Handling Book Piracy for Authors - How to Do a DMC Takedown

Has your book been posted in places without your permission? It's time for a DMCA takedown. Boom. And if you have no idea what that is or what to do, well, this video is absolutely for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad, the founder of Book Launchers, a professional self publishing services firm. From time to time, one of our fabulous authors comes to us and says, my book is here and I didn't do it. From time to time, our team actually finds a book on one of the book pirate sites. And every once in a while, it can also happen that we go to republish a book with changes on Amazon and they refuse it, saying that it's online somewhere else as it belongs to someone else. He gets. That's when you know you've got a pirate problem. Ha ha. Jack Siegel, Ha ha ha. Has got me another pirated book. Oh, and side tip, set up a Google alert for your book title and your name, because that can alert you when a book or your name is on the Internet somewhere. And it's useful for tracking and finding media appearances, book reviews, and book pirates. All right, so if you've found your book on a site out there right now and you're wondering how to proceed, let me help you. Now first, don't freak out. My own personal perspective on book pirates is that they're not pirating your book if nobody wants it. So hooray. You have something that's popular enough to be stolen, but also your goal is to reach readers, right? Someone out there is helping you reach readers, so. So you don't need to exert too much energy, anger, or whatever strong emotion you feel when you first find out. I'm not saying leave it up there so someone else can profit from your hard work. I'm just saying there's no need to lose sleep or seek dark revenge. If your book was the next in a blockbuster series, well, that's a different thing. But if it was, you'd also have a team of lawyers at your disposal to handle this. Chances are this is more of a nuisance than anything else as far as impact on your book business goes. Now let's talk about what you need to do. It's called a DMCA takedown. A DMCA takedown notice is basically when you the fringed upon informs the person, business, web host or Internet service provider, also called isp, that they have material on their site that is infringing on your valid copyright. Here's how to go about that Fun. Contact the email address on the Website where you found your content firmly request the material be taken down. If no response within 24 to 48 hours, which is quite common, you go to whois.com and search the name of the website to try to get contact information for the servers. You'll find a whole bunch of information in that search, but you want the host server. There should be contact information. Or when you know the host server name, go to the host server's website and look for something about report abuse and fill out that form. Most of them will have something for copyright infringement and or DMCA violations. Have the links where your pirated information is and the link showing the content belongs to you, like your Amazon link or your own website. Sometimes you'll have to do this a couple of times because the first contact may not actually be the host and sometimes there's other service companies ahead of it. So be prepared to get an email directing you to contact the actual host. Once you have the contact information, you should follow their abuse reporting process and send a DMCA takedown email notice. You may also need to follow up with another letter. Now, you're probably wondering what should a DMCA letter look like? Well, it's simple really. You address it to the person you've got the contact information for and it should say, the purpose of this letter is to inform you that I, the name that appears on your copyright page, reserve and own all rights to your book title which was published wherever else your publishing company has published it, and give them your publishing company name, your ISBN and the date first published. And then include links below to showing the origination of that publishing. And then you want to state the use of my contact on the website where you found it is infringing on my copyright. My contact information as the copyright holder is as follows. And then you include your email and your phone, the above reference. Copyright works that appear on the website for which you are the designated DMCA agent are not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or by law. I declare under penalty of perjury this notice is true and correct and that I am the copyright owner entitled to exclusive rights which I allege are being infringed, and then sign it. Usually the above steps are enough, but if there is no response, then you can escalate with a second letter and just add a little bit of text to make it sound a little scarier. So you would add text saying, this is a notice in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright act of 1998, requesting that you immediately cease to provide access to copyrighted materials. I have evidence and believe that your entity is engaged in the use of copyrighted materials, namely my intellectual works as listed below, and whereby the infringing material appears on your website. If nothing's happening after the above, then there's one more step you can take. You can head on over to this website right here, ic3.gov and file an FBI i3C report. Send the DMCA to the parties involved with a copy of your FBI report. That usually shakes them loose. Now you can also ask Google to break the link so it doesn't show up when someone searches for your book title. It's similar in that you're filing a DMCA request with Google. You can see on this page that Google will support the request. You won't be notified when it's done, but you'll see that it's not indexed anymore. Hopefully you don't ever need this information, but bookmark this video just in case you do, or share it with a friend so you all have it. Are there other ways you've found to remove pirated content? Go ahead and post a comment below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some of our sweet noboringbookswag. And when you comment almost any day, I almost always reply, so go ahead and try it now. You might be more curious about copyright after this video. So check out this video. All about copyright pages in your book and this one on filing copyrights. Both are pretty great if I say so myself. So I'll see you there.