A Kuwaiti national using fake names and selling others' copyrighted stories in the Kindle Store sheds light on black hat hacker forums--and the theft, taboo sex, and swindles festering in the recesses of Amazon.
Editor's Note
Want more on digital piracy? Read Fast Company's ongoing coverage of the federal crackdown on file-sharing site Megaupload and the arrest of its playboy founder Kim Dotcom. Also, read more on SOPA, PIPA, and Congressman Darrell Issa's plans for combating piracy.
Then there's the problem of proving infringement. "Copyright is a Federal statute," says Jane Shay Wald, a partner emeritus at Irell and Manella, and a former president of Los Angeles Copyright Society. "No company can make a finding of copyright infringement that's binding on the alleged infringer. That's the job of a judge and jury."
She envisions a number of scenarios in which someone could believe he owns the copyright but doesn't. He might have inadvertently acquired the copyright to a work that had been copied previously. Maybe he had transferred ownership to another party or been employed by someone else who holds the copyright. Or the copyright might be invalid for a number of technical reasons. Amazon could tie up any potential litigant in court for years.
Now you likely know why Amazon--and Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, and many others--have been so adamant in their opposition to the Senate's heavy-handed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the House's sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). If made into law both could have armed copyright holders with weapons to do battle with websites that host infringing material. In theory, without the hassle of attaining a court order, a single complainant might have been able to force credit card companies to suspend Amazon's financial transactions, Google and Bing to erase it from search results, and DNS providers to cloak the site so users couldn't easily find it. One slip up and the impact on a site like Amazon could be devastating.
The vehemence and widespread popularity of anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, which caught senators and congressmen by surprise, effectively hobbled chance of passage. Instead, Amazon continues to act under the oft-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which under its "safe harbor" provision puts the onus on the infringer, not the platform. Amazon is in the clear as long as it makes a good-faith effort to remove material that might violate someone's copyright.
"One could try to formulate a claim against Amazon based on the fact that it kept these 'ill-gotten gains," Brown, the technology attorney from Chicago, says. "That case might fall under the heading of 'unjust enrichment.' But I think a case like that would have some problems, likely being tossed out by a court for being preempted by federal copyright law."
Meanwhile, David Springer says he's thinking of contacting Luke to demand compensation.
As for Luke, he just wants to forget the whole thing. "I'm putting this behind me," he says, "chalking" the money he spent on the bogus books "down to experience."
Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at NYU and a contributing writer to Fast Company. Follow him on Twitter: @penenberg
[Image: Flickr user Bart Heird; Thumbnail: Flickr user Kaptain Kobold]