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It's not trademark, but you can sue someone for fraudulently using your name and likeness, it varies by state in the US. Of course the actual entity posting th
by imgabe 3y ago
It's not trademark, but you can sue someone for fraudulently using your name and likeness, it varies by state in the US.
Of course the actual entity posting the fraudulent books are probably overseas somewhere and will disappear if anyone tries to contact them. Maybe if it happens to enough people a class-action lawsuit against Amazon would force them to do some due diligence when listing a book to make sure that the author is actually who they claim to be.
- sverhagen 3y agoRumor has it that TikTok'ers are doing explainers on how to easily create these for a quick buck, so why wouldn't there be plenty of takers stateside. It being the onslaught it is, murky territory and all, much enforcement seems pretty unlikely anyway, so why not give it a try.
- techdragon 3y agoPeople used to sell this sort of information, it was the classic digital multi level marketing scam without the overarching marketing company. There were ads on YouTube google and Amazon all the time for get my book about how to successfully make money self publishing books on Amazon… people bought it tried to do the harder part of writing stuff then eventually some decided they could crib the book that convinced them to do it in the first place and plagiarised/rehashed the material and wrote the next generation of how to make money writing books to self publish on Amazon and the cycle would continue, slowly growing as more customers fell for the cheap garbage books and the promise of easy income… Then large language models utterly annihilated this as it becomes obvious that you just write spam books and hope people buy them, job done… Kind of amazing to see thevalue collapse reaching a new phase, where the only reliable way to drive sales for garbage books is to try and parasitically leach reputation by pretending a real author who has a real reputation is the author of the garbage book.
- mavhc 3y agoThe author of the article: In addition to being a professor with The Great Courses (How to Publish Your Book), she is the author of The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal.
- ke88y 3y ago> Of course the actual entity posting the fraudulent books are probably overseas somewhere Amazon is an international, but is certainly bound by the laws of the United States of America. At least the ones it can't buy itself out of. "I didn't know" isn't an affirmative defense if your employees are on the record saying they know.
- imgabe 3y agoI think Amazon wouldn't say they didn't know, but that it's not their responsibility. For example if Random House published a book that libeled someone, and Amazon sold it, you would sue Random House and the author for libel, not Amazon. Likewise, Amazon would tell you to go sue the publisher, who is probably judgement-proof in some way.
- 23B1 3y agoAlso don't you have to prove damages in cases like these?
- cycomanic 3y agoThe better example is a store that sells counterfeit goods (and continues to sell it even after being made aware). In most countries if they are a small shop they get closed down very quickly, now if they are Amazon ... crickets.
- wombat-man 3y agoyeah, it's such bullshit.
- FireBeyond 3y ago> The better example is a store that sells counterfeit goods (and continues to sell it even after being made aware). The (frustrating) argument Amazon would make here is that they weren't "aware", there was just an "accusation", and since the accuser didn't supply evidence...
- ke88y 3y ago