January 16, 2012

Smut, Amazon, and the biggest plagiarism problem of them all

by

Amazon’s publishing services have been touted for how easy they are to use. Much has been made of the story about writers bringing to market works while not having to go through the trouble of finding a publisher or agent. This is to say that the internet retail giant has removed the fickle gatekeepers, and now a readers alone get to decide who and what to read.

They also have made it possible to anonymously and nimbly rip off the work of other writers.

Adam Penenberg reports for Fast Company:

Amazon’s erotica section isn’t just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It’s also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn’t appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.

The Fast Company expose details the ins and outs (ahem) of Amazon’s dirty little secret, which is namely that they are unable to monitor their new little micro-publishing economies. The article follows the investigations of one erotic fiction author, who writes under the name Sharazade, as they uncover the dirty deals of Amazon’s red light district. In this case it is the “work” of someone writing under the name of Maria Cruz:

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon’s U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and MeWicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

And they weren’t all public domain, either:

It turns out Cruz isn’t the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan’s author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn’t appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1.

It seems that authors looking to publish with Amazon should take a long pause before getting in bed with them. What’s to stop another Amazon author from plagiarizing from them and undermining their sales.

Obviously it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Amazon does to fix these illegalities. Or perhaps Amazon can convince some of these authors that have had their work plagirized that it was all part of some sort of meta “violation fantasy.”

 

Paul Oliver is the marketing manager of Melville House. Previously he was co-owner of Wolfgang Books in Philadelphia.

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