If you’ve read the message board at Fictionmania in recent weeks, you’re probably aware that there’s a thief in our community; maybe more than one. Stories that were shared free of charge are taken, given a new title and bogus author details, and sold to unsuspecting readers. Another facet of the same crime is where stories are being fed through an AI voice program to produce ‘audiobooks’ – again, with the title changed and the author not being credited, in the hope that they won’t discover that their work has been stolen and take action.
It’s been going on for years, and it’s horrible to rub shoulders (online) with the kind of person who’s pleased to note the obituary of an author, because that serves to identify another easy victim.
In my mind’s eye, our thief is a person in a developing country. For one thing, certain nations that I won’t name have a very different attitude to intellectual property rights. For another, it’s got to be the kind of person for whom ten or fifteen dollars is “good money.” Crime does pay… but it doesn’t pay very well.
Unless, of course, you do it at scale.
If it takes me between six and nine months to write a novel… how long does it take a thief to go online, find a suitable tale, download it and then put it up on Amazon’s self-publishing platform, KDP? With AI tools now available to create the cover, I think a person with no morals could easily steal several stories a day. More, if they don’t care about quality.
The really despicable thing, here, is that the big corporations are happy to turn a blind eye because they benefit from the crime. Amazon, for example, have done a lot to enrich me (and vice-versa) in recent years, but they don’t actually care about me at all. Consider: they get the same 30% cut from the sale of an e-book whether you buy it from a genuine author or from a thief: it benefits Amazon not to notice when stolen intellectual property is offered for sale and it benefits Google not to notice when they make ad revenue on YouTube content that’s stolen.
Some of the biggest brands in the world benefit from theft.
In most cases, theives aren’t stripping Digital Rights Management from an existing ebook (though that’s not unknown), but simply taking a story that’s available for free and making it appear to be something you haven’t read before, so as to trick you into paying for it. At most, the really sophisticated thieves do a search-and-replace to change the names of the characters, sometimes with confusingly inconsistent results.
The people who buy stolen stories are victims, too: paying for something that they could have had for free. “Let the buyer beware,” you might say; a fool and his money are soon partying… but it poisons the well for independent authors in general.
It had to happen sooner or later: a prolific thief chose one of my stories. ‘Door Candy’, which you can find on Fictionmania, was made into an audiobook and put on YouTube – no author identified – with the rather dorky title of ‘This Drug Made Me Time Travel – audiobook’.
The ‘Fem Stories’ channel consists of thousands of stolen works, so I needn’t feel either particularly honoured or victimised here: it’s simply theft conducted cynically and on an industrial scale. I wrote to the thief and the story was removed within hours. No apology or anything; just a bland acknowledgement.
A braver person than me might go through YouTube’s copyright infringement process, but that’s very clearly designed to facilitate theft and to make life hard for the victim: you have to supply your real name and postal address, while being told that in the event of a legal action, this could be shared with the other party. (My circumstances mirror those of David Ferndale in many ways: it would not go well for me, were I to reveal my identity… so Google/YouTube’s policy exposes me to considerable risk.)
Meanwhile, I (and people like me, such as ‘Tigger’ who has also recently discovered that a well-loved story was stolen), must continue to play ‘Whac-a-mole’ with the story thieves. But do you know what most rubbed me up the wrong way?
This comment on the stolen YouTube ‘audiobook’:
I am going to finish the story since this writer does not do part twos I will Martha is the happiest woman ever now and she’s also sad for the real Martha that passed away she gets married to Jamie legally and they become husband and wife Jamie, yes hired by another pharmaceutical company and produced a better drug than even Martha got, but this time there is no going back in the future it transforms someone into the person they want to be example. If a man wants to be a woman that’s exactly what happens with this medicine if a woman wants to be a man that’s exactly what happens with this medicine, Jamie becomes a famous pharmacist and gives everyone that is transgender their ultimate desire not only does it transform your body it gives you everything about that person want it example if a man wants to be a woman he has now functional ovaries and uterus he has. It’s just like a regular woman he gets bloating and cramps for the woman she gets erections and produces sperm to put inside a woman to impregnate them. They also have the ability of gaining the strength of a man and anything else that a man has they have it just like the woman gets so the whole world thanks Jamie and Martha for what they have given them to so many people, and made those people very very happy that is the second part in my opinion of this story. Also, I am a postop for 21 years, and I never had a relationship with a man or a woman and I know this would be an ultimate desire for me and I know another person that is FTM. She would love this to be real to for him
Things like this (if you know my story, you might begin to appreciate just how utterly bonkers this ‘sequel’ is) are why I try not to read the comments that people leave on my stories. Ugh! Did this person understand anything of what they just read or heard?
Funny thing is, ‘Door Candy’ is a rare exception to my personal rule that I don’t serialise. At just ten thousand words in length, the original story sees Matt trapped back in the 1950s, in the body of Martha and forced to take the slow route back to 2012… but I did write more, detailing the adventures of Matt as he struggles to adapt to his new life…
Here’s the real question: why the heck would I choose to share it on Fictionmania if some dickhead on Skid Row is promptly going to steal it from me and start trying to sell it to people?
This is why we can’t have nice things, folks…
Sugar and Spiiice 