The Author's Guild and the Random House Portal of Doom

At the BEA convention, and other events, you can always count on some salesmen-saps from the "Author's Guild" or some other union to tell you how important it is to give them money.

Ask them WHY, and they mutter about low cost health insurance, which usually is no better than deals you can find elsewhere. Next? "Oh, we stand up for authors!" Yeah?

Like, you'll contact eBay and get pirates removed on behalf of your members?

Well, no.

Some time ago, the Author's Guild website happily reported on a random notion from Random House and their Penguins: they'll ALLOW their authors to report piracy when they see it. On their own books only. Meaning, if E.L. James sees an eBay pirate abusing George R.R. Martin, her complaint to Digimarc (Random's idea of an enforcer) will likely be ignored or obfuscated with "thank you, we took appropriate action" which was nothing at all.

If you're an author and you somehow have Googled yourself and discovered the wide world of "forums" that let members upload PDF/MOBI/KINDLE files, you can report the problem yourself. You contact the "cloud server" that hosts the file, and let 'em know you're the copyright owner, and to take down the abuse.

They will. Or they won't. It depends on what country the "cloud server" is in. Fact is, Digimarc can do no better for you. If your file is at Kickass or Pirate Bay or some other well known abusers, they get ignored.

So much for the great "authors only" portal, which looks like this:

As this site has proven time and time again, the publishers and their sheriffs aren't doing that good of a job when it comes to EBAY. All they need to do is type in some hot author names and book titles, and add "ebook" or PDF and they'll spot the latest parasites from Sri Lanka, Macedonia, Romania or FLORIDA.

They don't.

Is there any day that you CAN'T type in "Game of Thrones" and add "e book" or "MOBI" and see a bunch of bootlegs being sold? It's not that there are too many moles to be whacked. It's that nobody's looking, and the message is, "Hey, we're so rich, we don't care." Which is interesting news to any mid-list author trying to get an extra five hundred bucks advance or an extra five copies on their contract.

Random's proud of what they claim they do for authors:

Why don't they let the general public report piracy on their website, as many other publishers do? Why don't they even allow a Random House author to report piracy on behalf of another author? And what IS the "Author's Guild" and other nitwit anemic groups doing about this problem on eBay?

The late Joseph Heller would find all of this to be quite ludicrous. So would a lot of other beloved authors who spent their lives pointing out idiocy, apathy and foolishness. The Catch-22 here is beyond laughable: publishers NOT welcoming piracy reports, NOT allowing authors to file them on behalf of other authors, and NOT taking the easiest steps to virtually eradicate piracy on eBay.