What To Do About Copyright Infringement
by Kayla Kuffs

Copyright infringement has been a problem for the music industry for years. Since the days of Napster and file sharing software, which brought the problem to a head, there have been countless discussions, court cases and laws to address this issue. The music industry has had some success in stopping their music from been given away or sold without any compensation, sadly, the problem still continues today for writers who post their work on the Internet.

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of somebody else’s copyrighted material which violates their exclusive rights under copyright law. For the focus of this article it means taking somebody else’s material and posting or publishing it (online or on paper) without the author’s permission.

Establishing Your Copyright:

Understand that anything you write falls under your copyright as soon as you write it. It is yours unless you are writing for an employer. However knowing that doesn’t help you prove it if you ever have to. There are a couple of things you can do to ensure you have some proof of copyright. You can register it with your country’s Copyright Office. This is expensive for the budget minded writer and not always worth the expense. Keep in mind though that you can register a group of writings for one fee, that does help alleviate some of the cost.

You can also do something that is known as ‘The Poor Man’s Copyright". Take a copy of your work and mail it to yourself. I’d suggest detailing the contents on the outside of the envelope prior to mailing. Once you’ve received the envelope, file it in a safe place. If your copyright ever comes into question you have the postmark to prove the date you mailed it and it can assist you in proving when it was written. It’s not fool proof but it is better than nothing.

Another thing you can do to protect yourself is keep a detailed record of each piece you write, when you wrote it, where you submitted it for publication and which publications accepted and printed it. A spreadsheet is an easy way to keep these records and I understand there are various programs available to use if you are not computer literate enough to set up your own system.

Regardless of how you decide to establish your copyright, it is beneficial to each writer to have some kind of record of their work in an accessible place.

What Does Copyright Infringement Look Like?

Taking somebody else’s material and publishing it on the Internet or in a paper publication is copyright infringement. Taking large excerpts of somebody else’s work is copyright infringement. Even if the publication provides a link back to the original place the material was found and/or provides the author’s name, it is still copyright infringement. Without permission of the copyright owner no work should appear anywhere other than where the author permits it, except under some very strict circumstances. I’ll discuss those circumstances later on in this article.

The Importance of Maintaining your Rights:

For a writer who doesn’t concern themselves with getting paid, or doesn’t have goals to be published in a specific publication, it may not be that important. Some people write for the joy of writing and love knowing other people are reading their work. However, even if money is a non issue for you, having your work plastered all over the Internet may be important to the website owner who’s legitimately showing your work on their site. For somebody that wants to sell their work or promote other things with their work, copyright laws are important and need to be followed for you to get the ultimate value for what you are doing.

Writers lose out even if they don’t care about the money. They lose control of where their work appears. They lose opportunities to pull traffic to their websites or the sites that legitimately publish their work. Those two factors can have a big impact on the promotional aspects of writing. Work that has been stolen may no longer be eligible for certain anthologies, magazines or websites that the writer wants to appear in. Work that has been stolen loses value as writers can no longer license or sell certain rights to their work. Stolen work might be nixed by a publisher when a writer wants to publish collection of their own work simply because the piece in question has been spread all over the net. Consider this: why would a customer pay for the same stories they can get for free somewhere else?

Copyright infringement translates into dollars lost for the ones doing the work and free money/traffic for those who steal. As the erotica market is already a low paying market, for some writers, every penny counts.

What to do About Copyright Infringement?

First off, you have to find out if you even have the problem. This is where your favorite search engine comes in handy. Start by searching your pen name. See what comes up in the search results and then visit those sites. Poke around and see if anything you wrote is there, and if so, did you give them permission to put it there?

You can also do this search with a distinct sentence taken from the first two or three paragraphs of your story or article. I say distinct because to use a sentence such as:

"She had long blond curly hair and blue eyes."

You will likely end up with hundreds of results and most, if not all, won’t be yours. However if you use a sentence such as:

"Rachel’s skin was the color of heavily creamed coffee with eyes as dark as melted chocolate, her full lips were raspberry red and I swear she looked good enough to eat."

Your search results will be much more specific, and the results most likely will be yours.

Try the above searches at www.google.com and see the difference in the results.

Another thing to keep in mind when hunting for your own work is to keep an eye out for colleague’s and friend’s work. One of a writer’s best protections is networking with other writers. You might not find your own work when you search but you might find your friend Susie Smut’s work. Let her know what you found. You’ll help her out and very likely she’ll return the favor when she is doing her own searches. Also, more often than not, if your work is on a site illegally, you can safely bet most of the other content is there illegally too. As frustrating as that is to discover, by telling the other writers you now have a significant number of people to contact the site owner to demand removal. Sometimes just one lone writer doesn’t send a very powerful message but when ten or twenty writers swoop down on a site owner, it’s a little harder to ignore.

Networking with other writers is also a good defense when dealing with discussion groups that steal work. It’s harder to find work posted on these discussion lists as the search engines rarely list the actual material included in the lists. But if you are a member of five lists and you have five writing friends who are also members of five lists, you actually have 6 pairs of eyes monitoring 30 lists for stolen material. It really increases the chances of finding the unscrupulous lists.

You Have a Problem, Now What?

Well depending on the site there are a few things you can do. I’m going to address two situations separately here.

Websites:

Start by contacting the website owner. Look for contact information on the actual site. Most will have an email address. Contact them and use strong language to request the removal of your work. Give them a few days but no more than a week to remove your work.

SAMPLE LETTER
(replace sample URLs with relevant URLs)

(send to email address listed on the site)
Subject: Unauthorized use of material on your website

Dear Website Owner,
It has come to my attention that my story "A Romp in the Hay" is included in your website here: http//www.website.com/romp.htm

This story falls under my copyright and I have not, nor do I intend to, give permission for this story to be on your website.

Please remove the story "A Romp in the Hay" from your site within the next five days and notify me as soon as you have complied. Failure to do so will force me to take further steps to protect my work.

Sincerely,
Your Name
email address

If you get no reply, or an unsatisfactory reply from the website owner then it is time to get a little more official and a little more technical. Go to the website host. It sounds a bit tricky and it is, but if you know how to do it, it’s not a big deal. Here’s how you do it:

1 ­ http://www.whois.ws/ 
2 ­ Enter the name of the website and you will get the following:
     Registrar: The company where the domain name is registered
     Registrant: Person/company who owns the domain name
     Domain: Name of the website address
     Administrative Contact: Person who administrated the website
     Technical Contact: Person who maintains the website
     Domain or Name Servers: Company who owns the servers the website resides on (also known as website host)

Note that the Registrant, Administrative Contact and Technical Contact can all be the same people or different people. It depends on how the domain name was registered.

The Domain or Name server plays the most important role here. It is that company that hosts the website. They will be your most powerful tool beyond spending money on lawyers to fight a theft through the legal system.

The Domain or Name server will look similar to this: ns1.protgp.com Protgp.com is the company. Go to that site and you’ll find email contact information to pursue your complaint. They may also list a TOS (Terms of Use) or an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy). If they have a usage policy on their site, read it first, it may provide you with the details they require to deal with somebody accused of copyright infringement.

Once you have this information you start emailing. Copy your email to the Registrant, Administrative Contact, Technical Contact and most importantly the Domain/Name Server company.

If you receive a ‘privacy protection’ company name, use the email contact given and your email will be forwarded to the domain name owner. Privacy Protection Services, assist in protecting the registrant’s personal information from being mined by spammers etc. They will forward all legitimate business emails.

SAMPLE LETTER
(replace sample URLs with relevant URLs)

(Send copies to: Registrant, Administrative Contact, Technical Contact and most importantly the Domain/Name Server company.)

Subject: Copyright Infringement by your customer

Dear Sir/Madam,

On [XXX date] I notified [WEBSITE] owner that they had my copyrighted material on their site. I requested that it be removed within five days of my notification. As of the writing of this email my material remains on the website: http//www.website.com/romp.htm

I am writing to request your assistance in having the website removed until they comply with copyright law and remove material they are not allowed to publish.

My original copyrighted work can be found at: www.mywebsite.com, it clearly states that my material is copyrighted with all rights reserved. I have not, nor do I intend to give permission for my work to appear on: www.website.com.

I look forward to your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,
Your Name
email address

I have never had to go further than this. It is rare that I have had to go that far but some people will force the issue. Be ready for it.

If your work is still not taken down then you have a decision to make. Do you want to spend money with lawyers and go through the legal system? If so, contact a lawyer familiar with copyright law. Not every lawyer will be suitable. Screen them, ask for their experience in that area of law. This will be an expensive and complicated fight, make sure you have somebody who knows what they are doing.

Discussion Lists:

This is a difficult area to deal with based simply on the fact that copyright infringement is rampant on discussion lists. Most of it is done in ignorance of the law and it is usually very easy to stop. A quick note to the moderators of a list will stop the most of the problem immediately. Sometimes people think they are following the law and you may have to take a little time to explain what they are doing wrong and what they can do to fix it. Most will comply.

SAMPLE LETTER
 (replace sample URLs with relevant URLs)

(Send this letter to the owner of the discussion list your work has been posted to)

Subject: Copyright infringement on your discussion list

Dear Discussion List owner,

It has come to my attention that you have my copyrighted work on your discussion list. I would ask at this time that you remove the material from your archives.

The material may be found at: 
http//groups.Discussion.com/group/GROUP NAME/message/2065

I would also ask at this time that you stop the practice of posting other people’s writing in its entirety on your group. The instructions below will provide you with the correct procedure for sharing other people’s material. I would appreciate you explaining this to your group members.

1: Post the URL to the article of interest with a brief description of what the article is about.

2: Post the first one or two paragraphs of the article in question and include the URL for people to follow if they choose to.

These two options allow the original author and website owner to receive the traffic they should rightfully receive for their work as well as offer your group members the ability to read the article and possibly other related material on the site.

Please note that I expect my work to be removed from your group within the next five days. Failure to do so will force me to take further steps to protect my copyrighted material.

Thank you for your assistance with this matter.

Sincerely,
Your Name
email address

If the list owner doesn’t comply then you need to contact the service provider. Yahoo and MSN treat copyright infringement in similar fashions. They require a specific format with very specific information in your complaint letter. If your letter passes their muster, they will remove the discussion list. This doesn’t always stop the list owner from opening another list so you need to be on high guard if you want to stop somebody completely. Be aware that MSN states that they do send your complaint to the list owner so if you are concerned about your real name being exposed it may be wise to write them using your pen name first to see if that will be acceptable to them.

Yahoo and MSN will remove lists and user names, however I have yet to see them ban an individual from using their services. The best you can expect is to frustrate the person who is stealing your work by wearing them down, one list and one ID at a time. It becomes a test of wills which is why dealing with discussion lists is easier if you have more than one person making the complaints. It’s tiring and frustrating on both ends.

SAMPLE LETTER
 (replace sample URLs with relevant URLs
Letter courtesy of Dani Benjamin)

(Send this letter to the service host i.e. Yahoo, MSN, SmartGroups etc)

Subject: Copyright infringement

Dear Sir/Madam,
I was recently informed that a Group on your service is using my copyrighted material without permission.

The group is: http//groups.Discussion.com/group/GROUP NAME

This material posted without permission is at: http//groups.Discussion.com/group/GROUP NAME/message/2065 (include actual post # which includes your work)

On [DATE], I emailed the owner of this Discussion Group at the email address given on the group's home page GROUP NAME-owner@Discussion.com , and requested that they remove my material. As of today, [DATE], I have had no response (or, they have refused).

So I am writing to you to request that my work be removed from that site immediately.

This is a violation of your own Terms of Service, which states: (this is Yahoo’s TOS agreement for example only):

In Section 5, "MEMBER CONDUCT"

"You agree to not use the Service to (f) upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party" And your Copyright notice which states "Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same."

My original work is posted on (NUMBER OF SITES PERMITTED TO POST YOUR WORK) website(s) with my permission at:

[INSERT WEBSITE URLS HERE]

These pages clearly state that my work is copyrighted (include copyright notice: i.e 2004, All rights reserved.)

The use of my work at the site mentioned above:
 (http//groups.Discussion.com/group/GROUP NAME/message/2065)

is done so without my permission. I have not and DO NOT give my permission for this use of my copyrighted work. I again request that it be immediately removed.

I do hereby state that the information given above is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the creator and sole Owner of the exclusive rights to said work.

Please respond to me at [your email address].

Let this serve as my electronic signature.

/Your Name/
Your Name

My contact information:

Your Name:  
Your Address:  
Your Phone#:  

A Little about Fair Use or Fair Dealings:

Fair Use or Fair Dealings is where your work may be used for some very specific circumstances. These circumstances include (but are not limited to): satire, commentary on your work (example: book reviews), news items, and teaching. It is important to know that this is not carte blanche to use the entire entity of any one piece but only enough of a piece to allow for the function of its use. In other words, you can’t include the whole book when providing a paragraph will suffice. This usage must not detract from any financial gain the copyright owner could earn from the piece.

What If You Are Not Concerned About Money?

Well if money is not an issue, it is still worth your effort to track your material. What if a piece of yours ends up on a site that you don’t support, or worse, a site that you vehemently disagree with? You would want to be able to prove you owned that work so you could have it removed quickly. Keep track of your writing.

There is a non profit organization called the Creative Commons Project. They have developed a system that allows for specific use of any material you wish you offer. You may allow reprints of your work as long as they are reprinted for free or for certain purposes only. They have a set of codes and tools you may use to mark your work for use under the circumstances you choose. This, from what I can see, is a better system than just throwing your work out in the world with no strings attached. It allows your work to be used under the circumstance you are agreeable to.
http://creativecommons.org/ 

So, depending on your own set of circumstances, copyright issues are important. As I have only touched the surface of this very complicated topic I am providing a set of resources so that you can research this topic in depth if you need to. Keep in mind that at this time copyright law is going through changes, the Internet has caused all kinds of new issues to creep up and we are in a position of closing the gate after the horse has been let loose for some copyright issues.

Copyright Resources:

Wikipedia - DMCA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA 

Ten Myths about Copyright Explained
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html 

United States Copyright Office
http://www.copyright.gov/ 

Canadian Intellectual Property Office
http://cipo.gc.ca/ 

Australian Copyright Council
http://www.copyright.org.au 

The UK Patent Office
http://www.patent.gov.uk/index.htm 

Fair Use
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/fair_use.html 

Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/ 

Yahoo ­ copyright complaints
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
(Scroll down to section 24)

MSN ­ copyright complaints
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtInfrg.htm 

______
"What To Do About Copyright Infringement" © 2005 Kayla Kuffs. All rights reserved.

About the Author: Kayla Kuffs has been writing erotica for six years, and has been the editor/owner of the BDSM eZine The Dominant’s View for three years.

Kayla’s erotica and other writings have appeared in Whiplash, Leash, Prometheus and Smut Magazines as well as various websites. A former columnist for Brilliant Smut and ghostwriter for a well known bondage model, Kayla’s writing experience spans BDSM lifestyle, adult entertainment and mainstream erotic genres.
Website: The Dominant’s View

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