Fred von Lohmann, a copyright expert in the San Francisco law offices of Morrison & Foerster, emphasizes that these authors do have legal recourse, should they choose to pursue it. "These stories are copyrighted expression, and the author who wrote it owns it," he says. He recommends amending a copyright notice, as many authors already do, to every work posted, specifying how it may and may not be used.

At one of the main archives of erotic stories online, the nonprofit Alt Sex Stories Text Repository appends a reminder to the end of every story that notes that even if a story does not a have copyright notice on it, it's still copyrighted "pursuant of the Berne Convention." Essentially, it's copyrighted by default. Rey del Sexo, who maintains the archives, says that the ASSTR, which relies on donations from the public for its existence, doesn't have the financial resources to take up the cause of robbed authors in court, but adds, "This is something that we aspire to be able to do at some point in the future."

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a writer can send a notice to a site's Web host, formally complaining about a rogue site that has nabbed his or her work. If the host fails to take down the post, the host can be held liable in court for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, according to von Lohmann.

Still, the copyright lawyer understands how unappealing such litigiousness may be to an anonymous erotica scribe: "If you're writing freelance for fun for no money, the last thing that you want to do is spend your time pretending to be a lawyer."

A small subgroup of writers sees such legal dickering as a futile attempt to apply pre-Net copyright law to the new medium. "Nick Urfe" has been known to roil the other habitués of alt.sex.stories.d with his unpopular views on the topic: "I don't believe in intellectual property, per se. On the Net, the whole point is to instantaneously create as many copies as possible and disseminate them as widely as possible ... Approaching Internet distribution with a rules set informed by paper publishing is a guarantee of ulcers and frustration," he says.

He regards his stories as gifts and sees the reposting and mutation of the stories as a part of the basic Net ecology: "I feel that if you do have a problem with other people posting your stuff, you probably ought to rethink whether publishing on the Internet is right for you."

Delta has struggled with whether publishing on the Net really is right for her. She took a hiatus from publishing online for several months after discovering stories that she'd posted for free being sold.

"MichaelD," an author of erotica who happens to be a lawyer when he's not writing stories like "Eve of the Bad Girls" and "Virginity Is Curable, Inquire Within," takes a laissez-faire attitude to his work's being reposted. He says that he can rely on the more vigilant members of the story-writing community to raise a stink in the case of a mass theft, but "frankly, I don't care that much," he says. "It's a sort of a backhanded compliment to have your stories stolen, since it means someone thinks they're worth stealing. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I think the only thing worse than having your stuff stolen is not having it stolen."

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