How EBAY Coaches Sellers to Cheat Authors

Digital book files are flying all over the Internet. The stealing is called "sharing."

It's no surprise that EBAY sellers get the idea they can "re-sell" pdf/mobi/kindle files like second-hand books. Or, keep making copies.

When a seller declares "I will send you the file by e-mail" or "you will get a download link within 24 hours," that's the big red flag. IF anyone reports the link, it's taken down.

EBAY then helpfully points to their policy, and how to find loopholes to get around it.

What all of that means is that sellers shouldn't put their files in the "books" category, and they should lie and claim they own the rights.

Like so:

Only the above caveat was, irony of ironies, at the bottom of an ad for a pdf bootleg of "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak.

EBAY, hiding behind the "Digital Millenium Act," which was put into law well before "file sharing" became popular, declares "we are JUST a venue." They can't be sure if some guy in Sri Lanka owns the rights to Zusak's book or not.

With the caveat in place, nobody can report the auction except Zusak (his agent, publisher or whoever he's designated as his "VeRO - Verified Rights Owner" rep.

Look at the "Guidelines" below, and you'll see that EBAY coaches sellers (big yellow block) on the correct weasel words to use.

It's fortunate that most illiterate EBAY thieves never read the above guidelines, so they do get stopped. Again and again. Unfortunately, EBAY is very lenient about suspending anyone. The hardcore Sri Lanka bunch (some actually in Texas but faking a foreign location) get 10 or 20 aliases so they can pile up plenty of warnings.

The true professional penny-ante thieves add the lying caveat about "owning the rights" or declaring the new book "public domain," and so, bottom line, it's up to the rights owner to take a minute (literally, that's all it takes) to send the auction number in for removal. Yes, too often EBAY will figure the seller has simply made an "honest" mistake in claiming to own the rights to everything Rowling, King or Patterson wrote. But if that seller does it a second time on the same author, that IS a suspendable offense.

I know. Authors have plenty to do without glancing at eBay once a week, and that's especially true of the big shots. But EVERY author should be staying vigilant, for the good of all. The more people get free, or via bootlegs, the less they buy.