You can quote a SMALL portion of the work, with attribution, when writing non-fiction (especially if it’s educational or critical, and not for your personal profit). That’s fine. But people will quibble, then, over “how much is acceptable,” and it varies, right? Like, five syllables is one third of a Haiku poem — not cool. But a paragraph from a book, properly credited and cited? You don’t need permission for that.

Here’s the other thing — not sure if you remember, but one of my short stories was stolen and published on NINE gay porn sites, years ago. I’m not a prude; my objection was not “gay porn site,” but the story was a spooky scary Halloween story about young teenaged boys. That was enough to put me on the all-out warpath. I wanted that taken down, and I wanted their sites wiped off the planet. That was my first run-in with an EIG hosting company. They made me jump through completely unnecessary hoops in order to send them a DMCA take-down notice. Eventually, they did remove the infringing material. (That was Bluehost, by the way. And that incident is the one that took them off my list of potential hosting companies for life.)

As for who to go after and who not to — it doesn’t matter. They multiply. If you ignore one, 100 pop up to take their place. You may not find them all; but when you find one, go after them. It may make others think twice about their poor life choices.

How do you decide which bank robbers to go after?