Breaking news:

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

Whatever you do, DO NOT go to this form created to target trans people in Utah and DO NOT spam it with bogus reports such as:

The entire Bee Movie script

100k word fanfics

Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"

The names of conservative lawmakers

Full-length movies

Keysmashes

PDFs of novels

etc.

source 1

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.

Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.

In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.

In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:

I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.

In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.

Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

With the world in lockdown, most “white-collar” crime (AKA “world-destroying corruption and looting”) now takes place over Zoom. If you witness such a crime, you might be tempted to record the meeting and leak it to a journalist.

But leaking Zoom recordings is seriously fraught because they are full of personally identifying details. Some of these are “traitor-tracing” mechanisms, others are intrinsic to Zoom, and still others come from your end of the recording.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/leak-zoom-meeting/

Nikita Mazurov’s guide to anonymizing Zoom videos for The Intercept tackles each of these classes of identifiers.

Traitor-tracing: Zoom meeting hosts have the option to add visual and audio watermarks to their videos.

The visual ones are perceptible - displaying your name/email on the screen so that it will be present in any video-grab - but the audio watermarks are a series of ultrasound chirps with unique identifiers in them.

It’s not clear where the audio watermark is inserted; Marzurov hypothesizes that the ultrasonic watermarks are inserted by your copy of the Zoom client, so using an external recording tool might bypass them.

Another important identifier in Zoom recordings is the arrangement of the other participants; this is different for every viewer.

Any recording will reveal information that could identify the leaker: not just the user’s OS, but also pop-up alerts about emails and messages.

L with a dash through it (ł) makes a “W” sound. and W makes a “V” sound.