Where do users commonly get their pirated e-books from? NYTimes columnist Randall Stross asked himself the question and so he hired an antipiracy organization from California to do a search on how many e-book copies of Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" were available free on the Web. They came up with 166 copies on 11 different sites; 102 of the copies were located at Rapidshare.
In case you don't know, Rapidshare is a hugly popular one-click hoster with headquarters in Switzerland, claiming to have storage capacity of several petabytes.
The Association of American Publishers agrees with the findings that Rapidshare is the big daddy for illegally sharing e-book content.
Quote:
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"As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material," Mr. McCoyd [executive director at AAP] said. "Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it."
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And Rapidshare's response? A spokeswoman said that her company wasn't responsible for content uploaded by its users, and that it's the publishers' responsibility to send take-down requests, requiring a link to each individual download address ("it's left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers").
Rapidshare's advice to the publishers: to "give away most of their content for free" (as the popular rock group Nine Inch Nails did).
Read the full article:
Will Books Be Napsterized? (registration required)
Thanks to Tim for the hint!