I was surfing the net yesterday during a break in teaching a class at Kinky Kollege in Chicago when what to my wondering eyes appears, but the full text and illustrations from my book, “Family Jewels” online!
Now I am not a fat cat author who lollygags around all day dining at Spago and sipping mineral water. I am a poor sucker who works freelance and makes a slight, very slight income from the sale of my books. I found the site called http://www.scribd.com/. It is a site designed to steal intellectual property from the rightful owners and distribute it for free. Now I have as much angst toward “the man” as the next old burned out hippy, but come on folks! First Napster now this? For God sakes the book is available in some libraries, and if you can scrape together $13 bucks you can own a copy. Send it to me and I’ll even sign it, but don’t steal it!
This kind of crap, though it may be done in the name of “freedom of information” makes as much sense as “freedom of money” as a justification for robbing banks. I am pursuing legal remedies to persuade the misguided folks at scribed to remove the book, and I would encourage all authors to check the site for their works. Mine was posted with an intentional misspelling in the title to avoid search engines finding it, but I found it and I am not happy about it. I don’t have the funds to mount a big law suit and I sincerely hope they will remove it voluntarily.
To the folks at Scribd, give me a break! Authors toil for years in some cases to produce their work and they have a right to make a living from what they write. If I stole the code that runs the Scribid website, I suspect you would not be pleased.
To everyone else, don’t download stuff from this site that is in obvious violation of copyright law. Stealing is stealing weather it is done with a keyboard and a mouse or a gun and a mask. Enough already!
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