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Saturday, January 29, 2011

Plagiarism Update

In the interests of keeping this legal and visible, I present the following:

Noticed the following item for sale thru your site:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Unearthing-ebook/dp/B004JF4NUK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AZC9TZ4UC9CFC&s=digital-text&qid=1296328931&sr=8-1

It is in fact a total plagiarism of this item, also for sale thru your site, these last 4 & 1/2 years:

http://www.amazon.com/Unearthing-Steve-Karmazenuk/dp/1424131642/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296328978&sr=8-1-spell

In short, Peter Michelsen is selling a kindle version of what is in fact my novel, The Unearthing. I am the sole owner of the electronic rights of The Unearthing. While it is published physically through Publish America, my contract specifies ownership of the electronic rights. This Kindle eBook Mr Michelsen is selling is in fact a verbatim copy of my book, which he claims as his own, down to the last typo.

I have never authorised Mr Michelsen, nor anyone else, to sell this work or to sell it on my behalf. I have no agreement with Mr Michelsen, nor have I ever had any contact with him or anyone representing him. I have not been remunerated for any sales of this work.

I hereby declare under penalty of perjury, that the above information is accurate and that I am the sole copyright owner for The Unearthing.

3 comments:

Eon said...

Is he doing it to other writers as well?

Steve Karmazenuk said...

Yep, he is...this also isn't the first time I've seen this sort of scam. I'm fairly sure that it's some sort of aggregator that is filching ebooks and then reselling them on behalf of some sort of fraudster.

John Hoggard said...

Steve,

"we" (i.e. Indie authors who have had their work stolen by Peter Michelsen) would join us here:

http://wagar.org.uk/website/?page_id=1337

The more of us looking out for each other and complaining to Amazon about their slack approach to the validation of authorship/copyright the better.

Good luck getting your work pulled from Amazon.