PSA: Your Fanfiction Might Be Getting Sold Without Your Permission · 10:43am Apr 14th, 2015
Hey everyone. I come to you without my usual blog of "nothing," and instead with a PSA. There's a website floating around known as Ebooks Tree, and they've been caught selling Fanfiction. Now you might think "Oh, that's not so bad, sign me up!"
Well, normally it'd be great, except they're doing it without permission from the author. They're just straight up stealing stories from other websites and then slapping them on their webpage. Hell, our own Obselescence is a victim of this, as you can see with his story In Memory Of.
Luckily, I was fortunate enough to not have my work stolen, but you might not be so lucky. I recommend going to the site and searching your author name. Try all your usernames and Fanfiction accounts, too, because I have a friend who had her 5-year-old anime fanfiction stolen, all the way from fanfiction.net.
So yeah, let everyone know. Be on the lookout for your own work and the work of others. This site has absolutely no permission from any of the authors that it posts work from.
If you do find your work, you'll need to check out their DMCA Policy, then write an e-mail about it using their Contact page. Good luck.
(To go into greater depth into how they make money off of other's work, you need to sign up for their service in order to download stories. It's free for the first couple days, then they start charging you.)
Edit: I've been told that only stories that have been in the Pony Fiction Vault have been taken.
Wow what idiots
If I were them, I would be less concerned with the authors they've stolen from and more concerned with the Hasbro's copywrite that they are now infringing on due to their financial gain.
2982523
Probably not. If that were the case, Fimfic, EQD, and an uncountable number of artists would be fucked.
However, I did see they listed official MLP books, like the ones by G.M Berrow...
The trouble with this sort of thing is that it's hard to copyright a piece of fanfiction. Since it's based off of other copyrighted material, and therefore only allowed to exist because the people who own the show don't see any harm in it, it's difficult to legally protect your stories. However, as with many things, if you go to the people and complain hard enough, they'll probably give you what you want and find somebody more apathetic to victimize. That's just how those people are.
I seem to have fifteen files up there, without having been notified. I'm not giving them my credit card information just to find out which stories they're trying to sell, and these would all be fanfics, so there's no way for me to make money off them. My only worry would be that Hasbro might imagine I'd authorized this.
Oh, and they are probably selling some of my UNFINISHED stories too, which is embarrassing.
2982844 See? This is why authors need to stop slacking with long delays on unfinished works! How are sites like ebookstree supposed to profit off writers on this site if they all slack off on their stories? How unprofessional to have incomplete stories. Those poor fools trying to profit off the works of fanfic writers, assuming all fanfic writers somehow complete their fanons like good old professional writers they steal from.
Keep this up and they might have to increase their subscription fees to continue carrying incomplete works. /faintingcouch
2982484 Idiots smart enough to put up a DMCA wall to protect themselves from fanfic writers. xD
The only thing I hate more than a thieving site like theirs, is the horrible one-sided and beyond need of revisions: Copyright and Trademark Laws. In this case, Copyrights.
An author won't be able to go after them on any legal grounds save for one. And that's if you can really prove it. There is a guy on DA who to this day makes millions off stolen DA works. Digital mediums are hard to protect if you aren't a corporation with deep enough pockets. There is a legal term that could let writers defend their works, but good luck. Short of the site just trying to avoid problems and hope none of their victims care enough to do anything, they might potentially (though as past events have shown, bot run sites like this will just eat up a taken down link and re-post again down the road unless they make an actual attempt to add yours to a list or something.)
Fanfic authors tend to be pretty screwed without physical copies of their works. Fair use is not something that really stands in court very well. But this isn't you vs hasbro, it's you vs a site that doesn't acknowledge you as being the copyright holder of the works fanfic authors here wrote. It's a messy deal. One short of Hasbro intervening will be able to do anything about in fanworks like these.
Each day that passes is a digital buck in their bank. Subs and ads. Double-dipping profits xD
2983063 yeah
It sucks
thanks for the heads up. apparently ive made it because theyve stolen at least one of my stories.
It's not just the Pony Fiction Vault. They got my PFV feature (and it appears to have been scraped off of the Vault, based on the appearance of the ebook cover), but they also got The Dragon's Riddle and one of my Writeoff Association stories.
Ugh. Thanks for the heads up.
I know this is probably from a year ago, but what should I do to keep my story from being stolen by these guys or anyone else for that matter? I told a couple of my friends that I was going to write some stories on here and they all told me about their concern that, "My story might get stolen" I hope I'm one of the ones it doesn't happen to, but is there anything I can do to keep it from getting stolen or do I just hope that my story doesn't get "picked"
That site is gone