Are Your e-Books Being Pirated?

I have a client who recently did a Google search for several of her e-Book titles and was sickened to find out that there are sites are giving away one of her books for free. She has a clear copyright on the e-Book version as well as the softback versions which are sold through Amazon.

She sent an email to SiteProNews (one of my favorite newsletters!) and got this response:

We suggest the following steps:

In the event of copyright violation, we advise authors to exercise their rights under the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 by taking the following steps:

1. Contact the offending party directly asking them to rectify the copyright violation.
2. If the above fails, contact the ISP that hosts the offending website and the domain registrar that holds the registration for the website domain.
3. Most Domain Registrars and ISPs will respond to a copyright enforcement request by warning or suspending the offending party. If they fail to do so, have a lawyer make the same request in writing. This last action rarely fails to produce results.

Information for the domain registrar and hosting service can generally be obtained by doing a lookup using any WhoIs service such as:

http://www.whois.net
http://www.networksolutions.com

If you have had this happen to you and have any advice, I would love to hear from you.