This morning another romance writer, A.J. Llewellyn, was kind enough to contact me. He wanted to let me know that my books, HE’S BEWITCHED and PRETTY MAN, were being pirated on a web site called:
http://www.4shared.com/network/search.jsp?searchName=home&searchExtention=&searchmode=2
At first I wasn’t too worried, but then, while I was at the site checking out my books, I watched thirty downloads happen right before my eyes.
This is stealing; it’s illegal. So I contacted the web site with e-mails, then I followed up with a phone call to one of the owners of the site. It wasn’t easy getting him, but I put my journalism background to work and finally snagged him.
He ultimately agreed to remove all my works from his site, and they are all down now. But the fact that a good number of books were already stolen doesn’t make me feel much better. From what I’ve learned, the author has to take control and stop these things as they happen. So I’ll be checking regularly from now on, because I doubt this is the last time it will happen.
And, out of curiosity, I opened an account with this same file sharing web site just to see how it worked. I was absolutely amazed at how simple it is to upload files, share work illegally, and totally get away with it.
I’d like to add that as soon as the books were removed from the pirate site above, they popped up again on another pirate site later that same afternoon. The name of the site is http://www28.zippyshare.com/v/97262540/file.html Yes, that’s right, “Zippyshare.” How cheesy is that?
