Freedom of Speech still exists. Despite the cowards who crumbled over the hissy-fit extortion of Ronan "I won't let you publish MY shit anymore" Farrow, YOU found a new publisher. It's ARCADE, a company that is concerned with letting voices be heard. They also worry, as Stephen King does, about "who's next" to face unjust censorship and mob rule.
BUT...look who is getting robbed on EBAY...
TODAY, there were eight different scumbags from Sri Lanka and Morocco, professional thieves, getting new identities and PAYPAL accounts to bootleg Woody's book...and dozens of other books.
Oh yes, RONAN FARROW's latest, too:
How nice, paying as low as $2.49 or $2.99 for what Amazon and the others expect to get $9.99 or $11.99. How lovely, that somebody thinking of actually BUYING the real hardcover on EBAY, gets LURED AWAY by the promise of a cheap digital download (in ePub, Kindle and PDF formats).
Somehow, EBAY still does NOT take piracy too seriously. EBAY admits that digital piracy may be ignored if there's a lot of porn, gun, drug or other complaints going on. If you know there's a REPORT ITEM link in the ad, and you also know how to scroll through THREE different menus, it does NOT mean that the item you reported will actually be removed.
It's a bit ridiculous that low-life dirt-faced walnut-brained filth in Sri Lanka and Morocco can so easily get PAYPAL accounts and EBAY identities galore.
Oh: PAYPAL and EBAY get a percentage. Even if the weasel only charges $2.49, EBAY charges 35 cents to put the ad on their site and THEN takes a cut of the winning bid, and PAYPAL charges 50 cents or even 75 cents to process the sale.
PAYPAL doesn't make it easy to report things to them. EBAY does have "report item" but it has some dazed "English as second language" stooges overseas who don't seem to know an illegal ad when it's reported. EBAY not only has a rule against "digital downloads," it has a rule against "location misrepresentation." This applies to almost all these bootlegger ads, since these crud-mites try to allay bidder suspicion by pretending to be in New York or London when it's Sri Lanka or Morocco (which is easy to see if you click the seller's name and get MORE INFO). An eBay employee might not notice or care. The excuse: we get MILLIONS of complaints and PRIORITIZE them.
Here's a WEASEL from MOROCCO claiming (seller location) to be in CANADA.
It doesn't take Interpool to see the obvious chicanery from these inbred pea-brained monkeys. All they know is that, somehow, PAYPAL and EBAY keep letting them get fresh accounts.
They also know that THE GREAT GOD GOOGLE is their FRIEND. Not Allah. It's GOOGLE that is the WORST when it comes to allowing piracy. Their hoops are SLINKY-dense. Unlike EBAY, which does have a competent VeRO department to at least knock off auctions before too much damage can be done, GOOGLE makes it very difficult to get through to them. Their templates are deliberately complicated and time-consuming, whether a rights owner is filing against a BLOGGER, against a YOUTUBE creep, or against a vile mouth-breathing stinker who has gotten a GOOGLE CLOUD and uses it for the illegal downloads:
Technically, a hard-hitting hero like Ronan Farrow, who cares so much about morality, should have somebody on his vast staff checking EBAY for theft of his intellectual property and copyright. It takes exactly a MINUTE to file a DMCA to eBay's VeRO (verified rights owner) email address.
You'd also think that in these troubled times, publishing companies would want to make sure to get a royalty on EVERY sale. Some EBAY dealers charge as much as $7.99 for their bootleg, but even $2.49 is a damn good profit and in most cases, the author royalties are LESS on a legit download or even a paperback sale than what the EBAY bootlegger is getting.
You'd think that the publishing world, which is SUPPOSEDLY full of brighter people than the music world or the movie world, would know from the destruction of record stores and the emptying of movie theaters, that PIRACY KILLS...and BOOKSTORES (the ones still around) should NOT be teetering thanks to Internet abuse. Is the future of publishing really going to end up where AMAZON dictates the puny royalty they will give, the same way SPOTIFY flicks a few pennies for every THOUSAND downloads?
The answer is for RONAN and WOODY's publishers to do the minimum, and draft an unpaid intern to file DMCA's and get the bootleggers suspended ASAP. Instead, they're SAPS???
PS, EBAY...this is how your smelly Sri Lanka cartel creeps reward you: in EVERY download win, they include a PDF that tells bidders they DO NOT HAVE TO BUY ON EBAY EVER AGAIN, but instead can go to a website and get ANY book for $1.99 - direct from them and PAYPAL. Like any terrorist group from that part of the world, these filthy swine are very well organized:
