futurejournalismproject:

Adam Penenberg writes at Fast Company that Amazon’s erotica ebook section is rife with plagiarized works. Seems “authors” are simply cutting and pasting stories found elsewhere (such as from Literotica), putting pen names on the titles and passing them off as their own.

Via Fast Company:

Writing a book is hard. All those torturous hours an author has to spend creating, crafting, culling until nonsensical words are transformed into engaging prose. It’s a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else’s work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in. This creates a strong economic incentive, with fake authors—Sharazade thinks it’s possible they are organized gangs based in Asia—earning 70% royalty rates on every sale, earning far more than a spammer could with click fraud. The new self-publishing platforms are easy to use and make it possible to publish a title in as little as 24 hours. There’s no vetting, editing, or oversight, and if your work is taken down you can always throw up more titles or simply concoct a new pen name and start over. There’s even a viral ebook generator that comes packed with 149,000 articles that makes it possible to create an ebook in minutes.

Penenberg’s proposed solution is to require those submitting ebooks to use a credit card that would be charged should the work infringe on existing copyright.

It sounds reasonable, but if there are “organized gangs” I’d imagine they could also get their hands on pilfered bank accounts.

His other solution is to run content through plagiarism detectors such as such as Turnitin and iThenticate before a book goes on sale. This would work somewhat like YouTube’s Content ID system where uploaded content is scanned to see if it matches existing, copyrighted work. Those that match get blocked until the copyright holder decides whether he/she/it wants the work to be published.