Bill Gates, I understand how you feel when someone makes a copy of your software and doesn’t pay the license fee. United States music industry, I feel your pain when someone rips a CD and then gives a copy of the music to a friend. Like you, I have had my intellectual properties pirated.
This morning I was notified by Google Alerts of my book “Miss Sarah’s Secret: A Story Of Betrayal And Redemption In Texas” By Jimmie Aaron Kepler being available for free download as ab ePub, eBook, mobi, Kindle, and PDF file. That’s news to me. I am not currently giving it away. Someone posted the book for free on a dark web Internet website. My initial research shows the server location is somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Over 116,101 people have downloaded it. I normally make $2.25 royalties on each electronic copy of the book sold, that’s $261,227.25 in royalties if each thief had legally purchased the book.
My science fiction book “The Rebuilder ” was pirated earlier this year. It has had over 111,000 downloads. The theft of that intellectual property has cost me $249,750.00. The two books piracy has cost me about $510,997.75.
I know that many people wouldn’t have paid to get the book but only downloaded because someone was giving my work away for free, but some of them would have bought it. In simple terms, I have been robbed.
