PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT - FANFIC WRITERS, YOU ARE PROBABLY BEING STOLEN FROM

[merrily]

Well, this fucking sucks.

TL;DR summary:

Ebooks Tree - an ebooks website with a paywall - is using a bot to harvest work from AO3. They are not asking permission from authors.

If they have taken your work and posted it, it will say that it has 612 downloads and 41 comments. These figures are fake; however, it is accurate that your work is archived somewhere that you didn't give permission for.

You can file a DMCA complaint using their contact form here. Put "DMCA complaint" in their subject line.

You can also submit an abuse notification to their host server, Moniker, at abuse@moniker.com. (I used WhoIs to find their host server info.) [EDIT - Moniker got back to me and said they aren't hosting ebooks-tree, they just registered the domain name. So don't do this.]

And then, like me, you can BE ANGRY and FUME ABOUT IT.

Why are we never rid of assholes who look at our gift economy and think "hey, I bet I can make money from that"?

UPDATE: fyeahcopyright - ie, Heidi Tandy, fan and lawyer and legal counsel for OTW (publishers of AO3), is on it.

UPDATE 2: It looks like all the AO3-harvested stuff is down. This might be a good time to mention that here is where you can donate to the OTW, who always has our backs about this kind of bullshit.

Comments

[raincitygirl]

Grrr! Would you mind if i linked to your post? It's the most cogent explanation I've seen so far, and has all those handy dandy links.

[merrily]

Go ahead and link! Looks like it's been sorted out, though. Crisis over.

[icarus]

The download button on AO3 has caused this problem.

It can be solved.

Give authors the option to opt-out of downloads.

[merrily]

I dunno. Even without the download button, you can C&P stuff and repost it elsewhere. Takes a little more work, but I think one could probably program a bot to skim stuff in large volume even without having it in a handy MOBI format.

It bothers me that readers don't care if my stories are stolen so long as their access is protected.

[icarus]

They didn't do that. They didn't screencap. They used that download feature--and that download feature is therefore the problem.

I'm going to protect myself from actual theft. You know--the theft that just happened.

And it disturbs me that you don't care.

RE:

[merrily]

Of course I care that theft happened! Look at my post! Look at the capslocks and the rage!

I just disagree with you that this happened because there's a download button on AO3. I think this happened because some people were assholes. And I think _that_ because I've seen variations of this occur maybe four times before, since I joined fandom 20 years ago. There's a reason so many folks used to have a "do not archive without permission" line in their author notes.

I mean, the other incidents were much more innocuous - early Harry Potter archives with particular 'shipping themes scooping stuff up to pad out their content offerings, for example. This run-in with ebooks-tree has the dubious honor of being the first time in my memory that someone tried to put fanfic behind a paywall without asking first.

I guarantee we're going to have another round of this sometime in the future, with or without downloads on AO3.

If you want to direct your energy towards lobbying to make downloads opt-out, go for it. I don't think adding that feature is going to be helpful, but maybe I'm wrong.

(PS - I can't read the subject line on your comment. What's it supposed to say?)

[icarus]

Subject line: no idea what that said. (What on earth....)

I'm concerned about this theft. Not past thefts. Not hypothetical thefts. The ones that just happened.

AO3 tells us this one happened because of the download link:

...there’s only so much we can do while also keeping the downloads functionality alive for our users (who might depend on it due to limited internet time or mobile access only).

...The only way we could prevent bots from downloading files would be to add a CAPTCHA button to downloads, and for a lot of accessibility reasons, we are not planning on doing this.

The download link is the weakness. If you want to argue with how this happened, you can argue with them. I'm just going by what they said.

Now, in Isis' journal I learned that full eBooks from fandom members' websites were also stolen. But bottom line, this bot scraped downloadable eBooks.

So we need to do something about that. I don't want my stories stolen.

I'm hearing you say: "theft happens ... and that's okay, because you can't do anything about it." Maybe I've misunderstood you, but that's what I'm hearing.

I believe: "theft happens ... and that's not okay, and we can do something about it." And I know we can, because AO3 says so right there. They just don't want to. Maybe there's a better solution than a CAPTCHA, but we know this particular type of theft can be prevented.

Why prioritize accessibility over taking measures to prevent theft? Am I the only person who noticed that when my stories got stolen--it was my problem?

At this point it appears to me that AO3 has leaned too far in the direction of accessibility, prioritizing the needs of readers, while exposing the writers to theft.

[waketosleep]

They had my fic Bang a Gong up there. Looks like the download is disabled but the page is still on the site.

[merrily]

Weird. My pages are now gone.