The Ebooks-Tree fic- and ebook-scraping business revisited

dduane:

I just thought I’d post a quick note about this.

Last week when the news made the rounds that this site had been scraping people’s fics wholesale off AO3, I went over there to see whether they had any of my books, and they did – a fair number of them – so I sent them a DMCA.

Haven’t heard anything new from them, but I did a search or two and found that nothing was coming up under my name: which was good as far as it went.

At the same time, not being sure where matters stood, I did a little googling around to see what might have changed since last week. These posts may be useful to those of you who’re concerned your intellectual property may have been scraped:

The update from AO3

This page at the Fanlore wiki

This note from Castle Fanfiction

That last one interested me, since searches on my name and the names of my books were coming up blank. So I tried this method of searching instead:

Used the letters-of-the-alphabet menu at the top: clicked on D –

http://www.ebooks-tree.net/author/?letter=d

Once there, being presented with another menu that said “Select two letters” I chose “Di”:

http://www.ebooks-tree.net/author/?letter=di

Note when you look at the next page that the listings are not in alphabetical order, but are strangely scrambled. There are a lot of possible reasons for this, but I’m gambling on someone wanting to make it harder for you to find your stuff. …Anyway, by happy chance my name was on the first page, so I clicked there – 

http://www.ebooks-tree.net/author/11984t.html

And lo and behold, there are four of my books (well, three really, they got A Wizard Abroad twice) still there. So now I get to DMCA them again.

Note that an earlier search on “Diane Duane” showed me nothing. I have a feeling this is not accidental. If you’re going by my example, make sure you search on an author’s first name as well as their second. In fact, search on all their names that you can think of. And on as many pseuds and pieces of pseuds as possible.

…So the note from Castle Fanfiction seems to be a pointer to a new tactic on these folks’ side of things. Also: the company has indeed changed their domain name to ebooks-tree.net. (The company may just have wanted to muddle the trail a little. In any case the old domain redirects to the new one.) And judging by my own results, at least URLs where links to books were once posted also now seem to have been changed.

One other note in passing: I tested the link from the .mobi version of AWAb and it leads to a “Buy a premium access package!” message from Nitroflare. Once you refuse this a couple of times, it starts throwing up ad pages for online games and clothing stores. These I shut, and eventually reached a button which actually downloaded a genuine .mobi of one of my books.  (Worse still, it was one of the NMEs, which means that once again somebody has either bought one of these things from directly from me and then uploaded it, or found another way to scrape it. Or both. Gah.) So now I will have to register with NitroFlare as well to use their “advanced takedown tool” and get rid of this thing. There’s another hour of writing time I’ll never see again…

So if you have been affected by this: Go back and check again. Don’t believe in the search box: you’re going to have to dig deeper.