How To Set Up a Pirate EBook Store In Google Play Books

Nate the greatest writes: Most ebook pirates simply upload ebooks to one of many pirate sites, but the entrepreneurial ones have opened storefronts in Google Play Books. They invent an author's name, and then upload dozens if not hundreds of pirated ebooks under that name, The names can range from Devad Akbak to Ispanyolca, but the really clever pirates choose a legit sounding name like Bestsellers — Books USA Press or Fort Press and then start selling ebooks.

Thanks to Google's indifference, the pirates can continue to sell ebooks no matter how many times copyright holders might complain. If Google takes a pirated ebook down in response to a DMCA notice, the pirates simply upload another copy of the same title.

Comments

Re:Lawsuit incoming?

[stephanruby]

What about ebay they’ve been selling illegal stuff for as long as the site exists no one sued their arses.

Wrong. Ebay got sued for that many times. And in some cases, it even lost.

Nope

[rsilvergun]

The DMCA safe harbor protects them as long as they take it down immediately on request, and google is big enough to weather any lawsuit. Now if you or I were running an app store...

Re:Nope

[BitterOak]

The DMCA safe harbor protects them as long as they take it down immediately on request, and google is big enough to weather any lawsuit. Now if you or I were running an app store...

No, the DMCA provides no safe harbor for anyone profiting directly from the unauthorized sale of copyrighted works, intentional or otherwise. As long as the Google bookstore gets a cut of the profit on the sale, there's no safe harbor.

Re:Here is what I don't get..

[0123456]

You are aware that every form of ebook DRM is completely broken and serves no purpose other than to annoy legitimate purchasers, right?

Re:OK, so let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if the person is in a country that recognizes those copyrights.

Being against the law never stopped the media industry before. Hollywood came into existence because they ran to someplace out of reach of the copyright holders on the east coast. The entire industry was and still is built on pirating. Even Frozen is a rehash of an extremely old book. If they're not going to respect other works I'm not going to respect them.

Lawsuit

[Todd Knarr]

There seems to be a required step missing: filing a lawsuit against the infringing publisher. If they're selling the books (as opposed to giving them away free), the kind of volume described should amount to enough money to make a lawsuit feasible. And once you have a John Doe lawsuit filed, based on the initial evidence (as described it should be trivial to provide in the complaint a list of books you hold the copyright on that this publisher is publishing without authorization) you can justifiably ask Google in a subpoena for information pointing to the real identity of the publisher. If money's involved Google has some sort of real financial information about the defendant, otherwise they couldn't send the defendant their money. Google may blow off demands that just make a claim, but they won't just ignore a subpoena that lays out Play store items from this publisher matched to your copyright registrations for those items.

Consider a regular bookstore. If you walked in and said "I hold the copyrights to those titles over there, and that publisher is pirating them.", what do you think the reaction of the bookstore would be? My guess is it'd be along the lines of "The publisher claims they're not. If you want us to stop doing business with that publisher, come back with a court order.". Your claims, however well-founded, aren't a legal determination, and the bookstore or even the distributor aren't the ones in our system charged with making that legal determination. It may suck, but consider the flip side: the publisher replies with a claim that they do have a contract with you and you're just trying to weasel out of it. Which would you rather do: argue the point once in front of a judge, or try to prove the absence of a contract to every single bookstore and distributor out there?

Re:Lawsuit incoming?

[Pembers]

DMCA takedown requests are made under penalty of perjury, but that only applies to the part where you declare that you're the copyright owner of the work that's being infringed (or are authorised to act on their behalf). That is, if you file a takedown that says "I am the owner of work X and I claim that work Y, which you are hosting, infringes on the copyright of X," and you're not actually the owner of X, you can go to jail for it. (Though I've never heard of that actually happening.) If you are the owner of X, but Y doesn't actually infringe on it, you're allowed to say, "Oops, sorry!" and carry on as if nothing had happened, even if it should be obvious to any reasonable person that there's no way on Earth that Y could possibly infringe on X.

I don't know anyone who uses Google Play Books either - not that I imagine my friends are a representative sample of ebook users. More than that, I don't know any authors who claim to be selling well there. (I probably know more authors than the average reader - see signature.) It's rare that the site even comes up in conversations about ebooks and where to sell them and how to market them. So even though it appears to be easy to get away with selling pirated books there, I'd be surprised if the pirates are making a large amount of money.

I'm surprised the pirates have even figured out how to upload books, to be honest. When I decided to start selling my books there, I found the publisher's interface one of the most unfriendly and ill-thought-out sites I'd used in recent years. (To give you just one example, it would allow you to upload an ePub that didn't conform to the relevant specs, which Google would refuse to sell, but didn't give you any indication of the error until you drilled into your dashboard a few days later to find out why the book wasn't live yet.) So far, it hasn't been worth the effort for the number of books I've sold there.