Social Shaming Works Faster Than Legal Recourse

from the uh-oh-lawyers dept

In the right hands, social media is a powerful tool. It can send canine-themed rappers to Palin-land, for instance. Some governments have even taken to the internet to publically shame tax evaders. But now we have a story of a couple of authors who found that imploring their well-connected customers to shame plagirists on their behalf may be a better route than legal recourse.

Reader drew writes in about the story of two fiction authors, John Scalzi (whom you may recognize from when we wrote about his free ebook experiment) and CJ Cherryh, who found that there were people selling the authors' works under a different name on Amazon's site. They sent their DMCA notices and waited in frustration as their publishers worked with the site to get all of the infringing works taken down. This admittedly has to be frustrating for victims, but fortunately the authors weren't content to sit on their hands and be pissed off.

"Both writers also posted a request for their Facebook fans to write scathing one-star reviews of Mr. Farabi's books, and warn others about the scan. By noon on Sunday, July 15th, all six of "Mr. Farabi's books" had been pulled, and were no longer for sale on Amazon.com. Score one for irate fans and copyright holders!"

The point here is that if you truly connect with your fans, they will be willing to fight on your behalf in situations such as this, and that is a far cry from the theory that everyone on the internet simply wants everything for free. But it takes work and a willingness to connect with your fan-base, so that the fans are willing to support you in this manner. Still, that work pays off in the passion those true fans will demonstrate.

And content creators, be they authors, musicians, or movie-makers, have no greater ally than a passionate fan-base. Those fans, as demonstrated here, are a more effective anti-piracy weapon than any legislation you can dream up, because while some companies on the internet may or may not be interested in acting as the "copyright police," they will sure as hell listen to their customers.

Filed Under: cj cherryh, infringement, john scalzi, mores, plagiarism, social shaming
Companies: amazon