it probably took longer to sculpt this dragon than it did for “ice man” to put together his stolen ebook full of stolen info. He stole this photo for the ebook’s cover.
updated 9/4/23: gave it some formatting, changed the weird second person perspective through most of it, and added the missing cover pic. Also did some seo.
stolen ebook: stealing content on the web
a surprising discovery
Imagine if you will, you’re checking out stuff on Amazon.com and you decide to see what kind of ebooks there are about ice sculpting. A couple pop up and one of them features one of YOUR photos as the thumbnail artwork. Confused for a second perhaps, you wonder how could that happen? That particular photo is definitely yours; you spent a long time working on that ice sculpture and almost as long trying to get the perfect photo. (See the blue dragon above? That’s the “cover” of what I soon realized was a completely stolen ebook!)
Once I kind of understood what was happening, I got a bit angry and immediately clicked on the product link to see what’s going on! Turns out, the ebook in question was written by “ice man” and Mr. Man had stolen my photo for his cover art.
But it got worse. Of course, Amazon lets you see a little bit about a book to entice you to buy it. And the table of contents for this ebook, “How to carve Ice Sculptures,” looked very suspicious; many of the chapters had familiar titles. Delving deeper, I found in the sample preview that the text was a near duplicate of an article that I’d written a while back and posted on my website!
Now, the worst part. In order to quickly find out how bad the situation was, I had to fork over $9.99. And when I did, I got that sick feeling that you get when you can’t find your car in the parking lot or you come home to find the lock on your door broken.
Yeah, most of the ebook was my writing, only it’d been twisted and screwed up, in many cases to the point that it didn’t make sense any more. In short, weeks and even months of writing were stolen from me and republished. The stuff that I’d written and shared freely, somebody had stolen and was now trying to profit from it. Not a great feeling.
what next to stop this stolen ebook?
What next? Hire a lawyer? Sue the guy? (Can’t really start by looking for “ice man” in the phone book.) Sue Amazon? I looked into a copyright infringement lawyer and that could be promising. But then I googled “Amazon” and “ebook” and “plagiarism” and I found out that it may not be a simple thing sometimes to get a huge company like Amazon to remove something from their catalog, even if it’s an obviously stolen ebook.
So without a clear path to follow, my angry determination faded a bit and I put my mission to crush “ice man” on the back burner.
but then google had a new surprise
A few days later though, I googled “carving ice” and what did I find? The stolen ebook came up nearly at the top of the page. Now this might be because Google is subjective. (Results are often affected by where you live and many other factors.) But it’s still there and it might be because the Amazon brand has a lot of pull. Now, it appeared that the stolen ebook was doing better on Google than your website, which had the original info!
This was too much! Thus galvanized, I decided on a course of action. Since I bought the ebook, I could write a review. Even better, I could get other people to write their own reviews, by bribing them or even just asking nicely. And, of course, instead of hiring a lawyer, I could follow the Amazon procedure for reporting copyright infringement.
my review of the stolen ebook
I maybe didn’t have time to screw around with this, but I couldn’t really think about much else, so I sent off the copyright infringement letter with all the required info and posted this review:
1.0 out of 5 stars
All I can say is “WOW!”,
November 14, 2011
By Dawson List
This review is from: How to carve Ice Sculptures (Kindle Edition)
This ebook is a steal at any price!
And when I say “steal,” I mean literally. As in stolen.
As a potential purchaser of this ebook, your first tip off that this may not be the best purchase is the author’s name: “ice man.” The “author” didn’t even want to put his own name on what he wrote, mainly because he didn’t write it. But he’s happy to collect his share of your $9.99, should you unwisely decide to part with it.
How do I know that he stole what’s written here? Because I wrote much of the original text in this book. Ok, well not exactly. What I wrote has been somehow twisted into a nearly incomprehensible mish-mashed mess, probably either because it was run back and forth through a translator or because it was poorly spun (Spinning is a way to put a new twist on existing text, making it similar, but not identical to the original.)
Much of the book’s content consists of bizarre versions of articles and entries from my ice sculpting resources and instruction website, ice carving secrets. Here’s an example. In an article about using handtrucks to move ice blocks and ice sculptures around (a gripping read, believe me!), I wrote:
“However, if something does go wrong while you’re moving a sculpture or block with a handtruck, it can easily mean the end of whatever you’re moving. Over the last nineteen years, I’ve lost a few blocks and even a couple of sculptures while moving them with a handtruck.”
Compare to what “ice man” wrote:
“However, if something goes wrong while you move a sculpture or a block with a devil, it can easily mean the end of everything you are moving. Over the past nineteen years, I lost a few blocks and even a couple of sculptures while moving them with a devil.”
Where did the devil come from?!! This is only one of many, many weird distortions of the original text. For me, except for the part where he stole what I wrote and is trying to sell it, it’s actually kind of funny. For you though, as the person presumably looking for valuable and useful information about the art of sculpting ice, it’s probably not so funny.
Rather than limiting himself to just stealing text from my articles, he also stole some photos from my website. In some of them, I’m even in the photo! The dragon ice sculpture on the cover is straight from my website also. (Amazon won’t allow me to post the gallery address; I tried already.) I carved it because it’s related to the name of my ice sculpting business.
And ice man didn’t steal just from me. He also stole some photos from other ice carvers, grabbed some text from Wikipedia, and apparently tries to pass off some fairly technical info about snow melting chemicals as a description of the “Composition of Ice.” Honestly, there’s more, but I haven’t had the time or inclination to figure out all the places that he stole stuff from. I just hope you’ll understand that nothing in the ebook is remotely useful, not after he got a hold of it.
I bought this ebook and now you don’t have to. Don’t waste your money supporting the theft of intellectual property, especially now that it’s been mangled so badly. I would imagine that ice man has done this a number of times under different names. I looked into hiring a lawyer, but it’s pretty clear that I’ll never find out who he is.
So, my realistic recourses are to write this review and to contact Amazon about copyright infringement, which of course I’m doing. I don’t hold out much hope that Amazon moves swiftly to address these issues, especially since eliminating titles from their catalog costs them money. So this ebook might be here for some time…
If you want to find actual information about the art of sculpting ice, you can look for the original info on ice carving secrets (external URLs aren’t allowed in reviews.) All of the ice carving info on my websites (except for a couple of sculpture design ebooks) is free. Thanks for taking the time to read my review and I hope I’m not too late to save you $10.
help from some friends
After I posted my review, I asked for some help with additional reviews. My friends Jim Ottens, Jeff Kaiser, Ron Meyn, Ed Fraze, and Andrea Latham all stepped up and wrote appropriately nasty reviews and rated the stolen ebook a 1 star. (Thanks for that!) Things were going well! So I settled down a bit to wait, thinking that Amazon would take their time, even though I’d succeeded in making maybe a tiny ruckus.
I do wish that I’d saved my friends reviews. I can only recall that they were funny, especially since they were written on my behalf 🤣
amazon responds
Was I very surprised when Amazon responds within 24 hours, not just to say that they got your email but that they’re pulling the stolen ebook? Yeah, pretty much. This is what they wrote:
Dear Mr. List:
Thank you for your message. Please be advised that we are in the process of removing the following Kindle titles from Amazon.com:
“How to carve Ice Sculptures” [Kindle Edition]
It typically takes 2-3 days for a listing to disappear once it has been removed from our catalog. We trust this will bring this matter to a close.
Copyright/Trademark Guy’s name
Copyright/Trademark Agent
Amazon.com
And just as promised, within a couple of days, I couldn’t find the stolen ebook on Amazon any more. It turns out that Amazon can move REALLY fast in some cases. My faith in Amazon was pretty much restored (briefly 😬) and I was actually pretty impressed.
Ok, so that’s not much of a saga. It’s really a relatively quick response by a company that’s trying to do the right thing when it realizes that somebody’s been doing the wrong thing under their umbrella.
But the saga isn’t quite over yet…
Amazon, I want my $9.99 back!
links and stuff
Since I’ve also written my own ebooks, you’ll find my stolen ebook story referenced on my ebook page. I’m hoping that this will be the only time this happens, especially with the restored site, but I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m also a bit concerned about how AI is going to play into things like this. We shall see.
You could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. You can comment there. I’d recommend commenting there if you’d like since it might be a while before I can fix the comments on older posts.
