Ebooks Tree hosted my fanfic without permission

[campylobacter]

The website ebooks-tree.com has been using an automated script to harvest fan fiction from AO3, Tumblr, & Wattpad without any author's permission, including mine. (And those were some of my crappiest stories LOL.)

Comments

[skypilot_dlm]

I'd heard about this ebooks tree thievery on tumblr, and whaddaya know, they've pinched my stuff without my say so, as well. It makes me so angry that crap websites like this exist. Thanks for posting the removal steps.

[campylobacter]

Whenever some crook dreams up a get-rich-quick scheme by using "free" content such as fanfic & then making suckers pay to access it, I hope their karma consigns them to having to make a living answering stupid tech support questions.

[lmichelle599]

Is it just those sites or it is LJ and DW as well?

[campylobacter]

From what I'd seen, people only mentioned Wattpad, AO3 & Tumblr getting scraped by the bots, not LJ or DW.

Although I once saw (a year or so ago) a shady LJ account repost random chapters of different people's LJ fanfic from various fandoms. Just to look like an active LJ account & try to attract traffic to their own spammy entries about fake designer handbags & Rolex watches & shit.

[lmichelle599]

I searched the site and didn't see anything that belonged to me. :)

[campylobacter]

Yep! Looks like they got the message after fandom flooded them with DMCA complaints, and so they removed all fanfic :)

[annejack]

It seems they are taking them down - mine are down now and a lot of others I know had theirs taken down. But it's really bad bad form to do something like this.

[campylobacter]

Spammers are definitely misinformed into thinking fanfic translates as "free republishable content" when they're looking for stuff to build a legit-looking website. Of course, anyone who spams can't be expected to be ethical enough to respect what international intellectual property means.

I've discovered this morning that their "taking down" action seems to also involve disabling their Search function & switching TLD from .com to .net.

[franthewndrhrse]

Boo.

[campylobacter]

LOL yeah they suck.

But they've taken down most all of the fanfic, disabled their Search function, and changed host servers, so maybe they know the jig is up? ;)

[franthewndrhrse]

Well, that explains some things. I went to look, several people have posted about the site. I searched for my name (did not expect anything, it's been so long since I wrote anything), but also searched yours and others. Got nothing.

[campylobacter]

That's great news! It means fandom rallied the troops so well that handling all the DMCA complaints forced Ebooks Tree to mass-remove fanfic :)