Ep 139: How Indie Authors Can Shield Their Book from Copyright Infringement

Copyright. Piracy. LibGen. AI scraping. If just reading that list makes you want to hide under your desk with a bottle of...something...you’re not alone. Indie authors are being forced to navigate a landscape that feels murkier by the day, and most of us didn’t exactly sign up to become copyright attorneys.

Unfortunately, the “poor man’s copyright” trick (mailing yourself a sealed copy of your manuscript) I used to suggest won’t do a thing to protect you in 2025. What does matter? Understanding when and how to formally register your copyright, what that three-month filing window really means, and how to handle it when you discover your book has been pirated.

In this episode, I break down:

• Whether copyright registration is worth the time and money for indie authors
• What to do (and what not to do) if your book shows up on LibGen or other shady sites
• The difference between healthy protection and exhausting paranoia

I’ll show you how to balance protecting your work with staying focused on what really matters—building genuine connections with readers who do want to support you.

Want to go deeper? Check out Jenn Hansen-dePaula’s conversation with attorney Olivia Maynes for a legal perspective here: https://jenndepaula.com/podcast/90

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Chapters

• 1:58 Welcome and Copyright Introduction
• 4:14 The Evolution of Copyright Concerns
• 8:36 Poor Man's Copyright vs. Official Registration
• 15:26 Understanding LibGen Piracy
• 20:43 Steps to Combat Book Piracy
• 27:28 Key Takeaways and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:59

Hi everybody and welcome back. Today we are going to talk about one of my least favorite topics and probably one of yours as well copyright. It's this brief but very heavy topic that authors, specifically indie authors, get very concerned about and, frankly, understandably so, because when we put so much of our time and energy and emotions into a book, the last thing we want is for someone else to take it and claim it as their own. Now, my stance on some of the things I'm going to talk about today has actually changed over the years because of the advent of this great thing, ai, which we are all oh so familiar with. And I received a question last week from someone who was concerned about LibGen and I'm going to get into what LibGen is and if and why we should be concerned about it and how we deal with it in a second. But it made me start to think about all of the other questions that authors have around copyright. As an editor, frequently not so much anymore, but certainly many years ago before I had worked with a number of authors and a lot of my editing clients now come on referral, so this question doesn't come up as frequently, but it still comes up, and fairly so An author will say will you sign an NDA when I send you my manuscript for editing? And my answer is always sure, just send it over and I'll sign it. That's fine.

Speaker 1: 2:33

There's this sort of understood paranoia that authors have about other people stealing their work whether it's their idea or their outright published work and uploading it to somewhere and selling it for like a dollar or downloading for free which is sort of what LibGen is and again we're going to get to that but then monetizing their site off of ads, sponsors and other sorts of things. And so to just get right to it, you can't copyright an idea. It you can't copyright an idea, you just can't. So there are some. I am not an attorney, want to be very clear about that, but there are some legal pathways you can go down. If you've shared your idea with someone, ie an editor, like you've shared your manuscript, or you shared thoughts about how you're going to pivot your manuscript, and then that editor goes and shares that with another author. And this has been known to happen, by the way, not just in the editorial space but in the agenting space, in the public, like places. You would hope it wouldn't happen, but it has happened. I would not say it's common. It's not common enough to be paranoid't happen, but it has happened. I would not say it's common. It's not common enough to be paranoid about it, but it has happened. And then the person with whom the agent, editor, whomever shares it, takes that idea and runs with it and then goes off and does something, so that becomes a very murky world that I am in no way positioned to speak to. As far as law or really much of anything else Like. If that happens to you, I would get an attorney involved and find out what your rights are.

Speaker 1: 4:15

What I want to talk about are the different ways that you can protect yourself up front and how nervous, slash paranoid you really need to be. So again, if you're working with an editor who doesn't come by way, recommended by way of a colleague, another author, a friend, you can certainly ask them to sign an NDA. Again, I never have any. If you send it over, I'll sign it. Like I know how much work it takes to make a book, not only into a book, but then to get it selling. So I'm under no illusions that I could just take your fabulous book and go out there and market it as my own and make a million dollars. That is not something that I think can happen. I mean, does it ever happen? Probably everything happens, but like the degree to which a reputable person with integrity would even consider doing such a thing who knows how difficult it is not just to get a book into the world but to get it launched not something that I feel people need to worry about. I have worked with authors, however, who have found that their work has been pirated after the fact, so they've published their work has then been downloaded from Amazon. It's been re-uploaded. I mean, this is happening more and more and more.

Speaker 1: 5:37

Actually, there's this darling slight aside, but anyone who doesn't know of this woman is going to be so delighted that I mentioned her. I'm going to call her an influencer, but she's doesn't know of this woman is going to be so delighted that I mentioned her. I'm going to call her an influencer, but she's not. She's just hilarious as hell. Her name's Melanie, her Instagram is just being Melanie and she's formed this whole we do not care club for women who are experiencing the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. She is hilarious and she has a book coming out in a couple of weeks. And when we have a book coming out right.

Speaker 1: 6:08

The last thing we want to be doing is fighting with someone, some strange person who has, who is posing as us in order to ride our coattails. So, unfortunately, us in order to ride our coattails. So, unfortunately, Melanie has a situation where someone has created a book, god knows what the contents of it are, and they have taken her cover and modified it just the teeniest amount to where the average person would never know, taken her name, like the whole thing, the same title, everything and put it up on Amazon for sale in advance of Melanie's book actually being for sale, in order to trick people into thinking that that's Melanie's book and ordering it and making a quick God knows what. I mean, it's probably more than I want to even think off of that. It's happened to Jane Friedman, melanie, like the people I know of to whom it's happened, is I can count them on only one hand, but the fact that I can count them on even one finger is a problem. So all this to say, I understand when authors want to do as little work as possible upfront to protect themselves in the event that something like this goes sideways. Some of it, it's hard to avoid and so you can't protect yourself against it. You just have to be prepared to defend yourself against it if and when it happens.

Speaker 1: 7:36

However, let's talk for a minute about copyright, because this had me thinking back to the way that I used to handle copyright versus how I handle it today and how I advise indie authors to handle it today. Back in the day, as in when we were working on cell phones that flipped and if you wanted to type in the letter A to text somebody you had to push the number one once and three times for C, I wasn't nearly as worried about copyright infringement. Maybe I was naive. I like to think I was just focusing on the things over which I had the most control, and I didn't want to shell out nor could I shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for attorneys to copyright, something that, in all likelihood, people weren't going to try to infringe upon. Fast forward to today, where we have AI and all kinds of other things going on, and the song I'm singing is a little bit different.

Speaker 1: 8:33

So back in the day, my advice was to do what was called by many people the poor man's copyright, and what you did was you printed out your manuscript, you put it in a manila envelope, you mailed it to yourself and you didn't open it once it arrived. And what that did was supposedly and again I'm not an attorney it allowed you to prove see the air quotes copyright should someone steal your material. Because you could go into the courts and you could open the envelope in the courtroom to prove that on the date that the postage was stamped that you owned you had already written that material and it had therefore been stolen. The challenge is, I don't know whether that ever worked for anybody. I'm guessing that in a court of law it was hard for that to stand up. The other reality, however, was defending a copyright much like defending a trademark is expensive and the amount of money that you get on the back end is not. Typically. It's not I'm not going to say it's not life altering, because that's different to different people, but it's not millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. So most people would opt to not take that to court and just kind of keep going, keep moving forward. So that was my advice back in the day was, if you're really feeling nervous about it, do this poor man's copyright approach, send it to yourself and if you ever have to prove it. Here's an option Again.

Speaker 1: 10:07

With the advent of AI, not quite my recommendation anymore, mostly because it will not hold up in a court of law at all. Now, I don't know that it ever would, but to my understanding it will not today. So what I recommend today is that authors do take the time to register their book with the copyright office. It's not hard to do at all. It does cost, I want to say, between $150 and $200. For some authors that's like I can't do it, okay, zero judgment from me. And for some authors it's like I will absolutely be doing it, period, full stop, because I will. Great, no judgment. This is just information. There's no should or shouldn't, it's just information, and then you get to decide what you should and shouldn't do, based on a whole variety of factors.

Speaker 1: 11:01

So the key with the copyright registration, however, is and this is where a lot of authors today are getting bit in the butt because they didn't realize it until now is that in order to have the full copyright protection, you have to register the copyright within three months of the book being published. If you don't do that, if you're past that point, if your book came out a year ago and this happened to an author I've worked with for years. She realized that her book was being pirated. It had already been out for a couple of years, so she went and secured copyright sort of in hindsight, and so she still has. She still owns the copyright. The only difference is she's not entitled to as much in the courts meaning as much financially in the courts if she were to sue someone and win as she would have been had she filed that copyright within three months of the book being published and oftentimes the attorney's fees and the time and the emotional it's just the energy that's required isn't even worth what you end up getting back from the court. So for some people it's not a money thing anyway, it's just a. This is, it's a principle, and they'll sue you all day on principle.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Now, thankfully, jen Hanson DePaula, my dear friend, did a phenomenal podcast this past week, I believe, with a wonderful attorney named Olivia Mains, and Olivia is a copyright, ip, intellectual property attorney I mean, I don't know, I think that's what you're, but she's very well versed in this stuff and she not only works with authors but she works with product owners, course owners who want to trademark their course names, all those sorts of things. So I have put I'm not going to go into everything that they talked about in the podcast obviously because you can go listen to it and should listen to it there, but because they touched on this copyright piece and I was already thinking about it, I wanted to bring that up. If you want to get even more information on specifically copyright, trademark non-disclosures, all that sort of stuff, I am putting the link to that podcast in the episode notes of this podcast. Or if you're listening while you're driving in the car and you have a phenomenal memory, you can just go to Jen DePaula so it's Jen with two N's DePaula, d-e-p-a-u-l-a dot com and just go to her podcast and listen.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Here's the other thing I wanted to talk about today is LibGen. I mean, we could take this intellectual property thing down probably 50 different paths and I'm not going to do that because it's a lot, but the two big ones. I wouldn't have even thought about LibGen except that someone emailed me and said have you done a podcast about LibGen and can you? And secondarily, I've been thinking about this copyright thing a lot with the advent of AI and I have changed it up. There is not within my course Publish the Damn Book already. There's not a full module on how to register copyright, because it doesn't need one, but there is a full link on how to get your Library of Congress number, which, by the way, is free. How to register copyright if you want to. All that sort of legalese from the periphery right Not as an attorney, just from what I understand, having spoken to attorneys, listened to attorneys et cetera, that self-published and indie authors want to be aware of. So I think that's in module six. If you're enrolled in, publish the damn book already. Okay.

Speaker 1: 15:08

So let's move on to LibGen and what the hell it is and why you maybe want to be. Just have your eye out for it when it comes to pirating intellectual property, for it when it comes to pirating intellectual property, copyright, et cetera. So essentially, what can happen is you can Google your book title or some other way, search your book title and it'll come up with a listing, oftentimes on Amazon, where the primary seller of your book is wait for it not Amazon. It's a third party seller, which, for the record, happens and is completely legitimate because, once you're think about it, once your book is on Amazon, if Joe Schmo goes and buys a copy, he's allowed to resell it because the idea is that he's already bought it from me. If he buys my book, so he's allowed to buy it from me and then resell it for whatever he can command for it. So sometimes, depending on a variety of things that I know next to nothing about, he will own the buy box see my air quotes meaning that when you click buy now, you're actually not buying it. You might be buying it from Amazon, but you're buying it through him, so he's the one who's actually making the sale, not Amazon.

Speaker 1: 16:19

It's not a print on demand situation, and so one of the things that people will find if they Google their book not on Amazon, separate from Amazon is that a site called LibGen is offering their book, their ebook, typically for free, which is really confusing, because how could that be? So LibGen is technically and I use the word technically very loosely a library, but it's like the shadiest library out there. So in a reputable library, the library system, the librarian, the system has bought your book. They have purchased the right to loan out your book, your e-book or your paperback to its patrons. Libgen has not done that, so they're essentially giving your book, giving your IP, to someone to consume without your permission and without having compensated you for it. Think of it almost like they bought a copy of your book. They went to Kinko's which doesn't exist anymore. They made a bunch of copies, put a cute binder on and they're just passing it out on the street. Just hey, enjoy, here you go.

Speaker 1: 17:34

So it's a pirate library and, even worse, it's constantly moving. We hear about these companies. They're so hard to follow because they're basically shell companies and they take a product and then when they get shut down, they just open up a new site. They open up under a new name and the whole thing and they sell the product. They change the name of the product maybe, but they don't go out of business, they just move. And LibGen is, as much as I can understand it, the same way.

Speaker 1: 18:03

So the challenge, as you can imagine, is you get it taken down off of wherever you see it and then it pops up somewhere else and now you've got to go and you're on this constant chase and it's like how much is that time, energy or money worth? Now, my personal opinion as an author, as a human being, on this, is that the people who are downloading it's kind of like Napster back in the day, like the people who are downloading your book for free, knowing that they're doing it for free, knowing that they're stealing, pirating, whatever. They're not your customer, they're never going. We are not going to be able to pivot those people into paying customers on sites like Amazon or Bookshop or Barnes and Noble or your favorite indie bookstore. It's just not going to happen. That being said, is it fair love that word, hear the sarcasm that a conglomerate is able to make a substantial amount of money off of a collection of books by stealing them and then reselling them? Essentially? No, it's not. It's not okay.

Speaker 1: 19:14

So there are a couple problems here for indie authors. One is the obvious that I just mentioned. The truth is that if money were no object, I would buy every single book that, and I buy most of my books from indie booksellers. I'm gonna be so honest, though, when I want a book immediately and if I see a book in a big box store that I know I want but I can wait for for 24 to 48 hours and I know it's going to be 30% less expensive at Amazon and I'm going to get free shipping and it's going to show up right at my door like I'm just ordering it from Amazon. I will own that. I will be honest about that. In a similar way, many consumers who aren't connected directly to the author, certainly, or to the indie bookstore, are looking for the lowest price for the product that they want to buy. That's just what we do, and so if they're getting ready to buy your book somewhere, even from you an e-book for $3.99, but then they see that they can get it somewhere for free and it's not a reputable library, they're probably going to download it there, which sucks, because I don't have to tell you why it sucks and you can't.

Speaker 1: 20:25

This is going to get a little technical here, but you can't even shut the system down. So I have an author who has sent off cease and desist letters and then had to keep sending cease and desist letters. There's no end in sight because it's whack-a-mole. You hit it here and then it pops up over here and you just can't keep up, because all of the copies of these books that LibGen has are not in a centralized location. They're kind of all over the place as these new places are popping up. So who can keep track of that? Nobody, that's crazy making.

Speaker 1: 21:00

So what can you do about this Number one. You can do nothing if you choose. If you'd rather just keep writing and think look, the bad actors are always going to be there. The people who are looking for free books are always going to be there. I'm just going to keep pushing and attracting and connecting with my ideal readers who want to support the arts and creativity and enjoy building a connection with me and supporting me, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then go ahead and do that. If you want to take action of some sort because you feel on principle that it's wrong, then you can absolutely do that.

Speaker 1: 21:33

So here are the steps that, as I understand it, you can take to try to have your book removed from LibGen. First of all, you've got to find where it is like, where all the different places where it's being disseminated for free. So the best way to do that, in my understanding, is to just Google Google your book title and Google your name and see where it pops up. And wherever it pops up, that's free. Copy the URL and stick it somewhere so you have a note of it. Then, assuming you have the copyright, either you already got it or now go out and get it, file a copyright removal form request with Google and I believe even like Bing, yahoo, like any other major search engine, wherever you find it, essentially you can already see why this would take some time but file a request to have it removed because it is violating copyright. So you can also use like a who is service to figure out who owns the site where it's being housed and you can send them a cease and desist. It's often they register these things as private. It's often very difficult to find out who is the who is and get their contact information. So that may be a non-starter but it's something you can try to do. And then if you look and this is getting real technical, but if you look at the file name, like the URL where your file is being either ipfsio or dweblink I think it's link In the link you can file a takedown request with that specific URL.

Speaker 1: 23:25

I believe that those little, the IFPO I'll put it down in the episode notes those designate certain gateways and so it's kind of like if you can shut down the gateway it's better than I can't think of a good analogy right now, but like it's like shutting down, pulling up the drawbridge to the castle, so it's more effective than just locking the front door, you're pulling up the whole drawbridge. It doesn't mean that it'll never find its way out there again, but it makes it more difficult and then you just got to revisit it every month or two. This is an ongoing thing that, if you're really serious about it, you would need to keep doing to double check is it being pirated? It's virtually impossible, as I understand it, to permanently erase your book from LibGen. So what becomes most important for most people is to pull up the drawbridge and or, if they can't do that part, lock that front door and lock all the windows as best they can every few months.

Speaker 1: 24:31

I do not recommend getting completely lost in this. You know situations like Melanie just being Melanie, or Jane Friedman. They have the fan base, honestly, to be able to go out and say don't buy this book and within a short period of time especially like on Amazon, if we're just talking about general pirating they pull it down. It's amazing to me how quickly Amazon will remove a book for suspected pirating. That's not versus how long and how cumbersome it is to get them to pull down a book that is absolutely a pirated version. And that's a whole separate conversation and not one I'm qualified to have. It's just amazing to me how much lifting has to be done to get something truly wrong pulled from Amazon and how little lifting has to be done to have something. It's like getting your Instagram account shut down or your Amazon ads account shut down over something that you're like account shut down or your Amazon ads account shut down over something that you're like huh. But then there are people just being egregiously not having no integrity with the system and they just fly under the radar. It's very weird, but here we are. So again and this is a keynote that I.

Speaker 1: 25:47

These are the big takeaways from this episode. Number one go listen to the episode with Jen DePaula and Olivia Mains. It's fabulous and fantastic. When it comes to LibGen, if you're looking for all, I will post the takedown steps that I've been able to identify in the episode notes, both here, if you're watching this on YouTube, and then also over on my website. I have all the podcasts on my blog over on the website publishaprofitablebookcom and the channel, if you want to watch these live on YouTube, is Write the Damn Book Already. I would be forever grateful if you would like and subscribe. I'm finally doing these on video after 135 episodes.

Speaker 1: 26:27

And then, third, please know because I do get questions about this a lot that if someone else is selling your book on Amazon, it's not necessarily illegal for them to do so. Again, there are a lot of third-party sellers and as long as they've purchased the book from you or your publisher from somewhere, they are allowed to resell it. That's just. I don't know what law that is or whatever, but that's what they're allowed to do. The issue is when you take something for free, when you get something for free pirated off a free site and then you try to sell it somewhere else Like, that's not.

Speaker 1: 27:03

Not only is it not okay, but it's not. It's not. Here comes the word again fair for people to be consuming creative content for free that the creator has not given permission to be shared for free. So DM me or email me with any further questions you have experiences you've had with, whether it's copyright infringement, ip infringement, libgen and any questions you might have just about this side of things. Again, not an attorney, but more than happy to float the question around and see what other people's experiences have been and how they've handled it. So that's it for today. Have a wonderful, wonderful week and I will see you again next time.