A New York man pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., to criminal copyright infringement for selling more than $250,000 worth of pirated copies of popular business, engineering and graphic design software programs.

Richard Humphrey, 22, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, was sentenced today in Cleveland to 29 months in prison by U.S. District Court Judge Lesley Wells for selling counterfeit copies of copyrighted movies through the Internet.

Robert Cimino, 60, of Syracuse, N.Y., was sentenced to 18 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga in the Eastern District of Virginia for his sales of more than $250,000 worth of pirated software.

Todd Alan Cook, 24, of Wichita Falls, Texas, was sentenced today to 18 months in prison by U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III for selling more than $1 million worth of pirated computer software through the Internet, in violation of criminal copyright infringement laws.

Richard Franco Montejano, 29, of Harbor City, Calif., pleaded guilty today to conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division.

The department said that this is the first time website domains involving cell phone app marketplaces have been seized.

We want to extend National Talk Like A Pirate Day just a few more days, especially since it is helping to spread the word about clean sailing and boating. The Sierra Club has put together a fun set of questions to not only get you in the

The Danby Parcel Guard reduces the waste of stolen packages and multiple deliveries.

Inspirate a Dar

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I've gotten several alerts over the past week about a pirate site that's new to me (though not new: this warning was first published in September 2017): Kiss Library, where many authors are finding unauthorized electronic versions of their books.

Kiss Library differs from the typical pirate site in a couple of ways. Unlike, say, Ebook Bike, run by serial copyright thief and "information wants to be free" ideologue Travis McCrea, it doesn't simply offer pirated books for free download, but appears actually to be selling them. Also unlike Ebook Bike and other pirate sites, it seems to promptly respond to DMCA notices.

I found two of my own books listed.

I filled out the form on Kiss's DMCA page, and within minutes my books vanished from the site. I also received this email:

Awwww. How nice. They're contrite! It's not their fault! They'll pay back the illicit profits! They are so transparent about the whole thing!

Except...it's bullshit. They send the exact same response to everyone. Here's someone who got it in July:


A friend of mine got it in March. Someone else got it in 2018. Kiss seems to have concluded that it's better to lose a few listings (which can always be reinstated later) than to make waves by ignoring authors or telling them to f*ck off. It's a different strategy from the "fight everything" stance of many pirates, or those that send takedown notices into oblivion--and it's probably why Kiss, with its huge, monetized catalog of pirated books, hasn't sparked the uproar other pirate sites have.

It's been suggested that Kiss doesn't actually take down disputed books: it simply blocks the IP addresses of anyone who sends a DMCA request so they can't see that the books are still on offer. I've no idea if this is true.

Also, there's the question of whether Kiss really offers the books at all--whether it's nothing more than an elaborate phishing scheme that uses books as bait. I followed purchase links all the way to the point of providing credit card info, but I didn't dare do more. This anti-piracy service, however, did:

An interesting fact is that they actually don't even have the books they are selling! The catalog is automatically generated from indexing Amazon author pages.
We know this because we tried to buy a clients ebook out of curiosity..

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 8, 2019

Exactly! This why we tried to purchase one of our authors eBooks to see if they could deliver the content.
We never received anything. -Eric

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 8, 2019

So if you visit the site, be careful. Send the DMCA if you find your books, but don't try to test the system by buying anything.

Kiss's About page features a photo of smiling millennials and a Canada address. Kiss originally had a .com domain, registered in 2017 by a Gibraltar-based registrar that was shut down by ICANN this past March. Its current .net domain, which is just 6 months old, is registered to Legato LLC, a Russian company. Make of that what you will.

UPDATE: An update from the anti-piracy service:

Hi Victoria, sorry for the late reply. I wanted to ask the dev and legal dpt. regarding this. The website didn't seem to be hosting any phishing or malware. Its just an elaborate scheme profiting from pirated content. We also used a dummy PayPal account for this testing. -Eric

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 9, 2019

So maybe there's no content on the site--just book covers--and all they're doing is taking the money and running.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Per this Facebook post from Tamara Thorne, the Authors Guild is aware of Kiss Library and is preparing a statement on the status of the matter and steps they are taking. I'll link to or post it here when it's released.

UPDATE 8/10/19: Well, that didn't take long. Thanks to an alert commenter, I visited Kiss Library this evening and found this:


Not only have they reinstated the two books I DMCA'd (with different covers; they're both backlist books that I re-published with Open Road Media), they've added my two other Open Road backlist books, and a pair of fake books put up by a Writer Beware-hating troll a few years ago as part of a harassment campaign. Think the Kiss Library folks know about this post?

UPDATE 8/11/19: Oops, gone again (except for the two fake books that use my name). Someone is following Writer Beware!

Shameless opportunists are buying up supplies of personal protective equipment and hiking prices by as much as 10,000 times, a Mail investigation has found. 

Amanda Large, from Downpatrick, met ghost Jack Teague and within two years had sailed into international waters to wed him at sea using a spiritual medium.

Due to recent 'revelations' made in the court case between Depp and ex wife Amber Heard, Disney executive have allegedly been 'lobbying' for the 56-year-old actor's return.

The actress, 32, was seen sporting her trademark curls and corseted dress as she returned to her beloved character in the new promo clip for Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Keira Knightley is laughing all the way to the bank. The 33-year-old actress has amassed £15.7 million in her personal businesses, according to accounts published by Companies House

Shameless opportunists are buying up supplies of personal protective equipment and hiking prices by as much as 10,000 times, a Mail investigation has found. 

When your dad dresses up like a swashbuckling pirate and dances his heart out on stage, it moves you to your feet yourself.

A permanent solution should be sought to defend ships and their crew who, refusing to be party to unscrupulous trade, end up being eliminated, with their deaths portrayed as suicides, writes Shabeena Zaheer who lost her son.

A disgruntled pirate’s haunted history lingers in the town where his shipmates met the hangman. Carson Hudson and Willie Balderson team up for “Pirates Amongst Us.”

Producer/Editor: Annaliza Savage Camera: Somali Pirates

Dewey Library - K1420.5.M44 2018