The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Two issues involving Audible's ACX have come across my desk recently.

Rights Fraud

I've heard from several self- and small press-pubbed authors who report that they've found their books listed on ACX as open to narrator auditions...except that they, or their publishers, didn't put them there. This appears to be an attempt to steal authors' audio rights.

Below is one listing. Here's another and another and another. (All of these listings have been invalidated by ACX.)


See "Comments from the Rights Holder" at the bottom. The purported company, Publishing D LLC, does not show up on any searches.

The fraud seems pretty elaborate. Here's what one of the authors who contacted me told me:


These comments from a freelance audiobook narrator illustrate that "Publishing D" is not an isolated incidence.

Promotional Code Shenanigans

Multiple authors have contacted me to report that they've received an email from ACX withdrawing their promotional codes. The cited reason: "unusual activity," with no explanation of what that means.

The authors say that they have not used the codes improperly or violated ACX guidelines; in some cases, they've used the codes only a handful of times or not at all. See, for instance, blog posts by authors G. Michael Vasey and Adam Piggott. Per discussions on the KBoards and Reddit, a lot of authors seem to be affected.

Is this one of Amazon's (Audible's parent company) periodic crackdowns on misuse or fraud that has inadvertently ensnared innocent authors? According to author and self-publishing expert David Gaughran, ACX promo code scamming is a major problem, and Amazon's anti-abuse sweeps often involve a lot of collateral damage. Or could it be an error--a glitch or rogue algorithm?

So far, authors' efforts to get a fuller explanation have run up against the black box that is Amazon:


If I hear anything further, I'll update this post.

UPDATE 11/27/19: One of the authors who alerted me to the promo code withdrawal has received a notice saying that their codes are reinstated--however, they say that the promo code tab has yet to appear in their dashboard.


UPDATE 2/25/29: More about ACX scams, from a comment left by a narrator:

About the ACX thing...I was contacted by ACX to narrate three books, however, the person who offered the contracts kept emailing and frantically telling me to send them my book codes. I got leary and called ACX. They said unfortunately there are many scams taking place where if a book is "unclaimed" in their system, someone may grab it and offer it as an audiobook contract. Then they keep the codes and blackmarket sell them. They do not pay the narrators. Many other authors are experiencing it, they said, but they have no way to regulate it.

I declined the offers and got a nasty note from the contract holder. I was also told that since I corresponded with them, they had my email that is associated with Amazon..the same one. So, ACX said I had to go change my email on Amazon or they would have access there too. Geez.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

The enormous digital archive that is the Internet Archive encompasses many different initiatives and projects. One of these is the Open Library Project, a huge repository of scanned print books available for borrowing in various digital formats.

Unlike a regular library, the IA does not purchase these books, but relies on donations to build the collection. Nor are permissions sought from copyright holders before creating the new digital editions. And although the IA claims that the project includes primarily 20th century books that are no longer widely available either physically or digitally, the collection in fact includes large numbers of 21st century books that are in-copyright and commercially available--and whose sales the Open Library's unpermissioned versions have the potential to harm.

Most professional writers' groups consider the Open Library to be not library lending, but massive copyright violation. Many have issued alerts and warnings (you can see SFWA's alert here), and many authors have contacted the IA with takedown requests (to which the IA was not always terrific at responding; you can see my account of my own frustrating experience here).

In the fall of 2018, a novel (and disputed) legal theory was created to justify the Open Library and similar initiatives, called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). CDL's adherents present it as "a good faith interpretation of US copyright law for American libraries" seeking to conduct mass digitization projects, and invoke as support the "exhaustion" principle of the first sale doctrine (the idea that an authorized transfer of a copyrighted work "exhausts" a copyright holder's ability to subsequently control the use and distribution of  that copy; this is what allows used book sales, for example) and the fair use doctrine (a complex principle that permits the copying of a copyrighted work as long as the copying is limited and transformative). As long as the library restricts its lending in ways similar to restrictions on the lending of physical books (for instance, allowing only one user at a time to access each digital format), CDL holds that creating new digital editions of in-copyright books and lending them out is fair use, and copyright holders' permission isn't necessary.

Libraries in particular have embraced CDL. Publishers' and writers' groups...not so much, especially in light of a recent legal decision that rejected both the first sale doctrine and fair use as basis for re-selling digital content. Here's the Authors Guild:

CDL relies on an incorrect interpretation of copyright’s “fair use” doctrine to give legal cover to Open Library and potentially other CDL users’ outright piracy—scanning books without permission and lending those copies via the internet. By restricting access to one user at a time for each copy that the library owns, the proponents analogize scanning and creating digital copies to physically lending a legally purchased book. Although it sounds like an appealing argument, the CDL concept is based on a faulty legal argument that has already been rejected by the U.S. courts.

In Capitol Records v. ReDigi, the Second Circuit held that reselling a digital file without the copyright holder’s permission is not fair use because the resales competed with the legitimate copyright holder’s sales. It found that market harm was likely because the lower-priced resales were sold to the same customers who would have otherwise purchased new licenses. In this regard, the court emphasized a crucial distinction between resales of physical media and resales of digital content, noting that unlike physical copies, digital content does not deteriorate from use and thus directly substitutes new licensed digital copies.

The same rationale applies to the unauthorized resale or lending of ebooks. Allowing libraries to digitize and circulate copies made from physical books in their collection without authorization, when the same books are available or potentially available on the market, directly competes with the market for legitimate ebook licenses, ultimately usurping a valuable piece of the market from authors and copyright holders.

For a more detailed deconstruction of CDL's arguments, see this statement from the Association of American Publishers.

Flash forward to 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic crisis. Last week, the IA announced the debut of the National Emergency Library--really just the Open Library, but with some new provisions.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

What this boils down to, under all the high-flying verbiage: the IA is ditching the one-user-at-a-time restriction that is one of the key justifications for the theory of controlled digital lending, and allowing unlimited numbers of users to access any digitized book in its collection.

The Authors Guild again, on how this harms authors:

IA is using a global crisis to advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors. It has misrepresented the nature and legality of the project through a deceptive publicity campaign. Despite giving off the impression that it is expanding access to older and public domain books, a large proportion of the books on Open Library are in fact recent in-copyright books that publishers and authors rely on for critical revenue. Acting as a piracy site—of which there already are too many—the Internet Archive tramples on authors’ rights by giving away their books to the world.

Here's just one concrete example. Katherine Harbour's Nettle King is available for borrowing in the National Emergency Library as a scan, an EPUB, and a PDF (the IA's EPUB versions are OCR conversions full of errors). Published in 2016, it's also "in print" and available on Amazon and other online retailers as an ebook, in addition to other formats. The IA, which never bought a digital license to Ms. Harbour's book and scanned and uploaded it without permission, now is proposing to allow unlimited numbers of users to access it, potentially impacting her sales. How is this any different from a pirate site?

Announcement of the National Emergency Library has been greeted rapturously by the press and by libraries. Less regarded has been the flood of protest and criticism from authors and professional groups. In situations like these, authors and publishers tend to be dismissed as greedy money-grubbers who are putting profits ahead of the march of progress and the noble dream of universal access to content...despite the fact that authors' right to make money from their work--and, just as important, to control the use of it--springs directly from the US Constitution, and has been enshrined in law since 1790.

In response to the outcry over the National Emergency Library, the IA has issued a justification of it, citing the "tremendous and historic outage" of COVID-19-related library closures, with "books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access...sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them." This noble-sounding purpose conveniently ignores the fact that those libraries' (legally-acquired and paid-for) digital collections are still fully available.

If your book is included in the National Emergency Library, and you don't want it there, the IA will graciously allow you to opt out (another inversion of copyright, which is an opt-in system).


Hopefully they'll be more responsive than they were in 2018, when I sent them DMCA notices that they ignored. Or later, when they began rejecting writers' takedown requests by claiming that the IA "operates consistently with the Controlled Digital Lending protocol.”


I've covered this question above, but I want to highlight it again, because it's such a persistent objection when this kind of infringement occurs: Brick-and-mortar libraries lend out books for free, so how are the IA's "library" projects any different?

A few reasons.

- Brick-and-mortar libraries buy the books they lend, a separate purchase for each format (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, etc.). The author gets a royalty on these purchases. The IA seeks donations, and lends those. Authors get nothing.

- Brick-and-mortar libraries lend only the books they purchase. They don't use those books to create new or additional, un-permissioned lending formats. That's exactly what the IA does. Moreover, one of its additional lending formats is riddled with OCR errors that make them a chore to read. Apart from permission issues, this is not how authors want their books to be represented to the public.

- People who advocate for looser copyright laws often paint copyright defenders as greedy or mercenary, as if defending copyright were only about money. It's worth remembering another important principle of copyright: control. Copyright gives authors not just the right to profit from their intellectual property, but to control its use. That, as much as or even more than money, is the principle the IA is violating with its library projects.

UPDATE: It appears that the IA--on its own initiative--is removing not just illegally-created digital editions in response to authors' takedown requests, but legally-created DAISY editions as well, even where authors don't ask for this (DAISY is a format for the visually impaired, and like Braille, is an exception in copyright law and is also permissioned in publishing contracts).


It did the same thing in 2018, even where the takedown requests specifically exempted DAISY editions. I don't know if the current removals reflect expediency or possibly are just a kind of FU to writers (and, indirectly, to disabled readers), but if you send a removal request to the IA, you might consider specifically asking them not to remove any editions for the blind and disabled (which, again, are legal for the IA to distribute).

UPDATE 4/2/20: The Authors Guild has issued a statement encouraging writers to demand that the Internet Archive remove their books from its National Emergency Library. The statement includes instructions on what to do, along with a sample DMCA notice in the proper legal form.

UPDATE 4/8/20: SFWA has issued a statement on the National Emergency Library, describing the legal theory of Controlled Digital Lending as "unproven and dubious". (A link to SFWA's DMCA notice generator is included.)

[U]sing the Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, the Archive has created the “National Emergency Library” and removed virtually all controls from the digital copies so that they can be viewed and downloaded by an infinite number of readers. The uncontrolled distribution of copyrighted material is an additional blow to authors who are already facing long-term disruption of their income because of the pandemic. Uncontrolled Digital Lending lacks any legal argument or justification.

UPDATE 4/9/20: The Chairman of the US Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Thom Tillis, has sent a letter to the Internet Archive, pointing out the many voluntary initiatives by authors, publishers, and libraries to expand access to copyrighted materials, and expressing concern that this be done within the law. 

I am not aware of any measure under copyright law that permits a user of copyrighted works to unilaterally create an emergency copyright act. Indeed, I am deeply concerned that your "Library" is operating outside the boundaries of the copyright law that Congress has enacted and alone has the jurisdiction to amend.

The letter ends by punting "discussion" until "some point when the global pandemic is behind us." So, basically, carry on and maybe at some point we'll talk.

UPDATE 4/15/20: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle has responded to Sen. Tillis's letter, claiming that the National Library is needed because "the entire physical library system is offline and unavailable" (even though libaries' legally acquired digital collections are still fully available) and that "the fair use doctrine, codified in the Copyright Act, provides flexibility to libraries and others to adjust to changing circumstances" (there's no such language in the actual Fair Use statute).

Kahle also notes:

In an early analysis of the use we are seeing what we expected: 90% of the books borrowed were published more than ten years ago, two-thirds were published during the twentieth century. The number of books being checked out and read is comparable to that of a town of about 30,000 people. Further, about 90% of people borrowing the book only looked at it for 30 minutes. These usage patterns suggest that perhaps that patrons may be using the checked-out book for fact checking or research, but we suspect a large number of people are browsing the book in a way similar to browsing library shelves.

But this is hardly a compelling argument. Large numbers of these books are certainly still in copyright, and many are likely still "in print" and commercially available (in digital form as well as hardcopy). Just because a book was published more than ten years ago or prior to 2000 doesn't magically cause it to become so hard to find it must be digitized without permission in order to save it. "But they're older books" sidesteps, rather than addresses, the thorny copyright issues raised by the IA's unpermissioned scanning and digitizing.

This passage also tacitly confirms the IA's abandonment of the one-user-at-a-time restriction that is a key feature of the rationale for the Controlled Digital Lending theory. If the basis for your enterprise is a legal theory whose strictures can be jettisoned at will, how credible is that theory really?

Kahle also claims that "No books published in the last five years are in the National Emergency Library". As it happens, the example I provide above (Katherine Harbour's Nettle King) handily disproves this statement: it was published in 2016, and was digitized by the IA in 2018 (you can see the scan here). I seriously doubt it's the only instance. Either Kahle is being disingenuous, or he doesn't know his own collection.

As a sop to creators, Kahle reiterates that concerned authors "need only to send us an email" and their books will be removed. As I've pointed out above, this is yet another inversion of copyright law, which explicitly gives creators control over the use of their work. In other words, it's the IA, not authors, who should be the petitioners here.

UPDATE 4/16/20: This terrific, comprehensive article from the NWU's Edward Hasbrouck examines the multiple ways the Internet Archive is distributing the page images from its unpermissioned scanning of print books--"[o]nly one of [which] fits the Internet Archive’s and its supporters’ description of so-called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)."

Locate S,1 “After the Final Rose” The first time I heard this song was the first time I saw Christina Schneider and Locate S,1 perform live last year, when they were opening for Of Montreal at the Bell House. I was immediately blown away by the verse melody – “women in love, women in airplanes […]

Pokus “Pokus Two” The best way I can describe Pokus aesthetic is that it’s like if the rhythm section of Fugazi was playing with a keyboard player who sometimes sounded a bit like Sun Ra when he was messing around synthesizers and overdriven electric organs in the late ’70s and other times was more along […]

Earlier this month, the Ohio state House passed a bill that would ban abortion with virtually zero exceptions when the fetus develops a heartbeat at about six weeks, which is before many women realize they’re pregnant. And as of last week, Ohio’s state House is considering another bill, HB 565, which would confer personhood upon […]

In October, the Supreme Court heard a case that was painfully ironic, considering the Kavanaugh hearings the nation had just been subjected to: a challenge to the United States’ extremely restrictive sex offender registry laws. While opinions on the case Gundy v. United States, which challenges the Attorney General’s ability to retroactively impose registry requirements, have yet […]

After 15 incredible years, Feministing is shutting down. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to the readers who joined us for this journey. As digital media has become corporatized, many independent news sites and blogs have been forced to shutter. As the New York Times reports today, unfortunately, we find ourselves among these. […]

Doraaaa

Happy Buttsgiving! Regular comics resume tomorrow.

Nice

Hi Renee, hi Brun

Hi Elliot

It took me so long!

I mean, maybe

Eeeeoooo

"Mad Mike" Hughes, a self-styled explorer and daredevil bent on proving that the earth is flat was killed over the weekend when his homemade rocket crashed in the California desert over the weekend.

Pagan healthcare providers discuss how they are coping with the stresses of the pandemic and how the power of their spiritual practices sustains them.

Continue reading Healthcare providers share how their Pagan practices nurture them through the pandemic at The Wild Hunt.

NASA added the name of the goddess Artemis to new missions. TWH examines some possible implications of the secretive "Artemis Accords" and how they relate to previous treaties and agreements that pertain to space and celestial bodies.

Continue reading The mysterious Artemis Accords describe US interests in space resources at The Wild Hunt.

One virus; 18 ways of seeing the world. Covid Latam is a collective project documenting the coronavirus pandemic as it unfolds across Latin America. Photographers – 9 men and 9 women – are working in 13 countries: Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba and Mexico to document the unfolding story of the pandemic through the Covid Latam instagram account

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We would like you to share your tributes for friends and family who have died

Covid-19 has now claimed the lives of thousands of people in the UK.

Older people and those with underlying health conditions are much more vulnerable to the coronavirus, but it can affect people who are otherwise fit and healthy.

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About 2m Britons have paused payments in the coronavirus crisis. Readers share their concerns

• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

Almost one in five UK mortgage holders have now been granted a payment holiday, it was estimated this week – but people’s experiences of the process have been very different. Some struggled to get a holiday while others say it was almost too easy. And while for some it will add just a few pounds to their monthly mortgage bill, others say their outlay will rise by a lot more.

The Guardian asked readers who had applied for a mortgage payment holiday, or help with other debts, how they got on. Almost 200 people contacted us to tell us their stories.

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for Cait

The Brimstone is back
in the woken hills of Vallombrosa,
passing the word
from speedwell to violet
wood anemone to celandine.
I could walk to you now
with Spring just ahead of me,
north over flat ground
at two miles an hour,
the sap moving with me,
under the rising
grass of the field
like a dragged magnet,
the lights of the flowers
coming on in waves
as I walked with the budburst
and the flushing of trees.
If I started now,
I could bring you the Spring
for your birthday.

Continue reading...

The wildly popular game gives players a place to socialize with others or simply escape while on lockdown for coronavirus

As shelter in place orders around the world have left many people trapped at home indefinitely, some have found a new place to meet up: inside the digital world of wildly popular Nintendo game Animal Crossing.

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Russian media pours scorn on Europe, but the only progressive way forward for our common continent is together

In the early 1990s Russia used to have a strong sense of belonging in Europe. This began to change: the post-Soviet shock therapy reforms were a punishing transition to a free-market society, when a kilogram of sausage cost about the same as a monthly pension and many families experienced malnutrition and hunger. The sudden shift to a more “westernised” way of running the economy left many impoverished, which was eventually capitalised on – after the oligarchic power wars – by a new political leader who embraced a conservative, nationalist rhetoric: Vladimir Putin.

Today, Russian television presenters feed us stories about a European continent in decay, where “aggressive migrants” run amok, where social services take children away from their parents for being “slapped”, where “sexual minorities” destroy traditional families.

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For a while supper and wine were sufficient; now I’m watching every adaptation that is better than its source material

I suspect I’m not alone in this but, at some point in the past two weeks, I hit my lockdown wall. Not literally, although apparently the “banging one’s head against the kitchen wall” phase kicks in on the eighth week, so that’s something to put in the diary. But last week I felt really, really over it. Enough with every day being the bloody same; enough with watching my children become increasingly fretful because they haven’t seen their friends in over a month, the equivalent of five years to a pair of four-year-olds. But unless you want to be one of those delightful people protesting the lockdown in the US, clothed in stars and stripes, AK-47s across their backs, what choice do we have? So, like Bill Murray, we grind out the same day, again and again and again.

The trick is to invent things to look forward to. For a while, “supper” and “wine” were sufficient, but repetition has dulled their efficacy. So I set myself challenges, driven on by the thrill of completion. Some people hear the word “challenge” and think, “Fitness!” Those people are not me. “Rewatch the entirety of 30 Rock” is more my speed. It is so soothing to watch a show about a luxuriantly bouffanted New York tycoon who isn’t a moron. In a just world, Jack Donaghy would be the US president instead of, well, you get the point. Then, sparked by his brilliant turn as Chris Tarrant on the ITV drama, Quiz, my next challenge was, “Watch every Michael Sheen performance in which he plays a real person”. This was deeply enjoyable, even if, in my lockdown-confused mind, I now think Brian Clough interviewed Richard Nixon on TV and Kenneth Williams was prime minister when Diana died.

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Resuming the season is absurd and the ‘safety’ ideas are terrible, but whatever football decides it must decide together

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• World champion not relishing racing without fans
• Hamilton appreciates sport’s importance to many

Lewis Hamilton believes returning to grand prix racing without fans will be an “empty” experience as Formula One prepares to launch the new season behind closed doors.

F1 expects to hold its first race on 5 July in Austria as a double header followed by two meetings at Silverstone, all without spectators. However, there remains the possibility that government quarantine restrictions may make travel for F1 teams unfeasible.

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