Remember a couple of weeks ago when I bitched about piracy in GooglePlay Books?
Well, it hasn’t been just me bitching, either.
Ink, Bits, and Pixels (formerly The Digital Reader) picked it up and ran with it, and has been doing a series of posts about it, applying Google’s feet to the metaphorical digital fire. Today, they report that the GooglePlay Books publisher side of things is closed to new publishers. Read it here.
(In that story, they also link to other stories they’ve been doing about it.)
Can I get a hallelujah?
Seriously.
Not only is Google the suckiest of the online publishing platforms to deal with in terms of usability, they’re also the hardest to deal with in terms of reporting violations of copyright.
Including they told a legit publisher they’d have to request a pirate remove a file they posted, and they couldn’t do anything about it.
Uh, what the what? (Also linked in that story above.)
FYI, if you’re an author/publisher and you find pirated content on GoogleBooks, not only should you file a DMCA takedown request with them, but you should ALSO go through the Google webmaster dashboard AND report the inbound link to Google as well. This means double the alert to them, and (heh, here is where it’s HIGHLY ironic) the Google dashboard feature USUALLY gets you fairly quick and easy results getting the inbound link taken down from Google’s search results. (Doesn’t kill the content, and on some pirate sites, that’s a harder job than playing Whack-a-Mole anyway. But at least it chokes off some of their income and makes it harder for innocent people to find the pirated copies by accident.)
The link to the Google webmaster dashboard is:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard?hl=en
Have fun with that. Maybe Google starts seeing enough DMCA requests against their own content it will speed things up a little.
Make sure to check your spam filter for the confirmation e-mail, because if you don’t click and confirm the link in there, it won’t sign you up.
LATEST NEWS:
Coming Soon | Audiobooks | Latest Posts