the existence of this illegal edition which will inevitably reduce the prospect of further sales, even for a better product. No reputable bookstore should be selling this book. I cannot speak for other titles in the series.

Am wondering what laws in Malaysia cover copyright of books and what the author's legal rights are? I checked up on Wikipedia which told me that:

In most of the world the default length of copyright for many works is generally the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years.

which would mean that this particular title was published illegally.

And that quite apart from the moral consideration: it's completely wrong not to ask for permission.

Mr. Pringle was hard to find? Nonsense, he responded within days to Raman's posting once his name was on the internet, and no doubt could have been reached through his publishers (this book was previously published by Cornell University Press and I believe the author's most recent book was published by Allen and Unwin.)

Rather, I think it's an extension I think of the let's-make-a-quick-buck-and-never-mind-the-rights-of-the-author syndrome.

Am looking forward to the opinions of the legal minds among my readers.

Raman, meanwhile, has withdrawn the book from sale and I hope that other bookshops have enough integrity to follow suit.

Stolen Stories

A question about copyright from Caving Liz. Can anyone help her?

Does anyone know what the legal situation is if chunks of text are taken from a website and used on another website, without persmission or acknowledgement from the original site???

Is it plagiarism, or abuse of copyright, or what?

Thanks to Sharon, I have been using Copyscape to 'protect' my caving webpage. On the rare occasions when I remember to use Copyscape to check for copied pages, I usually find one. Yesterday I did a check and voila........ I found 2 pages had copied chunks of text from my page without my knowledge, and neither of them acknowledge me as being the source. My page is http://www.cavesofmalaysia.com/

One is Virtual Malaysia, which is part of Tourism Malaysia.

The other is an Indian Travel Agent in Tamil Nadu.

I have a feeling they have copied lots of text from lots of sites as they probably don't have their own first hand knowledge on the places they are marketing.

Does anyone have any experience about this? What can I do?

Liz