Hard-Copy Knock-Offs

Most people have encountered “knock-off” versions of some familiar product over the years; the designer clothing and accessories that are copied on the cheap and then sold as the original (frequently off the back of a truck or at a stand by the side of the road) tend to get the most ink, since the practice is now illegal in most of the states, but you can find imitation versions of almost anything if you look in the right place. Anytime there’s a highly successful movie or television show, somebody will throw together a lookalike cover and some leftover footage from the back of their archives and put it on the shelf next to the real thing, hoping that people in a hurry will grab the wrong product by mistake; you see the same scams with software and books. Sometimes you will even see a retailer design a package for their in-house generic product that makes it difficult to tell the knock-off from the name brand. But the current controversy at Amazon still constitutes a new level of fraud, as far as I’m concerned…

You can read more about it on the CNN/Fortune site, but the basic idea is that people are using the Amazon self-publishing system, called CreateSpace to generate titles that sound (and in some cases look) enough like best-selling books to confuse the casual shopper; in some cases going so far as to copy or paraphrase marketing slogans and jacket quotes. Technically, creating these products isn’t illegal, at least so long as they don’t actually use any copyrighted material without permission, but you would have a hard time telling someone who was looking for “Twilight: New Moon” and actually purchased “Twilight New Moon” by mistake that he or she wasn’t ripped off. But whether or not you consider this a deceptive business practice – people could check author names, publisher names, ISBN numbers and so on, since they’re already online if they’re buying things from Amazon – what makes this case unique is that the whole practice wouldn’t be possible without the CreateSpace system…

Up until a few years ago, knocking off a book was a significant undertaking. You could steal text from online sources and claim it as your own if you wanted to – and a lot of websites still do – but making money off of Internet content is notoriously difficult unless you’re selling porn. Ripping off the same text – or just designing a book with different content but a similar title and cover design – has always been possible, but printing up copies of a book is expensive, and getting them into actual bookstores takes time and effort. This is why most self-publishing efforts were ineffectual before Amazon and Barnes & Noble introduced their online self-publishing systems, and suddenly made it possible for anyone knock off a best seller in a matter of days. But even worse, in my opinion, it’s now possible to do this anonymously…

Any real-world author has to have a publisher, a distributor, or at least contact information if he or she wants to get paid. An electronic publishing “author” just needs an Amazon account and a Pay-Pal account, and while both companies can delete accounts for abusing the system, they have little motivation to do so, and even less reason to patrol the tens of thousands of self-published e-books that pop onto their virtual shelves every day looking for such violations. Until such time as somebody succeeds in prosecuting one system or the other (or both) under Deceptive Business Practice laws, the only recourse the book-buying public has is “Let the buyer beware!”

Of course, for authors this raises a whole crop of additional issues – but that’s a discussion for another day…