LEGAL AND COPYRIGHT PROTECTING CONSIDERATIONS FOR eBOOK WRITERS

When you sit down and write a book that you want to have published as an eBook (either self-published or via one or other online eBook publisher) there are a number of things you need to consider to avoid loss of income and other problems arising from lack of adequate copyright protection for your book.

There are of course other more or less legal matters you need to consider, but in this post I will restrict myself to copyright, and deal with the others in later posts.

The reasons that you should seriously consider copyrighting your book is that it has all too often occurred that books uploaded to less than reputable online publishers have suddenly appeared as work by someone else (normally someone who works on that site), or if you have posted it as a downloadable eBook on your own website and if  you haven't copyrighted your book before uploading it, it suddenly appears on the web as the work of another person, and you don't really have a leg to stand on, and all your work was for nothing.

Also sadly not unheard of is for people to download your book and then simply republish it as their own work

You could of course protect your work by locking it with a password or some similar bit of technical trickery, but this in no way stops someone simply retyping your book and going ahead and publishing it as his own work.

So, the best form of protection is to copyright it, you can then at least always prove that the book in question was in fact written by you.  This enables you to take legal action against anyone who in any way infringes your copyright on your work.  Still not fun, and can be very tedious, and of course contributes handsomely to your lawyer's income, but worth doing....  It is a jungle out there Folks!

This is a rather tricky issue as copyright laws vary from country to country, but there is a simple way to protect yourself that apparently works most times.  This is to submit your book to the copyright authorities in your country, and have it properly registered before you either post it on your own website, or submit it to an online publisher.

It is then of course up to you to be vigilant and do your best to discover any possible copyright infringements, not easy I know - the internet is huge, but you will need to do this, especially if your book seems to be popular!

Obviously it is beyond the scope of this blog to give you contact details of all the World's copyright offices (should you live in Angola, where on earth do you find such a thing?)  But in general it should be easy enough to find your nearest copyright office and do the necessary, and by and large it isn't too expensive either.

There are quite a lot of specialist websites that give useful advice about how to go about all of this, so I would recommend that you spend some time checking them out, especially if you can find ones that know the law in your particular country.

Here is a link to one such, in this case, American.  CLICK HERE

Good luck!

SHARE WITH US:

If you have had any experience of copyright infringement on your work, I would appreciate it very much if you would let us know about it, and what - if any - action you took to deal with it, and whether or not you were successful.  Also, if you can recommend any particular websites that gave you real and useful advice on this problem.

Also of interest to writers - how on earth did you discover this infringement?