I thought I'd try starting a thread for anyone interested in discussing whether this can "work" - why - what it would actually mean for it to work - etc.
No need to moralise over the evils of piracy, the evils of using of the word "theft" to describe copyright violation, or the virtue of self-publishing over the use of middle-men. Use whatever words you prefer. No need to argue over de-rails; ignore them and they'll go away. (Literally; there's always the "add user to your ignore list" button).
IMO, it's not a bad idea per se. Get two-click downloads off the front page of Google, and re-assure authors who're worried about that. Let people who feel strongly feel they're doing
something.
What worries me is that
a) Using Muso is not necessarily a
good idea. E-Read's blog tends more towards the moralizing. Maybe E-reads are doing the right thing, but it's not clear that they'd really be able to evaluate their success or otherwise (apart from the feel-good factor). Are they over-selling it to authors? Hell, are they over-selling it to themselves? Are E-Read's paying the full $15/month/author for what seems nothing more than a set of keywords, Google Alerts, a database of publicly available email addresses, and a DMCA form letter?
b) At least two people have balked at "we identified some 3500 illegally shared files of titles by our authors and ordered them removed. It took me 45 minutes". The implication is that they're checking files at over one per second. For a process where a "false positive" leaves them committing the crime of perjury, they should be checking each file manually - are they respecting that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
For readers of the E-reads blog, there's never been any doubt how agent and E-reads founder Richard Curtis feels about ebook pirates. He doesn't like them. Now he's announced an initiative on behalf of E-reads authors and Curtis agency clients to use a third party security service, Muso TNT, to scan [...] for pirated books and issue batch DMCA takedown notices. |
http://ereads.com/2011/08/curtis-age...e-pirates.html