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

Lawsuit incoming?

[Dog-Cow]

Unless every single pirated work is free on their store, Google is in for a massive lawsuit and probably criminal charges for profiting on copyright violations.

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.

Re:Lawsuit incoming?

[stephanruby]

I could personally target one legitimate publisher with many DMCA take down requests (where I lie about my identity). And I could do this repeatedly. That would create a pattern. Wouldn't it?

Also, I wonder what happens when a scammer is discovered. Is the ebook taken back by Google like Amazon did with 1984? Google Play Books is a DRM bookstore, so technically it could do that.

No one I know actually uses Google Play Books. It's full of DRM and Google doesn't even prevent competing bookstores from appearing on Android. So it's not like anyone is actually buying any ebook from them. Their prices are not even discounted compared to the ebooks from other bookstores without DRM.

Re:Lawsuit incoming?

[BarbaraHudson]

The ISBN number has all the info needed to contact the real author/publisher. Find 2 books using the same ISBN, one of them is a fake. Even different editions of the same book, or the same edition in 2 different languages, or illustrated vs non-illustrated, need separate ISBNs, so copying the ISBN isn't going to work, and finding duplicate material from 2 separate publishers should be enough to raise a red flag.

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.

Re:Lawsuit incoming?

[CaptainDork]

Along those lines ...

I'm an amateur photographer and I taped a wedding party where the couple danced. I didn't think about the music the DJ was playing, but Sony sure did.

I got a DMCA.

Hell, the thing was on a YouTube channel that gets no hits. Just family.

They applied that, "what song is this?," algorithm.

OK, so let me get this straight

[Brett Buck]

Slashdot is now sanctioning crimes and giving instructions on how to commit them?

    Someone might have a point about the wisdom of copyright law but there's no doubt that it *is* against the law.

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.

Re: Google reminds me of MS in the late '90s

[pollarda]

Keep in mind that by that point IE was being used by Microsoft for a whole lot more than browsing the web. Significant parts of IE was being used for file display / file browser and a whole lot more. IE was intertwined throughout the Windows operating system and thus simply removing it would have been very difficult. At the same time, I'm sure MS could have found a way to not install the users client that displayed web pages.

Re:Google reminds me of MS in the late '90s

[stephanruby]

To be fair, I don't know if Steve Ballmer would even know how to use Powerpoint, or Microsoft Word, if he didn't have an assistant that did it for him.

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:Nope

[Theaetetus]

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.

First, I don't believe that's correct. The DMCA doesn't seem to mention profit anywhere except in relation to whether something is a nonprofit institution of higher education.

Second, direct vs. indirect profits are when an infringer has both direct profits from the infringement (selling the infringing work) as well as indirect profits (add-on non-infringing sales of other works that may have been caused by the sale of the infringing work). For example, if I sell you pirated software plus a "service and warranty package", that's both direct profits and indirect profits.

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?

Google's YouTube no different

[NewtonsLaw]

As a regular YouTube uploader and "Channel Partner", I often find my videos have been copied and re-uploaded (with monetization) by "pirates".

There are now obviously scripts out there that can be run to automatically create a new channel which consists of nothing but re-uploads of other people's popular videos.

On countless occasions I have laboriously filled out YT's copyright complaint form, listing a dozen or more instances where a single channel has pilfered my hard work. I always get the standard response "the offending content has been removed" -- but the channels are often still operating. What happened to the "three strikes" for copyright infringement?

And just as importantly... since *my* videos were clearly being leveraged by someone else to generate revenue... what happens to that money?

I bet Google still charges the advertiser but no doubt they won't be paying the pirate -- so do they just pocket this money without the need to pay a share to the genuine copyright holder? It would seem so.

This probably explains why they have made NO EFFORT at all to circumvent these script-created channels that contain nothing but other people's content re-uploaded in clear violation of YouTube's Terms of Service.

What an earner for Google -- no wonder they don't bother enforcing their "three strikes" policy on channels for which they effectively get to keep *ALL* the ad revenues and no wonder they don't flag (for inspection) new channels which suddenly appear and upload several hundred videos within 24 hours.

Do no evil? Yeah... right!

Interesting business model

[johanw]

I didn't know this would actually work. Now /. has given me the idea I'll try it out and see if someone is really stupid enough to buy an ebook instead of downloading it from usenet / bittorrent / mobilism / ...

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?

Microsoft was proved to be lying about this.

[dpbsmith]

They were just saying this was true to resist antitrust actions. The Department of Justice said bundling IE was illegal "tying." Microsoft claimed that IE was an integral part of Windows and that it was impossible, for technical reasons, to unbundle it and allow competition on a level playing field from other browsers.

Edward Felten proved to Microsoft to be lying, in court, in 1998, in a live demo, by removing IE from Windows without breaking Windows.

Opposite of Youtube?

[mysidia]

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

Interesting... and woefully inconsistent with how Google handles copyright in other places.

One alleged copyright violation; innocent or not, on Youtube, and your account is crippled, you lose the ability to post videos more than 5 minutes and a bunch of other things.

Two strikes, and they take your channel down and ban you for a few weeks.

Three strikes, and you're gone forever.

All 3 strikes can be received from one video, or in a short period of time, for example when Microsoft goes back and starts randomly posting copyright strikes against anyone that posted videos mentioning Windows 8.

And there is no recourse..... your only way out is if the MPAA or RIAA or whoever was responsible for the strike decides to retract it.

On the other hand... Google play is fast and loose on copyright and just lets the real bad guys re-upload blatantly pirated books, really??

Re:Opposite of Youtube?

[NewtonsLaw]

That's what Google *claim* but, as I mentioned in a previous post, there are some channels against which I've filed up to a *dozen* copyright complaints against and they're still there -- still carrying content for which they do not have copyright (ie: stuff from other channels they've downloaded and then re-uploaded without permission.

They seem *VERY* selective about when they actually enforce their copyright strikes in my experience.

Here's another of the script-generated channels that are being created by downloading and re-uploading other people's popular YouTube videos

Mavi Kocaeli

Now you *KNOW* that this channel has been generated by a download/re-upload script and people will file copyright complaints but chances are that it will still be there in a month's time and by then the videos will have been monetized and earning the script-user a small but useful amount of cash -- money that should have been going into the pockets of the original creators/uploaders.

And here's another one that is already monetizing other people's re-uploaded videos: Kasandra Sahr.

Where's the "three strikes" policy now?

And why hasn't YouTube automatically flagged new channels that upload large numbers of videos within a few hours -- because most people don't do that -- only scripts do that.

Re:Copyright infringement cannot be suppressed

[Jason Levine]

I'm all for reducing the penalties for copyright infringement when there's no profit motive involved. For example, someone downloads a movie via BitTorrent and shares that movie out. Mind you, I still think there should be penalties, but the $750 - $150,000 per infringement seems too high.

This case, however, is one where people are intentionally selling books that they don't own the rights to sell and not paying the legitimate author. This is piracy purely for profit and can snag people who think these are legitimate listings. THESE kinds of pirates are the ones that the original copyright infringement fees were designed for and I will feel no sorrow for them if they are fined exorbitant amounts of money.