Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I would venture to say that a significant portion of those illegally downloading books don't know what a torrent is.
There is no illegality where law enforcement gets anywhere near 100 percent enforcement coverage.
In real life, I'm sure most antitrust violators do get away with it, so long as they price within a range rather than all the same. Suppose I was to tell you that antitrust enforcement is worthless, because all conspirators have to do is meet privately and avoid discussing sensitive subjects in emails, and to burn anything in writing. Would you buy that? Then why should I buy that only torrents matter?
This illustrates one of several subtle advantages book publishers have over the music industry when it comes to reducing piracy. I realize there are ways to make book files not byte compatible. But there also are thoughtless perpetrators -- who imagine they are being helpful to readers -- who will upload exactly what they downloaded. That can and should be reduced.
That was a guess as to what is being done. I'm sure you could catch some perpetrators that way. I thought of it, so others smarter than me have as well. I'm also guessing that none of the law enforcement methods are what you call efficient.
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I'm going to have to agree with eschwartz on this one. For the most part, people who are actively pirating books, i.e. not the people who buy an ebook on Amazon thinking it's legit, are a very small group of people who use bit torrent and other technologies. Frequently, they are based in countries with little interest in actively prosecuting copyright violations.
Really, we are talking two very different situations. The first situation is people who post copyrighted material in legit ebook stores either looking to make a buck or because they don't respect copyright law. This situation can be handled by giving the ebook stores an easy method of validating the right of the person to post that material. Ultimately, the solution is that the copyright holder takes the poster to court for copyright violations.
The second is so called pirate sites, which use a variety of methods and tend to be frequented by a small group of people. While this group does get copyright holders panties in a wad, it's almost impossible to block since they quickly shift technologies and sites, and ultimately does minimum harm to copyright holders since it really doesn't represent any lost sales. That is to say, few people who knowingly use pirate sites would buy the material.