Infringed Again [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

What's a reasonable rate to charge someone who wants to republish a story I wrote on their own porn site?

What's a less-reasonable price to charge for the privelege of removing my name from the story and presenting it as if it were content developed by, or specifically for, that web site?

How unreasonable should I let myself be, considering that they decided to skip such steps as negotiation, asking permission, etc. and I have no idea how long my work has been on their site?

Or should I abandon all pretense of expecting them to pay me for use of my work, figure that they got away with using my work without paying for it for however long, and just send a DMCA takedown letter to try to stop them from continuing to do so? (But if I do that then I need to be prepared to sue in case they try to resist, right? So first I'd need to find a lawyer who'd take on a copyright infringement case on contingency ...?)

Having my name removed pisses me off more than anything else, because this way I'm not even getting credit, in addition to not getting paid.

(The story in question is, of course, "The Chastity Belt", the third most popular page on my own web site. A few years ago it was #1 on my site; I wonder how much of its drop to third place is because sites placing higher in search-engine results are sucking away readers from my site.)

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I would say that you should definitely do something. However, you might first want to check the SFWA website and see what they have regarding the issue.

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Well, think of an amount of money that would make your life easy enough that you were kind of pleased they'd ripped you off for a while. $25K? Keep upping it until you don't feel resentful any more.

You've got the moral high ground, but you should get (at least) recognition for your work. Since they
denied you that, they also owe you compensation. I'd ask for $300 and putting your name and link
back on your work, and explain that they could have had it for $50 or $100 if they'd asked nicely and
not stolen from you.

$300 is too low for this. However, you need to review the agreement you signed (by hand or electronically) for them when you initially agreed to publish on that site.

Check into potentially free legal aid advice.

S

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"you need to review the agreement you signed"

That's the point: there was no agreement, no communication; I'd never heard of the site until I stumbled across it looking for new stories to read and found my own there without my name on it. I'm thinking of sending them a bill. Since they've already used my work without deigning to negotiate a fee with me, my 'standard fee' must be acceptable to them, right? (Though something tells me that having an ocean between me and them might make them feel less compelled to pay up.)

Ah, I didn't understand that. Then you should go to the free legal aid to get help drafting a cease-and-desist letter. In the meantime, you should write the webmaster (and the web host if you can find him) and state in no uncertain terms that they do not have permission to post your story.

S

I'd say just send the takedown notice, being sure to cc in the hosting company.

Short of messing around with lawyers and court, that's probably all that you'll realistically be able to do....although, if you can find some evidence that the thief is doing this on a wider scale, I imagine that there's someone at Google who might be interested enough to deindex the infringing site.

Takedown is *for* the hosting company, isn't it?

Hmm. I'm not sure where the server is, but 'whois' says the owner is in France. I wonder whether France has anything analogous to [this aspect of] the DMCA.

They demonstrated bad faith from the start. My $0.02: takedown today.

Is it for profit? If not, they might refer you to this:

http://www.fuzzykitty.com/~jonathan/library/jonathan/adult/chastity-belt

Naturally, removing your authorship is abhorrent and not to be tolerated.

I should say, this doesn't mean that I think that they're right, just that I can see how somebody might see that and think it's okay to roll it into something like an amateur collection site or something.

I'd forgotten that I'd used that phrasing pre-web. Hmm. The removal of attribution is something I want to do something about regardless.

It's not obvious from the page that copy of my story is linked from whether it's a commercial site or somebody's hobby archive they just decided to publish, but a) there are ads for paysites there, and b) some of the other topic-index pages are chock-full of links to paysites (including from pages that look like listings of free content until you click through), so at best I think it's an adult-site referral farm, and at worst it's a front-end for one or more of the sites it links to.

But I'm not sure I've gathered enough evidence yet that it's an intentional attempt to profit from my (and scores of others') work by luring them to the link farm, if they try to claim that the main purpose is just a net.archive and the advertising is a side issue. I'm convinced, because every real story-archive site I've seen retains authors' names and this one seems to have filed off every last one. I'm not sure how solid my case has to be to get action from their ISP.

The site is http://chastity-belt-stories.com/home (http://dummy.url) (HREF intentionally broken to avoid upping their inbound link count).

There are a couple of sites I've given permission to -- they link back to my site. There's an authorized Japanese translation (and I think an unauthorized one as well, and I suspect there may be a French translation floating around). And the occasional major or minor non-commercial collection that retains the Usenet statement about archiving, that I'm not going to gripe about even though I'd prefer a link to my site. But the more I think about this particular example, the sleazier it seems.

Huh. That site's a headscratcher. I can see either case being true. A whois shows that the nick masterboyhr (at yahoo.com) is used on the domain registration, which makes me think that it's at least a somewhat unique site.

But here's a bigger complication: they're in France. I'm not sure what the international applicability of DMCA takedown notices is.

I'd probably just start out trying to have a civil conversation with the guy with the presumption of good will, if only to give him the ability to save face - there's always time to go nuclear later. If I wanted to go nuclear, I'd first try to find other authors whose work he's misappropriated and distribute torches and pitchforks.

That's not a pay site. If you can reach a webmaster, someone should be happy to put your name back on.

In order to place a legally "binding" takedown notice in the US (these rules may be different in France), you must first ask nicely and be ignored. So, if the takedown notice is the way you want to go, you must first contact the infringer in any case.

When you do contact the infringer, it is equally valid to either offer him several options or to offer him only the one option (takedown). So, in other words, you can send him a letter saying something to the effect of "You may either pay me at these rates OR you may take down my work", OR you can send a letter saying "you must take down my work immediately". For the legal letter to have teeth, you cannot send a single letter saying "you must pay me" and, if that is ignored or rejected, immediately send the legal letter. If you opt for the "you must pay me" option first, without mentioning the takedown option, then you must send a second letter. This is my understanding of how the process works.

That wording on the usenet copy really weakens your case. You voluntarily permit free reprint rights. I don't know if it is possible to "prove" or "disprove" whether a site is making "profit" off your work. I think you lost a major battle before you even thought to fight it.

HOWEVER, you are still entitled to credit, and they stripped you of that, so you still have some standing. I think. At least in the US.

As for rates, if you decide to send him a bill: While reprints are normally less valuable than first rights by far, I would go ahead and bill him a "first rights" rate. And I, personally, seldom write professonally for magazines/websites for less than $1/word. However, 20 cents per word is considered a very good rate by most; 20 cents is certainly a professional rate. That's your call.

This one's tough... I wish you luck.

Send a bill and say you'll sue them if they don't pay. I don't know how much is reasonable though. Maybe look at other magazine/websites and see what they offer to pay contributors and use that as a guideline. One friend says to ask for $25,000 since if it's a porn site, they should be getting a good income stream off of that. That sounds really high to me though.

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