I don't spend much time on social media (I might be the only person in America who really should spend more time on it), but I'm glad I was checking notifications this morning.
Tom Lennon posted this in a private Facebook group for audiobook narrators about five hours ago. I've put Tom's words in italics for clarity; the rest is Nigel Peever's experience:
If you are also not a member of the ACX Narrator group, you may miss an important post made earlier today by Nigel Peever. I am sure he won't mind me repeating his post here.Nigel's post text is below.I found a number of my audiobooks available for free on audiobookcup.com their system allows you to stream/listen to them in their entirety for free or download them for £4.99. So as you can imagine I was not very happy about that. However a cease and desist request has resulted in a prompt removal of the titles in less than 24 hours. You do need to search for each title as a search for my name as narrator showed up nothing. I strongly suggest checking out if any of your titles are currently being pirated on this site. I have also contacted ACX support to look into the site and pass on the details to Audible's legal team.
Almost immediately comments were being made by narrators that they also found many of their RS books on this site. I have found many of mine and have also sent a Cease & Desist letter.This is not a small site. Their page views are really high, so this is big-time theft.
This is a classic example of a 21st-Century piracy ring. If you have an audiobook for sale, search for it on AudioBookCup and see whether they are selling it for you and pocketing the money themselves. Or maybe just giving your audiobook away for free —and this without signing folks up for your mailing list, without even including a link to your landing page, because then you might realize what they were doing. Send them a cease-and-desist order (you can write it yourself: google some examples) and, apparently, they will comply pretty quickly. Do it now and limit your losses.
I look forward to reading more about how exactly Audio Book Cup managed to skim those audio files wholesale like that—unfortunately, I don't think it was very hard, if they could afford the appropriate zero-day hack. Even that might not have been necessary. I hope this develops into a bigger story so that we can all learn from it.
And so that future piracy is at least somewhat discouraged.
Leave a Reply