Heads Up if you use AO3

[elmey.livejournal.com]

If you haven't heard about ebooks-tree.com, who's been scraping stories off ao3 and other sites, the ao3 tumblr has information on what's been happening:

We’ve been getting pings and @’s all morning about ebooks-tree.com who seem to be scraping/taking stories off of AO3 and hosting them as PDFs and mobi downloads on their site; the site seems to be pulling from UrBookLibrary as well. They’re not reading your “do not copy/duplicate” notes on your AO3 fic; their bots are pulling things directly from AO3, without AO3′s authorization or assent. It looks like they are pulling from Wattpad too, again without authorization or assent.

Read the whole thing, they may be trying to charge for this material.

I checked and sure enough they grabbed some of my stories, you might want to check as well and join everyone else in filing a DMCA complaint, the instructions are on the ao3 post above.

Comments

[gillo]

Thank you very much for the alert. I searched myself and three friends, more or less picked at random - they have stolen from all of us. I've boosted the signal. This is nasty.

[elmey.livejournal.com]

It's a bit suspicious when they ask for credit card info to register at the site. I'm really curious what's really going on there.

[gillo]

More than a bit suspicious. I have made sure a couple of lawyers who write fanfic know about it. It is possible to read a lot of stuff online, particularly published work by known writers. They may well be taking advantage of the free Kindle thing. I noted they took two stories at random from quite a lot of people - testing the water perhaps.