Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Google/Blogger Complies with My DMCA Complaint

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An update to my recent copyright infringement article.

Last week, I reported finding a pirate Web site that was offering, among other things, one of my books for free download. The site was hosted on the blogspot domain name, which is Blogger’s. Blogger is owned by Google. I sprung into action and began issuing DMCA notices.

Yesterday, I got the following e-mail from Blogger:

Hello Maria,

In accordance with the DMCA, we have completed processing your
infringement complaint and the content in question no longer appears on
the following URL(s):

[omitted].blogspot.com/2007/06/putting-your-small-business-on-web-by.html

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

I followed the link and, sure enough, the page was missing. I then went to the home page of the site. The site was still up and running and still offering pirated ebooks and software.

I replied to “the Blogger Team”:

Yes, you can assist me further. You can take down the entire site at [omitted].blogspot.com. It’s a pirate site that offers illegal access to eBooks and software.

So far, I haven’t gotten any response.

My efforts to get the book file off the file hosting servers were successful. All three hosts removed the file.

Using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping

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An excellent article on PlagiarismToday.

As a blogger, feed scraping is one of my pet peeves. It irks me to no end that sploggers use automated tools to copy my copyrighted content from my site to sites that exist solely to attract clicks on AdSense and other ads.

Jonathan Bailey likely feels the same way. He writes about the topic regularly in his blog, providing well-researched and insightful commentary to help understand and fight the problem.

His recent article, “Using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping” on PlagiarismToday:

Many sites, including this one , have expressed concerns that CC licenses may be encouraging or enabling scraping.

The problem seems to be straightforward. If a blog licenses all of their content under a CC license, then a scraper that follows the terms of said license is just as protected as a human copying one or two works….

However, after talking with Mike Linksvayer, the Vice President of Creative Commons, I’m relieved to say that is not the case. CC licenses have several built-in mechanisms that can prevent such abuse.

In fact, when one looks at the future of RSS, it is quite possible that using a CC license might provide better protection than using no license at all.

The article then goes on to explain what a Creative Commons license is and what it requires of the licensee. As Jonathan explains, the automation tools that sploggers use simply cannot meet all of the requirements of a CC license, thus putting the sploggers in clear violation of the license terms.

If you’ve been wondering about copyright as it applies to your blog or Web site, be sure to check out this article. While you’re at PlagiarismToday, poke around a bit. I think you’ll find plenty of other good material to help you understand copyright and what you can do when your rights are violated.

eBook Copyright Infringement

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An author’s worst nightmare.

I use Google Alerts to get a daily list of posts that match keywords I provide. Among the search phrases I have alerts for is “Maria Langer.” Yes, I’m trying to see if anyone else in the blogosphere is writing about me.

Just back from a 2-week vacation, I started going through the alerts. There usually aren’t many for me, so I did those first. And I came across something that made my blood boil: a blog that includes free download links to copyrighted eBooks. And, as you might imagine, one of them was mine.

My book is being distributed as a Compiled HTML Help File (.chm) file, complete with hypertext TOC and all screenshots. Other books are being distributed as PDFs. Where did these books come from? My publisher has not responded to that question. Could it be that publishers are releasing books in unprotected, easily shared formats? Could they be that stupid?

I immediately went into defense mode. First, I confirmed that the download links gave me a free copy of the book in question. It did. Then, I called and e-mailed my editor to tell her about the problem, providing her with a link to the blog. Then I composed a DMCA notice to Google and faxed it to them and my editor. Next, I contacted some of the other publishers whose books appeared on the page. Finally, I went to the sites hosting the ebook files and reported the file links as abuse.

All this ate up about 2 hours of my day — on a day set aside to catch up after vacation.

Now I’m waiting to see what comes of my actions. At the very least, I want the entire blog and files removed. I think that may happen quickly.

But what I really want is for the people who posted the links to be arrested and tried for copyright infringement. I don’t care if they get off — the legal fees alone for their defense should teach them a lesson. But I don’t think this will happen.

The thing that bothers me most is this: I discovered this one pirate blog. How many others are out there that I haven’t discovered?

And how many authors are having their work ripped off?

Update: 2:55 PM

I discovered soon after writing this post that the blog in question is a pirate blog that’s also got a lot of limited interest software available for download. One of the makers of this pirated software is AT&T. I called their sales staff and told them about their software being listed for free download in an effort to get AT&T involved. They have a lot of clout (as you could imagine). The sales guy said AT&T is very interested in this kind of thing.

One of the sites that was hosting my book file has deleted the file at my request. I’m hoping the other two do so quickly, also.

Vox "Blogger" Copies and Pastes

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Another blatant case of copyright infringement.

I use Google Alerts to find articles that might interest me. Today, while going through a list of articles that came in earlier in the week, I found an article titled “Mac OS X Vs Windows Vista.” I clicked the link and was taken to a page on Vox, yet another blog-based social networking site. The blog entry began with the following brief introduction:

Doing my daily read of the news papers today and I came across a story asking which is the better OS, Windows Vista or Apple’s OS X. me I’m a mac users so I already know which is the better OS lol. Anyhow I’m sure you don’t want to read my one sided thoughts lol.

What followed that was a sloppy paraphrasing of the entire text of an article called “Vista versus Mac OS X” on Blogger.com. The Vox “author” had obviously copied and pasted the entire piece into the Vox-hosted blog, then edited selected sentences and added paragraph breaks to come up with a lengthy summary.

For example, the original says this:

On features alone it’s easy to conclude that Vista and Mac OS X are now on par but this overlooks two important elements. Firstly, the feel of both products is very different. In my opinion Mac OS X is unobtrusive and its interface intuitive and clean. Vista on the other hand makes you work for it. Take for example another new feature for Vista called User Account Control (UAC). UAC presents an intrusive dialogue box that warns you whenever you try to make a system wide change or install a new application. This will annoy most users however and you can just switch it off. But doing so overrides all of the new security measures Microsoft have built into Vista and makes the threat of infection from viruses or malware more likely. In contrast Mac OS X generally still remains virus and malware free.

And the Vox copy says this:

ON FEATURES alone it is easy to conclude that Vista and Mac OSX are on par, but this overlooks two important elements.

First, the feel of both products is different.

In my opinion Mac OSX is unobtrusive and its interface intuitive and clean. Vista, on the other hand, makes you work for it.

Take, for example, another new feature for Vista called User Account Control (UAC).

This presents an intrusive dialogue box that warns you whenever you try to make a system-wide change or install a new application.

This will annoy most users, however, and you can just switch it off. But doing so overrides all of the new security measures Microsoft has built into Vista and makes the threat of infection from viruses or malware more likely.

In contrast, Mac OSX generally still remains virus and malware free.

This is just one example. The entire piece was used this way.

Yes, the Vox blogger did link back to the original article. But why bother going there? All of the important points were already available on Vox.

And yes, the Vox blogger did include the name of the original post’s author. But did he have permission to use the entire article? I seriously doubt it. Was this “fair use”? I don’t think so.

As a writer, copyright infringement pisses me off to no end. A writer takes time to think about and compose an original, well-thought-out work. Who knows? It may have taken the article’s author hours to write the piece. How long did it take this lazy blogger to copy and paste its text into his blog? 15 seconds?

Obviously, I reported it to Vox. And I reported it to the author of the original piece. And then I left a comment for the blogger to think about.

Maybe (lol) he just doesn’t know any better (lol). Maybe (lol) Vox will set things right and teach him a little lesson about copyrights (lol).

It’ll probably put him out of business. As the sample of his writing shown at the beginning of this entry indicates, he obviously doesn’t know how to write anything worth reading.

By the way, the original article, by Danny Gorog, is pretty good. If you’re interested in these matters, I highly recommend it. You can find it here.

May 28 Update: The copy-and-paste blogger has deleted the comment I left on his offending blog post. If he cared about writers rights, he would have deleted the entire post. I’m curious to see what Vox will do about this. Probably nothing.

Leopard Postponed — What's a Writer to Do?

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It’s all about timing.

Yesterday afternoon, not long after the stock markets closed in New York, Apple put a one-paragraph announcement on its Hot News page. The announcement told the world (or whoever happened to be watching that page) that because Leopard resources had been used to finish up the iPhone, Leopard would be delayed. Instead of seeing the finished OS in June, we’ll now see it in October.

Why it Matters to Me

I took the news with mixed emotions. I had begun working hard on my Leopard Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press. The book will be the eighth or tenth (I’ve lost count) edition of my Mac OS VQS, which is one of my biggest selling titles. The book is important to me; the last edition accounted for half of my annual income for two years in a row. When that book is ready to write I drop everything — even helicopter charters — to work on it.

The most important part of it is getting it done on time. When Tiger came out in 2005 only two authors had books in stores beside the brand new software on its release date: Robin Williams and me. Both long-time Peachpit authors with reputations for churning out books that satisfy readers. If Robin’s book sold only half as well as mine — and I’m not fooling myself; it probably sold twice as well — we kicked butt. It was a great reward for hard work and grueling deadlines. But I have to say honestly that my Tiger book was one of the ones I’m most proud of.

This Time was Different

This time around, things were definitely different. The software wasn’t ready yet — that was obvious in the way certain features just didn’t work right. Lots of bugs to iron out, but few developmental releases. It was almost as if Apple’s Mac OS team was overwhelmed. This announcement from Apple explains a lot. Apparently they were overwhelmed, but not by the task at hand. They were overwhelmed by being shorthanded to tackle the task at hand.

Add to that the fact that my screenshot software of choice, Snapz Pro, “broke” in Leopard. Don’t misunderstand me; it did work and it took fine screenshots. But the shortcut key to invoke it did not work — even when I fiddled with Mac OS settings and tried other shortcut keys. So, for example, there was no way to take a screenshot of a menu.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Visual QuickStart Guide, but they rely on screenshots to communicate information. The book is full of step-by-step, illustrated instructions. I estimate that my Tiger VQS has at least 2,000 screenshots in it. Some screenshots show windows, others show menus. Almost every single one is less than a full screen of information. Now think of how much fun it might be to take 2,000 screenshots with something as awkward as Grab or, worse yet, Apple’s built-in screenshot shortcut keys. And then manually edit every single screenshot in a graphics program like Photoshop. Not having Snapz Pro (or something equivalent, if something equivalent exists) was going to seriously slow down my workflow.

What was even worse for me (and all other writers, I assume) was the “secret features” Steve Jobs alluded to when he first showed off Leopard. I had no idea what they were. And no one else did either. What if those features changed the way part of Mac OS X looked? All my screenshots would have to be redone. And what if the features were big enough to warrant their own chapters? Or replaced existing features? That could mean significant reorganization of the book, with changes to all the chapter and feature references. I could be working my butt off to finish a 700+ page book, only to have to redo major parts of it.

So I was under a lot of pressure. I had the ticking clock that said the software would be out “this spring.” That meant before June 20. I knew my publisher needed 2-3 weeks to get the final files printed and turned into books. That meant I needed to be done writing and editing by the end of May. But not knowing what the future would bring, was crippling me, making it difficult and frustrating to get things done.

I was not a happy camper. So when the announcement came yesterday, it was a bit of a relief for me.

The Problem with the Postponement

There is a problem, however: timing.

I had planned to work on my Leopard book for April and May. Then comes my annual secret project (which I can’t talk about until after publication) for the month of June and a bit into July. Then my annual one-month stay at Howard Mesa to get some work done on our property and knock off a few articles for Informit and possibly try to reconstruct that mystery novel I was working on (which was lost in the great hard disk crash and backup screw-up of February 2007). Then we’d planned to take a vacation to the northwest to continue our search for a new place to live. By that time, it would be September and the helicopter business would be heating up again; I already have two charters lined up for that month. Also, around that time, I’d be ready to start work on my Word for Macintosh revision.

There was a plan B for this summer, too. It consisted of me getting a job as a pilot for someone else, flying somewhere other than Arizona. I could work on my secret project while I was away and escape Arizona’s brutal heat and get to fly someplace different. I have a very good lead on a job in St. Louis (of all places) and a few possibilities in Oregon and Washington. But nothing finalized.

Now these plans for the next six months of my life are completely up in the air. Assuming an October 1 release of Leopard — this is just a date pulled out of the air; I swear I don’t know anything and if I did I wouldn’t repeat it — I have to be finished with the book by the first week in September. So I’ll work on it in July and August. While I still have my secret project to work on in June, I don’t have anything lined up for the rest of April and the month of May.

What’s even worse about all this is that I can’t work on a VQS at Howard Mesa or at a summer job elsewhere — I need a desktop computer with a big monitor to do the layout — and I can’t take a vacation when I need to work on this book. (See above for how important it is.) So my whole summer schedule is completely screwed up.

And It’s a Money Problem, Too

And since I get paid advances when I work and I don’t have anything lined up between now and the beginning of June, I’m not going to see a payday until the end of June or July. Ouch. So my finances will be screwed up, too.

It gets even worse. If the book had a release date in June 2007 (with the original release of Leopard), I’d start seeing royalties at September 2007 month-end. But because it won’t be released until October, which is after the start of the last quarter, I won’t see royalties until March 2008 month-end. That’s a 6-month payday delay for a 4-month publication delay. Double-ouch.

But that’s what the freelance writer’s life is like: a financial roller coaster.

What to Do?

Today I’ll be making some phone calls. The goal is to pin down exact dates for all of my known projects so I can decide, once and for all, if I can get a pilot job according to Plan B. And, while I’m at it, I’ll try to pick up a small book project to work on in May. (Not likely but remotely possible.)

Then I’ll get to work doing other things that I’ve been neglecting — cleaning out the condo I want to rent, washing the helicopter, organizing my office, reserving rooms for next year’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure trips.

After all, life goes on.