Special Bulletin

[metanewsmods]

The links here seemed time sensitive, so we thought we'd do a special post. These are all links about a site that's been scraping fic (and book samples and journal articles and anything else they can get their hands on). To find out if they've stolen anything of yours, use their search box and put in the name under which you posted your stories. Don't try their alphabetical index because it isn't really alphabetical-- It's sorted by the first two letters of the name, and then everything under that is jumbled together in some random order.

The fics taken seem to be utterly random. They didn't go by length, rating, popularity, or fandom. (This link finder had four stories stolen.)

Untitled: isfanficlegal (tumblr) - "We’ve been getting pings and @’s all morning about ebooks-tree.com who seem to be scraping/taking stories off of AO3 and hosting them as PDFs and mobi downloads on their site; the site seems to be pulling from UrBookLibrary as well. They’re not reading your "do not copy/duplicate" notes on your AO3 fic; their bots are pulling things directly from AO3, without AO3′s authorization or assent. It looks like they are pulling from Wattpad too, again without authorization or assent."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

They’re at it again: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - "Remember the Goodreads fanfic debaucle? Well, another site is now doing it. I just found 13 of my stories listed over on ebooks-tree.com, a for-profit site where I neither uploaded them nor authorized anyone else to do so."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

Ebooks-tree.com update and getting your works removed: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - "It doesn’t matter if you’re extremely prolific or if you’ve only ever written 1 fic in your life, seven years ago, the ebooks-tree site scraped everything they could from AO3, so even if you think your stuff can’t possibly be there, check!"

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

Untitled: ao3org (Tumblr) - "A lot of people have been writing into Support about this as well, and as much as we’d like to prevent this kind of thing, there’s only so much we can do while also keeping the downloads functionality alive for our users (who might depend on it due to limited internet time or mobile access only)."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright, topic:ao3

Scam Advisor on tzarmedia.com: Scam Advisor - Rating of the site that appears to behind the fic theft. Do not give them a credit card number.

topic:fanfic, topic:scam

Comments

[isis]

I am super-saddened that all the links are now tumblr links. I will cling to Dreamwidth with my cold dead hands, but I guess everything has gone tumblr, even AO3.

[deird1]

*nods*

I don't get it. Tumblr is such a rubbish format.

[jainas]

Thanks for the heads up, I just found I had several works stolen... Fanarts (!) and fanfics in French (!).

I filled a complain and I'm signal-boosting the hell of this in the french part of LJ and DW.