Allen Say’s Warrior Forum is being savaged across the World Wide Webbies as well as the main stream media and there’s little he can do about it.
For the past few years this blog, Warrior Forum Sucks, has led the charge in exposing the scams, lies, corruption, fraud and censorship found daily on the Warrior Forum. I have been diligent in my quest to help regular folks avoid falling victim to the chicanery found there.
Now an even larger audience has discovered just how dangerous the Warrior Forum can be. National Public Radio did a story on plagiarism and piracy that had its roots in another Warrior Forum scam.
Also, FastCompany.com’s Adam Penenberg penned two excellent articles about this latest Warrior Forum PLR, plagiarism and piracy fraud.
Unmasking A Digital Pirate On Amazon…
NPR and FastCompany revealed piracy and plagiarism in the erotica genre but this Warrior Forum scam applies to almost all publishing niches. For example Gennie Gratto of BlogHer.com exposed how this nefarious technique has been used to steal money from genuine recipe book authors.
Prominent Food Blogger Discovers Plagiarized Ebook…
Here’s how it worked. Warrior Forum members would offer WSOs on how to become a successful Amazon/Kindle publisher without doing any of the heavy lifting stuff like, say….actual writing!
The scammers scrape real content off the web, sometimes make minor changes (often not), then group it into a PLR pack to be published as original works!
This outright theft and copyright infringement was heavily promoted on the Warrior Forum. Allen Says made money by selling ads and WSO offers to these thieves. He has no shame.
Granted there are legitimate PLR packages. PLR is short for ‘Private Label Rights’ and some ethical marketers/writers create original content then sell the right for others to publish this material.
However, as Gennie Gratto pointed out, “Though ebooks created through the PLR process might not be plagiarism or illegal, it occurs to me that their proliferation junks up the system and makes it that much harder to find the true rip-offs.”
How blatant is the plagiarism offered by these Warrior Forum hucksters? Adam Penenberg revealed an actual author’s research:
“Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.”
Chris Meadows from TeleRead.com explained:
“Nevertheless, Warrior Forum continues to be awash in copyright infringement come-ons. “If you go to the warriorforum and ask around, there are hundreds of people offering to sell you books with publishing rights,” Luke says. Check out this ad, posted in its special offers group, for “The Kindle Secret: Want to Create Kindle Books in 15 Minutes or less?” The person behind it hawks a guide for $17 that explains how he’s “dominating” one “hidden Kindle niche.” He claims to be “outsourcing books” for “$20 a pop (can you get a whole Kindle book created for $20?) and selling them on the Kindle for $2.99 each,” promising that his books “require no marketing and still sell like crazy,” with each title earning between $40 and $300 a month. “I don’t write a thing,” he brags. He just creates the covers, uploads the content then moves on to the next book. “This is completely scalable. Want to go big? Create 100 books for $2,000 and you’ll have major passive income set up for you in just a couple of weeks.”
Here’s a Warrior Forum member who calls himself Khaliff defending this despicable Warrior Forum scam on one of the many threads promoting this activity:
“I truly don’t understand the nature of your concerns. A recipe is basically an IDEA. You can’t “copyright” an IDEA. I suggest reading the recipes then rewriting them. Period! It’s that simple. Just don’t be guilty of cutting and pasting the verbiage that’s on the recipe.”
Then this Bozo actually continues with his mind boggling ‘recipe’ for plagiarism and piracy:
“EXAMPLE: (Original Recipe taken from Vons.com)
Ingredients
1 tablespoon O Organics(TM) Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
6 cups O Organics Chicken Broth
1 (28 ounce) can O Organics Diced Tomatoes
1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Kidney Beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Black Beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Organic Pinto Beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup O Organics Sour Cream
1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro
Directions
Heat oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add garlic and crushed red pepper; saute 30 seconds.
Add broth and next 4 ingredients. Cover and cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Ladle soup into bowls. Garnish with sour cream and cilantro, if desired.
Nutrition per serving
Calories 254
Total Fat 6 g
Cholesterol 10 mg
Sodium 1916 mg
Total Carbohydrates 36 g
Dietary Fiber 13 g
MY MODIFIED VERSION OF SAME RECIPE –
Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon O Organics(TM) Extra Virgin Olive Oil
6 cups O Organics Chicken Broth
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
6 cups O Organics Chicken Broth
A) 1 (28 ounce) can O Organics Diced Tomatoes
B) 1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Kidney Beans, rinsed and drained
C) 1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Black Beans, rinsed and drained
D) 1 (15 ounce) can O Organics Organic Pinto Beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup O Organics Sour Cream
1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro
Directions
The first thing you should do is Heat the oil in a large oven over medium to high heat. Add crushed red pepper and garlic; then saute it 30 for seconds.
Add broth and items A) thru D). Cover it and then cook 10 minutes. Stir occasionally making sure nothing sticks to the bottom
When finished, soup should now have a smooth consistency. Ladle the soup into bowls. If desired you can Garnish with sour cream and cilantro or some other topping of your choosing.
=====
You see? This is the same recipe but it doesn’t matter WHO created the original version or WHERE you found it at …you would NOT be guilty of ANY copyright infringement. MY modification is mine alone. Copyright is not like trademarks which are much more controlling. You only own the copyright to YOUR own words …not to your IDEA.
You could basically RE-WRITE somebody else’s book, as long as you use YOUR original words and style to do so. The exception would be when their is some sort of breach of confidence …or trust, such as when you expose or pitch your idea to use your personal story for a new film or TV show, they tell you that they are not interested and then take YOUR idea and YOUR story and create the film or TV show. THAT would be a problem because YOUR idea and your story is NOT in the public domain. You tell the same story to a newspaper, now it’s in the public domain and they CAN make a film about it without ANY compensation to you. “
Can you believe that? In the thread some Warrior Forum members ridiculed this idiot, but too many others swallow this nonsense as gospel.
Since the Warrior Forum has been disgraced in the national news some WF members have been banned and some threads on this topic deleted, but not all. There are still WSO offers, ads and Warrior Forum members pushing variations of this piracy fraud.
Allen Says and the Warrior Forum have taken a pounding for promoting this theft. However, in the midst of all the bad press one marketer has (in a roundabout way) defended Allen Says.
Remember when I mentioned above that legitimate PLR offers do exist? Well one honest and ethical IM, Tiffany Dow does offer valuable PLR packages. She recently wrote of paying Allen Says @$2500 a year.
Some might question the timing of Tiffany’s WSO/Allen Says article (after the recent world wide Warrior Forum criticism) but she does outline exactly how to properly invest in a WSO ad.
To me Tiffany Dow’s relationship with the Warrior Forum is like an honest Snapple Drink vending machine owner who places her coin-op machine in the Star Wars Bar. The establishment is rife with pirates, thieves, con men, scam artists and lowlifes but that vending machine keeps offering a great product for a fair price. Tiffany Dow is the Warrior Forum Snapple Girl.
Read her article. If all Warrior Forum members followed her example, I’d be out of work.
