That is my name. If you Google it and then scroll down to the related searches, one thing you'll see is “dark ambition pdf”.Dark Ambition is a book I wrote. I'm a journalist and author. That's telling you where you can go to download my book for free.
PDF, then: go get my book for free, and I won't get any money. It's very popular. You can find that with almost every book nowadays.
On the day my book was published, a Facebook group devoted to discussing this murder posted pirated copies—PDFs, EPUBs—and encouraged everyone to go and get it, and they did. When I told them that what they were doing was illegal, they laughed at me.
When I reported it to my publisher, Penguin Random House, they didn't really care, because I'm a small author in Canada and they're Penguin Random House.
When I reported it to Facebook, it was like beating my head up against the wall. They did take the illegal copies of the book out of the Facebook group, but they didn't close it.
My point here is—I'm not a lawyer—that it's very expensive to sue for copyright. There's absolutely no disincentive now for copyright pirates. If I write an article about it, which I could do, I'm just spreading the word: “Hey, you can get free PDFs of my book and any author's works.”
I'm lucky, because someone saved a screen shot of them saying, “Hah, we have her book; let's distribute it for free.” I'm going to small claims court and I'm going to sue the people who did this, which is a tactic some authors and content creators have successfully used to be reimbursed, because there is no disincentive for the pirates and thieves who are stealing our intellectual property. The legal route is not an option: it costs too much to have a lawyer.
In the States, there have been talks about having a kind of small claims court for copyright and some sort of system that works for creators like me to recoup our money from the pirates. That's what I'd like to see thought about in Canada, as well as some sort of system to find out who is doing this.
I know you hear a lot of civil libertarians complain, but if people are downloading books, I think we should have some access to the IP addresses and be able to go after the individuals as well as the organizations.
That's what I want to say: how do people like me, who have no means now, get our money back?
Do something about the thieves.