
Someone Stole My Book (and My Job) and Is Selling It on Amazon - artsandsci
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/267446-someone-stole-my-entire-book-and-my-job-and-is-selling-it-on-amazon
======
jostmey
This a major problem for amazon. I bought a baby product off amazon. I noticed
a few weird things about my product, so I emailed the inventor. They told me
that some Chinese company had stolen their product design and was seeling
fakes with the same name on amazon.

I refuse anything from amazon for my baby. Hell, amazon even sent me an opened
package of similac formula

~~~
paulcole
> This a major problem for amazon

I hear this over and over but where's the evidence that this is true on a
significant scale? Sellers have been counterfeiting and selling knock-off
garbage on Amazon since the 3rd-party marketplaces launched.

3P sellers are a NECESSITY for Amazon. They source and stock the hundreds of
millions of long tail items that Amazon themselves can't/won't. For Amazon the
benefits of 3P sellers far outweigh the costs.

Edit: Who's downvoting this and why?

~~~
limaoscarjuliet
HN is eager to downvote dissenting opinions. You got a vote up from me.

Edit: huh, this got downvoted too... First rule of fight club is we do not
talk about fight club?

~~~
dahart
> Edit: huh, this got downvoted too... First rule of fight club is we do not
> talk about fight club?

FWIW, there are multiple points in the guidelines your comment crosses.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation... Assume good
faith."

"Eschew flamebait."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals"

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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jhallenworld
I indirectly know of someone who makes extra money by plagiarizing little
known books, changing the cover and republishing them on Amazon. I'm surprised
Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism. Remember
Google's digitize all books project? This would be a useful use-case for it.

~~~
mabbo
When I was an Amazon intern 7 years ago, I went to a presentation of exactly
how the duplicate detector works. I won't discuss any technical details of
course, but suffice it to say: it should catch these sorts of cases, so long
as the books are already on Amazon in digital format.

I don't understand how your friend can get away with this.

~~~
rhizome
Just FYI, 7 years would almost certainly put that information outside of the
statute of limitations.

~~~
WalterGR
_Just FYI, 7 years would almost certainly put that information outside of the
statute of limitations._

I don't believe that sentence makes any sense. Do you have a legal background?

~~~
rhizome
Ah, credentialism on HN. Shocker! Is it that I'm missing "in the US," or do
you have other criticism more specific?

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teeray
Couldn't the author hand Amazon a DMCA takedown?

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13of40
In the (sadly, increasingly rare) cases that I need to look something up in
the book I wrote, I typically hit Google and find that one site in Vietnam
that has the pirated copy...

~~~
Mononokay
Upload it to Libgen! More information's always better, especially if even the
author isn't getting it legally.

~~~
13of40
I totally would, since it no longer generates any royalties, but I don't own
all of the rights to it.

~~~
Mononokay
If you don't mind answering, what book _did_ you write? I love reading things
by HN users.

~~~
13of40
I do mind, but I'll buy you TotalFark if you can figure it out from my posts.
:) (Besides, it's niche and technical.)

~~~
Mononokay
I think you win, ha. If I'm right, I found your brother's thesis, but other
than that I can't find a thing close to a book. (Unless you published it in
Britain for some reason during the 70's, in which case, possibly?)

~~~
13of40
You should know that my brother and I both changed our last names, and I spent
more than half of the 70's dead.

------
5_minutes
The problem is that Amazon just doesnt care about things like these. Remember
long it took them to fix their broken rating system? And it’s still not fixed,
it’s just “less broken”. Though quite vital for people’s shopping experience

~~~
hangonhn
Not sure if you know about this but I use this whenever i shop on Amazon now:
[https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/)

Amazon should just find some change and buy this company and integrate them.

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mfrisbie
Exact same thing happened to me, I documented the entire experience:
[https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-
bo...](https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-book-on-
amazon-23631624aca2)

~~~
aptwebapps
Did Amazon end up taking action in the end?

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Khaine
It is borderline criminal. If they were not such a large organisation they
would be charged with facilitation. They are knowingly allowing the sale of
counterfeit goods. You go down to a street corner and sell knock-off Prada
bags and you will be arrested. You let someone sell counterfeit goods from
your store and you are an accessory. This will only change when Amazon are
held accountable.

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billysielu
I thought fake stuff on Amazon was money laundering?

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herodotus
Knowingly selling stolen goods is not new to the law. In California, selling a
stolen item worth less than $500 is a misdemeanour, and carries a maximum
penalty of 1 year in prison. I think that if the owner of Amazon were jailed
for 1 year (assuming that Amazon is indeed knowingly selling stolen property),
then we might see a drastic improvement in how Amazon deals with all sorts of
shady sales on their websites.

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jinfiesto
Amazon's co-mingling causes so many issues. I'm really into board games and
would love to be able to rely on my Prime subscription to pick up new games
(and get them quickly.) The board game market is kind of perverse in its own
way in that publishers often do not publish enough to meet demand and supply
gets snapped up in the first couple days/weeks of release and prices skyrocket
on account of scalping.

Because of this there's a huge glut of counterfeit games on Amazon. Even
worse, sellers also pretty clearly are also selling damaged "new" product at
full price. I've received $100+ board games that were clearly damaged before
they were shipped. It's a huge PITA when you can't even exchange since the
game you wanted has gone out of print between when you ordered and when you
received.

I would love to shop local, but my personal collection exceeds the stock of
most FLGS's in size and they very rarely stock things I want at prices that
are reasonable. I've mostly switched to buying from coolstuff unless I'm
buying a game that's evergreen (that I somehow don't already have.)

Amazon needs to sort their inventory out.

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akeck
Amazon should buy Turnitin.

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sehugg
One of my Kindle books was rejected for unspecified reasons. I’ll have to
check to see if a plagiarist got there first. FWIW I’ve moved recent ebooks to
Gumroad PDF downloads.

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JPLeRouzic
Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the ExtremTech
web site.

The drawbacks are: 1\. Lack of the huge audience that Amazon have 2\. Lack of
low cost transport costs

The first point is not really valuable anyway as there are lot of junk books
on Amazon that come from Createspace. Usually it is books written in the
XIXcentury but with a title that suggests they were written recently.

Amazon would really improve the value of its brand if it would remove this
useless kind of books.

~~~
shkkmo
> Another way to deal with the situation is to sell the book from the
> ExtremTech web site.

What problem does that solve?

~~~
JPLeRouzic
The stealer is most probably without enough resources to deal with complex
situations. Let makes the cost to replicate higher for him.

If the book is not visible on Amazon, no ranking will be available, and no
e-book version will be easy to find.

\- Without ranking there is virtually no risk it will be targeted.

\- Without e-book version, it will be more difficult to copy.

That said there are other ways to trick a Createspace author. For example many
Createspace books are sold by independant sellers at a much higher price than
the original, if there is a sell then the independant seller buy the original
one and sell it to the customer, while making an easy benefit completely
legally.

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nkkollaw
Will they take the product down if you can prove it's stolen..?

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sqldba
I felt sorry for the author. But then I reached the bottom of the article and
see that site has that most awful and obnoxious banner advertising there. Now
I don’t feel bad.

