Theft of Stories from Fanfiction.net
Feb. 10th, 2016 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dawn_felagund posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
silwritersguildImportant ETA! All of the Spamdex sites have been taken down except for one! Talkfictions.org is the only site that is still up. Good job, everyone; it seems our collective actions are getting somewhere!
So now we need to make Talkfictions.org go away. You can continue to file a spamdexing report with Google,and if you are an author living in the U.S., you can also file a DMCA takedown notice on your behalf with the site's host (contact information below). ETA: The correct host is not a U.S.-based company, so a DMCA takedown notice is unfortunately toothless./ETA
Thanks to the sleuthing of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mikononyte and bunn, we now have contact information for the host and reverse proxy for Talkfictions.org. Both are large, reputable companies that allow you to file abuse reports for copyright violations.
File a Complaint with the Webhost
Enom has responded that they are not the host. However, I have heard back from Cloudflare with a contact address for the host: abuse@quasinetworks.com
This is the place to contact. Here is a basic form letter you can use if you wish to contact them. Please remember that these sites have been reported to contain malware and viruses; to grab your profile URL, search for your fanfiction.net username and Talkfictions.com and copy the URL from the search results.
Talkfictions.org is hosted by Enom. To file a support ticket with the host:
File a Complaint with CloudFlare
Please note that Cloudflare is not the host and therefore cannot remove the site. However, they are a reverse proxy service used by our little thief, and they will intervene with the webhost in the instance of copyright infringement. Here is the CloudFlare abuse report form. Click the bright green "Click here to submit an abuse report" button on the right side of the page. Fill out the form, making sure that you provide a link to your content from Fanfiction.net that was stolen. Click the green Submit button.
Gratitude again tomikononyte and bunn for finding the contacts above. Many thanks as always to rhapsody11, our indefatigable copyright expert on the SWG and MPTT, for her advice and insight! (And another nod to to Rhapsody, who found and posted the exact same contact information for Enom at the precise moment that I did. This kind of brainsharing is what happens when you work almost daily with a person for over a decade!)
I am leaving up the original post below the cut/line. Please be aware, though, that some of the information it now contains is no longer relevant because the sites have been taken down.
/ETA
It was recently discovered that a series of spamdex sites has created mirrors of profiles and stories from Fanfiction.net. If you are an author on Fanfiction.net, it is very likely that your work has been stolen by one or more of these sites. Below is a summary of all I have been able to learn so far and some ideas on how to strike back at these jerks.
ETA: And they have apparently stolen work from FictionPress as well./ETA
On 8 February 2016, Tumblr user Rhov posted the following alert to Fanfiction.net authors about the theft of their work:
Before you click on any of the links above, please be aware that several users have reported that the sites contain viruses and malware. If you want to check if your work has been stolen, I highly recommend using a search engine to search your Fanfiction.net username and the URL of the site you are searching (e.g., "Dawn Felagund hmofiction.org"). This should return links to your profile or work on that site, and you can see if it has been stolen without entering the site and putting your computer at risk. Here is a screencap of the search and what the results look like.
Rhov recommends reporting to Google if you find your work stolen on the site. This alerts Google that a site is manipulating content in order to boost its search results, and Google can take action accordingly so that the site doesn't show up in results. (Which penalizes the site because they make money by enticing people looking for Fanfiction.net content to click on their site instead and then click on their ads.) Here is Rhov's recommendation:
ETA: Please note that, now that we have the correct host, they are not located in the U.S., so the DMCA does not apply and a takedown notice is toothless./ETA
You can also send a DMCA takedown notice on your behalf. As fanfic writers, we are most familiar with this term as something that is served against creators of fanworks. However, as a creator of legal content, you are permitted to legally obligate a website that has stolen your content to remove it from their site. You do not need an attorney to do this. This post by Tikatu has a sample DMCA takedown notice that you can use.
Of course, I have no idea if this will make any difference.I was unable to find Whois information on any of the sites listed above, which tells me that they're already not playing by the rules--not surprisingly for people willing to steal the work of thousands of authors in order to turn a quick buck. Also, please remember that these sites contain malware and viruses. Don't go poking around looking for contact information if your antivirus is not up to date. (If you do go the DMCA takedown route and find contact information for these sites, please share it here, and I will update this post.) ETA: mikononyte had more luck with Whois than I did. (Who knows what I was doing??) In any case, she has compiled the Whois information (which includes contact information) for each site here./ETA
Finally, I have not seen this getting any play off of Tumblr, aside from what my comods and I have shared on our various groups. Please signal boost this. You can link to or use my post above if you want, no credit necessary (although please keep the credits in place for the Tumblr users who made the original posts I'm linking to and quoting from). Most fanfic groups are going to have a heavy contingent of users on Fanfiction.net, so it is imperative to get the word out.
Other ideas, suggestions, information--please share it in a comment!
So now we need to make Talkfictions.org go away. You can continue to file a spamdexing report with Google,
Thanks to the sleuthing of
mikononyte and bunn, we now have contact information for the host and reverse proxy for Talkfictions.org. Both are large, reputable companies that allow you to file abuse reports for copyright violations.File a Complaint with the Webhost
Enom has responded that they are not the host. However, I have heard back from Cloudflare with a contact address for the host: abuse@quasinetworks.com
This is the place to contact. Here is a basic form letter you can use if you wish to contact them. Please remember that these sites have been reported to contain malware and viruses; to grab your profile URL, search for your fanfiction.net username and Talkfictions.com and copy the URL from the search results.
I am reporting Talkfictions.com for copyright infringement. This site has copied, without my consent, my profile and the creative works linked therein, to which I own the rights. The infringing pages can be found here:
LINK TO YOUR PROFILE ON TALKFICTIONS
The authorized version for comparison can be found here:
LINK TO YOUR PROFILE ON THIS SITE
All of the content contained in this profile page and the stories infringe on my copyright linked therein need to be removed.
YOUR USERNAME
- Go to https://www.enom.com/contact.aspx
- Click the second option: "No, I have not submitted a ticket before."
- Enter your information into the web form.
- Click the tab at the top to Submit a Ticket.
- Complete the ticket form. Note that you are reporting a copyright violation for Talkfictions.org, a domain that they host. Provide a link to your stolen content. (Remember, you can pull this off of Google if you are not comfortable visiting the site itself. See below for instructions on how to do that.)
- Click Continue. One final pop-up will appear, suggesting articles that might help you. None of them will. Click to submit the ticket. If the ticket is submitted successfully, you will receive two emails from Enom, one with a password to check the status of your ticket and an auto-reply to the ticket itself.
File a Complaint with CloudFlare
Please note that Cloudflare is not the host and therefore cannot remove the site. However, they are a reverse proxy service used by our little thief, and they will intervene with the webhost in the instance of copyright infringement. Here is the CloudFlare abuse report form. Click the bright green "Click here to submit an abuse report" button on the right side of the page. Fill out the form, making sure that you provide a link to your content from Fanfiction.net that was stolen. Click the green Submit button.
Gratitude again to
mikononyte and bunn for finding the contacts above. Many thanks as always to rhapsody11, our indefatigable copyright expert on the SWG and MPTT, for her advice and insight! (And another nod to to Rhapsody, who found and posted the exact same contact information for Enom at the precise moment that I did. This kind of brainsharing is what happens when you work almost daily with a person for over a decade!)I am leaving up the original post below the cut/line. Please be aware, though, that some of the information it now contains is no longer relevant because the sites have been taken down.
/ETA
It was recently discovered that a series of spamdex sites has created mirrors of profiles and stories from Fanfiction.net. If you are an author on Fanfiction.net, it is very likely that your work has been stolen by one or more of these sites. Below is a summary of all I have been able to learn so far and some ideas on how to strike back at these jerks.
ETA: And they have apparently stolen work from FictionPress as well./ETA
On 8 February 2016, Tumblr user Rhov posted the following alert to Fanfiction.net authors about the theft of their work:
Dear fanfiction writers,
Please be aware that there are fake websites which have mirrored literally ALL FANFICS from Fanfiction.net. As far as I can tell, they are near-perfect mirrors, updating in real-time to FFN’s servers.
All of your stories, your profile, everything has been stolen and copied onto the following websites:
http://www.thebuystock.org/
http://www.talkfictions.com/
http://fictionavenue.org/
http://thanfiction.org/
http://hmofiction.org/
They are making profit off your stories with advertisements. This is called spamdexing. Please report them. Theft of this hefty magnitude, literally millions of stories, should not go unpunished.
Before you click on any of the links above, please be aware that several users have reported that the sites contain viruses and malware. If you want to check if your work has been stolen, I highly recommend using a search engine to search your Fanfiction.net username and the URL of the site you are searching (e.g., "Dawn Felagund hmofiction.org"). This should return links to your profile or work on that site, and you can see if it has been stolen without entering the site and putting your computer at risk. Here is a screencap of the search and what the results look like.
Rhov recommends reporting to Google if you find your work stolen on the site. This alerts Google that a site is manipulating content in order to boost its search results, and Google can take action accordingly so that the site doesn't show up in results. (Which penalizes the site because they make money by enticing people looking for Fanfiction.net content to click on their site instead and then click on their ads.) Here is Rhov's recommendation:
HOW TO REPORT
- Go here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en
- Put in the name of the website (one report each)
- Write in additional details: This is a spamdexing mirror site to https://www.fanfiction.net/ and has stolen my profiles and intellectual property.
- Click “I am not a robot” and then “Report webspam”
- Report more by clicking the link on: Go back to the webspam report form.
ETA: Please note that, now that we have the correct host, they are not located in the U.S., so the DMCA does not apply and a takedown notice is toothless./ETA
You can also send a DMCA takedown notice on your behalf. As fanfic writers, we are most familiar with this term as something that is served against creators of fanworks. However, as a creator of legal content, you are permitted to legally obligate a website that has stolen your content to remove it from their site. You do not need an attorney to do this. This post by Tikatu has a sample DMCA takedown notice that you can use.
Of course, I have no idea if this will make any difference.
mikononyte had more luck with Whois than I did. (Who knows what I was doing??) In any case, she has compiled the Whois information (which includes contact information) for each site here./ETAFinally, I have not seen this getting any play off of Tumblr, aside from what my comods and I have shared on our various groups. Please signal boost this. You can link to or use my post above if you want, no credit necessary (although please keep the credits in place for the Tumblr users who made the original posts I'm linking to and quoting from). Most fanfic groups are going to have a heavy contingent of users on Fanfiction.net, so it is imperative to get the word out.
Other ideas, suggestions, information--please share it in a comment!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:10 pm (UTC)They definitely have a lot to lose from this. Every click on one of these mirror sites steals potential income from them. I'm fairly confident that they will serve their own DMCA takedown notice. That would be the route they'd take, I imagine. I'm sure they have better legal counsel than we do about their options at this point.
Some people have advocated contacting them and pressuring them to do so. I'm not sure I support that ... yet. As a site admin myself, I know what a cluster these kinds of things are and the massive amount of time required to handle them. I'd sooner give their admins some space--for now--to get this resolved.
If weeks pass and there is no apparent action or official statement from them, then I will support turning up the heat on them a bit.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that anyone--ff.net or us as individual authors--can do to absolutely ensure that these sites are taken down. People who want to feel that they are doing something certainly can take one of the actions above. Especially for the Google reports, more reports will make it more likely that Google will take action. Given the lack of Whois information for these sites, I'm not sure that DMCA takedowns will do anything. To take legal action against a person, you have to at least be able to find the actual human being who owns the sites. So, no, we as individuals don't have to do anything. Either the sites will disappear or they won't. It's unlikely that action (or lack thereof) from any one of us will make that happen (ff.net is a different story). But like I said, it tends to feel good to do something, at least for a lot of people.
Personally speaking, I did the Google report (which requires a Google login, which not everyone has), but I'm not wanting to touch these sites with a 49-and-a-half-foot pole to try to scrounge up contact information (that is probably fake) to send a DMCA takedown (that will probably be ignored). Trying to find them on Whois actually started as a quest to try to find contact information for the owner to avoid sending well-meaning authors to the sites themselves looking for a contact. When that failed, I decided against the DMCA takedown for my own stories.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:17 pm (UTC)For sites like this, not appearing in search rankings is almost as good as being gone.
The first one at least is still showing results for me (I didn't check them all again). :(
(Editing to add that I searched for just my username and found none of them. So it looks like Google has done whatever they do to people like that.)
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:18 pm (UTC)Plus therein lies the advantage of being a niche writer.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:28 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how authors or works were chosen to mirror. I would have thought they would have just mirrored the whole site, but it appears not.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:51 pm (UTC):( I hope that one goes away, but if nothing's appearing on Google (for me, either), I have a feeling it's the best we're going to get.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:53 pm (UTC)I'm betting it was something like hit count or number of reviews or favorites or something along those lines: the "popular" stories, in other words. No point in taking the lesser-known ones because people aren't reading them, at least from the spammers' POVs.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:58 pm (UTC)Sadly, I cannot see your comments. :(
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:01 am (UTC)Do you mean on this post? That is ... odd.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:20 am (UTC)FF.net still has plenty of traffic, so I would think someone is making money there. One would assume they would try to blow these people out of the water sooner rather than later.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:26 am (UTC)I never go there except rarely when I get a smattering of "favorite" clicks or a comment and then check a few of my old, old stories to see if they are being read. Most of them are not or only the tinest trickle of readership! Except for the one.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:35 am (UTC)(Yes she does. Yes, yes she does.)
I'm sure ff.net makes money. Their quintessential ad in my memory was those ubiquitous "Wanna Hook a Hottie?" ads from a few years ago. I can imagine the site's clientele clicking on those before something like "One weird trick! Single mom discovers way to whiter teeth!!"
Anyway, I'm sure their hosting costs are absurd, and I don't imagine them sticking around long if they weren't at least covering those.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:40 am (UTC)They profit when people click on the ads, not on the pages themselves. But of course getting people to the page is necessary before they have a chance to click on the ads! Those awful, awful Internet ads. I wonder who even clicks on them. (NYTC started using them on their website, obnoxiously enough. I saw one there the other day--and I am neither prudish nor squeamish, as you know--that grossed me out so badly that I thought of screencapping it and sending it to the organizers with the subject line "W.T.F!" Even if I could use them on my webspaces--and I technically could on the Heretic Loremaster--ugh, no.)
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:47 am (UTC)Most of them I see reflect the latest commercial site I have visited--Laura and I have been looking at rugs for months, so most of the ads I get on the internet are for esalerugs.com. WTF? I know where the rugs are! And when I get the cash, I know which one I am buying whether you harass me or not--or maybe I won't because you are so damned annoying!
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 12:53 am (UTC)I had a student obsessed with my unicorn slippers (worn to school for Pajama Day) and, after looking up prices for him on my laptop, all I saw for months were those slippers that I already owned.
But my favorite is when I see ads for my university. As in the one I'm getting ready to graduate from. I want to tell them to save their money: The horse is out of the barn on that one!
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 02:25 pm (UTC)All of the domains are now not responding, apart from talkfictions.com. Talkfictions.com uses Cloudflare DNS, and Cloudflare do have an abuse form which can be used to report copyright infringement. Cloudflare are a huge DNS provider and should respond in good faith to detailed reports.
https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/
Cloudflare are providing a specific technical service (which has a free level of service that anyone can use), they are not hosting or responsible for the data, or profiting from it, but they CAN help you communicate with the people who are responsible.
DMCA reports as such are only relevant if the data is hosted in the USA. If it's somewhere else, then there may still be a relevant local copyright law, but I hear that copyright law in places such as Russia, the Ukraine and Romania is often not enforced.