Is it worth taking down pirate ebooks from the public web?

[sourcejedi]

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?

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

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by sourcejedi

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?

It's the authors that do the manual checking. The software identifies the files, but they need the author's permission as the copyright owner to send the takedown notice.

But still, the action in itself is pointless.

[ATDrake]

I think it's going to be a lot of money spent on something that'll have minimal impact on actual distribution and perhaps end up causing ill-will like the various *AA file-sharing lawsuits over the years or the old Napster/Metallica situation if they get too sloppily enthusiastic with the takedown notices.

People have grown to really hate the use of the DMCA as a pre-emptive scare/strike tactic because it's been abused over the years for some inanely nonsensical stuff where the supposed rights-holder was throwing around their weight to suppress fair use stuff*.

Also, those listings will grow back like mushrooms in your front yard. Take a few down, in a couple of weeks more will sprout, and unless they start to engage in those sloppily enthusiastic tactics where they send down automatic takedowns to everything which mentions their names/book titles, then the authors will have go back and manually check another batch of links/send permission for the notices again and again in a never-ending battle.

It seems more of a feel-good band-aid thing for the publisher/authors.

But if it really does make them feel better and they think it's worth spending the money on, then I suppose there are worse things they could be spending the money on (though I'd personally put that $15 per author per month into growing the company or paying out a higher author royalty to attract more authors or something).

* Vide the current MightyGodKing comics blog, which IIRC had its origins in a takedown notice over an Archie parody creation/discussion community over at LiveJournal which the Archie people complained about with the pre-emptive DMCA strike option.

This led to MGK, who was simply the moderator for the group, having his personal LiveJournal and other unrelated moderated communities suspended as well as being banned from LJ for no better reason than that the Archie people didn't like fair use parodies of their work.

[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

It's the authors that do the manual checking.

That's not what I understood.

The author, publisher or agent may view the files to confirm that they are not authorized. Then the user clicks authorization

Legally, I don't believe they need any additional permission from the author, beyond the publishing contract

A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

So I think your nit-picking may be wrong in this case. If you're thinking of Rowena, the author in the article comments who referred to the Muso dashboard - I don't think she publishes through E-Reads.

But still, the action in itself is pointless.

I'm coming round to that opinion. At least, that it's unlikely to demonstrate a return on the time & money put into it.

[mr ploppy]

Wherever there is fear there will be companies taking advantage of that fear to fleece people out of money in return for bogus services. They are only targetting cyberlockers, which are just a tiny percentage of the overall filesharing "community" (for want of a better expression). Downloads from those sources, even for popular/well known books never reach triple figures, most are lucky to reach 20.

People have always had ways of getting free reads, but the world still spun and people still bought new books, with lots of those buyers first discovering their favourite writer from one of those free reads.

Me, I'd rather become someone's favourite writer some time than pay someone to make sure that never happens. But if for some reason you want to remain obscure, save yourself $15 a month and set up a free Google alert for your name (or name of your book if you didn't choose a name with no other Google hits). That won't just get you the copies on cyberlockers, it will get you the copies everywhere else too.

Just don't go looking at how few people download them though, that just gets depressing.

[crich70]

I think it's rather like bailing out the ocean with a coffee cup myself. Not that someone should upload pirate books but say one person loads a copy of Dracula onto the web via torrent or something. Say 100 people download it, and only half go on to seed it, and they each attract 100 people and so on. Before the author or publisher is even aware that the book is being pirated it's already too late to keep it from happening. Book publishers have always lost some $ on books. Besides people borrowing library books rather than buying a copy and buying used copies at used book stores there is also the idea of 'remainders.' Basically the publisher sends out say 100 copies of a book to a particular store, and only 45 say are bought. The store rips off the front covers of the unsold books and returns them to the publisher for credit. So technically even though 100 went out 55 copies came back to be pulped and their paper reused. Though I imagine not all of those copies made it back in some cases anyway because if you look inside many pbooks now there is usually a notice that if this book has no cover it is probably stolen since it was reported to the publisher as having been destroyed. The medium of transmission has changed and the # of copies that can be stolen has increased but it's a very old problem.

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by crich70

Not that someone should upload pirate books but say one person loads a copy of Dracula onto the web via torrent or something.

Bad choice of example since it's public domain.

[xg4bx]

i'm no computer expert but it seems to me that the entire system could be defeated by the uploader simply renaming the file or not using the name/title in the post. download mile 81 by stephen king becomes nothing more than a pic of the cover and a file named sk81 or random numbers.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

Bad choice of example since it's public domain.

I realize that it is public domain, and just meant it as an example off the top of my head. i.e. It was the first title that came to mine.lol.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i'm no computer expert but it seems to me that the entire system could be defeated by the uploader simply renaming the file or not using the name/title in the post. download mile 81 by stephen king becomes nothing more than a pic of the cover and a file named sk81 or random numbers.

Makes me think of Project Gutenberg's books. They're named pg#### usually but when I put them on my Kindle the actual title shows up.

[OtterBooks]

It's worth every penny.

-Joe Shlabadoo
Data Rights Consultant

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by sourcejedi

That's not what I understood.

Legally, I don't believe they need any additional permission from the author, beyond the publishing contract

I was looking at the same segment, and since it said: the used clicks authorization, I interpreted it as: they need authorization.

[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

download mile 81 by stephen king becomes nothing more than a pic of the cover and a file named sk81 or random numbers.

That's a great explanation. It'd still be a change... you wouldn't be able to find unauthorized uploads of specific midlist books on a whim; you'd have to be a bit more dedicated.

Uploaders wouldn't be able to rely on search engines pulling together files in disparate locations. They would have to put extra effort making (or conspiring with others to make) "catalog" pages.

Also, AIUI the basic "cyber-locker" sites currently only provide text descriptions + downloads. So the indexing sites would have to serve the cover images themselves. Cover images are themselves copyrighted, and potentially subject to takedown notices.

I suspect you'd see people shifting to torrents before that happened, where they could still search for specific titles.

[Zetmolm]

I'm quite prepared to spend a bit of money on insecticides to kill the ants that make it into my house. But do I expect to kill all the ants in the world? No, of course not.

I'm always surprised by the naivity of people who think they can 'kill' an illegal file just by removing a few copies.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i'm no computer expert but it seems to me that the entire system could be defeated by the uploader simply renaming the file or not using the name/title in the post. download mile 81 by stephen king becomes nothing more than a pic of the cover and a file named sk81 or random numbers.

If the books aren't named by title & author (in a description if not the filename, depending on where they're archived/listed), people can't find them to download. Theoretically, from the publishers' viewpoints, that's almost as effective as a takedown.

Of course, it doesn't prevent casual sharing among friends, and makes it hard to track--if someone's got a Wordpress blog with files called "JKR_HP1, JKR_HP2" that might be noticed, but "SK_PC," "SK_Ca," "SK_Ch," "SK_TS" and so on are a lot harder to figure out--and the companies offering this kind of service want script-based results; they're not offering to actually check for unauthorized copies that involve opening files to see what's inside them.

**ponders setting up an archive with public domain texts with filenames to match popular titles**