Why I do not care about pirates. Really.

With all the kerfuffle going on about pirate sites and OMG THEY ARE STEALING MY BOOK!!!!!! I have decided I do not care about pirates. Not one bit.

Not in the Cory Doctorow fashion, that I believe in giving away stuff for free to create an audience. I’m already doing that on legitimate sites. If you follow this link, you get a list of books which are all free on all platforms where it is in my power to make them free. That’s different.

I do not care about pirates, because the aim of pirate sites is not some lofty goal of handing out creative works for free because, you know, art. The goal of the pirates is not even to make money off your free books.

The goal of pirate sites is to put malware on your system, or to trick you into giving out personal information they can sell.

I have Google Alerts set up, and I get a couple of these messages about my books every week. When my click on the link doesn’t make McAfee plaster IF YOU VISIT YOUR SITE, YOU DIE!!!!! popups all over my screen, I’ll usually find that what the site has put up is the free sample that’s available from Smashwords. They then link to Smashwords, presumably to get the affiliate fees.

When they put up whole files, they are always PDFs. I’ve stopped selling PDFs, but PDFs pop up all over the place. What’s in these PDFs? No idea. Not about to try. I really don’t like popups with revolting images. I don’t like my computer freezing up on me. I don’t like McAfee going AAAACCCKKKK!!! I WARNED YOU!!!

These sites are so virus-infested that anyone who visits them will need a month in an isolation ward in the hospital after visiting them.

I’m not touching this stuff with a barge pole. I am certainly not going to send them self-righteous DMCA notices in which my underlying message is: Here, have my email address. It’s valid, because I use it for all my correspondence. Now you can sell it to some scam artist.

Pirates. Good luck to them. Not going there. Not talking to them. And if by off-chance someone gets a free book of mine that’s not free elsewhere, awesome. Having hurdled all the above virus warnings, they probably deserve it for their efforts. People who get stuff at pirate sites would not have paid money anyway. They’re not usually people with a lot of money. Students often. Students have a habit of getting jobs later in life, and not having the time to go virus-busting, so they buy from legitimate sites, because it’s so much easier.

Why I do not care about pirates. Really. was originally published on Must Use Bigger Elephants

Patty Jansen torrent

(*turn on sense of humour* see also notes at the end)

Haha! Fooled ya!

I know you have been searching for days, because I’ve seen the title of this post pop up in my blog search terms a lot recently. Likely there is more than one of you. You thought that by searching “Patty Jansen torrent”, you could find pirated versions of my novels? You thought that was an OK thing to do? You thought I wouldn’t notice, especially if you landed on this blog?

You know what? You were wrong. I know where you’ve come from and how you ended up on my blog. I have your IP address.

Not only that, but you are a jerk. Because nothing in the world is going to make me believe that if you can afford internet connection and a device to read the internet on, you can’t afford the price of an ebook. So please spare me the sob story. Yes, I have bills, too.

But that’s not just it, right? You want to re-upload my stuff and sell it as your own? You know what? The ebook retailers are onto that trick. Their software actually ‘reads’ books and compares them. Prepare yourself for the nastygram from Amazon. Or your internet provider. Or both.

But, since you searched for a torrent site, and actually came to this blog post, I have you fooled. My books will not be at any torrent sites if I have anything to do with it. However, at any one time, a few of them are free on the legal sites anyway. So why visit those vile torrent sites that are rife with viruses?

Is saving coffee money really worth the trouble that will cause?

1. If you still have to ask, OF COURSE this is a parody. I’m a writer. I make shit up.
2. But the searches are real, so the least I can do is attempt to throw a stick in the SEO cogs by making this post the first one that comes up.
3. The IP addresses are real, too, at least on my self-hosted blog. Anyone can get (for free) plugins that will return, as well as stats, huge long lists of IP addresses of visitors. Nothing sinister going on there. Nothing on the web is secret anyway.