E-reads and Curtis Agency Declare War on Piracy

[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 the darknet for pirated books and issue batch DMCA takedown notices. Here's the announcement:

http://ereads.com/2011/08/curtis-age...e-pirates.html

How Muso TNT Works.

Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine “spiders” to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.

Lawful Takedowns

The author, publisher or agent may view the files to confirm that they are not authorized. Then the user clicks authorization for Muso to issue, to fileshare site administrators, batch takedown emails that are preformatted to adhere to Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice and takedown procedures. Within hours the files are taken down automatically.

They've already begun issuing notices on behalf of clients.

We recently tested the program. “The results exceeded our wildest dreams,” says technical director Anthony Damasco. “On Friday afternoon we identified some 3500 illegally shared files of titles by our authors and ordered them removed. It took me 45 minutes. By Monday just about every one of them had been taken down.”

The service is also available, for a fee, to non-clients.

This will be an interesting story to watch.

[JeremyR]

Do they even need to do that? A lot of times google turns them up just doing a search for the book in question - not looking for the pirated version, but just more info about it.

[molman]

I hate how the DMCA is take down upon complaint and then prove if legal or not. It's so backwards.

If these are legit pirated ebooks I have no issue with it, but considering most (pirated ebooks) are probably hosted on offshore servers that the DMCA has no jurisdiction over I feel it really is a fools errand in many ways. Add in Torrents and it becomes cat and mouse. Additionally it's rather cloudy if you loose a sale to piracy or potentially gain a customer for the future (lots of pirates = highest buyers of content reports that keep popping up).

[Sil_liS]

How Muso TNT Works.

Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine “spiders” to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.

Sounds like a virus.

[molman]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Sounds like a virus.

I hope it is a little more sophisticated than that clip presents - just a simple parser of files by author name. I'd hope for some proper digital fingerprinting before they shoot out hundreds of DCMA notices.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by molman

I hope it is a little more sophisticated than that clip presents - just a simple parser of files by author name. I'd hope for some proper digital fingerprinting before they shoot out hundreds of DCMA notices.

"The author, publisher or agent may view the files to confirm that they are not authorized. Then the user clicks authorization for Muso to issue, to fileshare site administrators, batch takedown emails"

The person issuing the authorisation has a legal obligation to check that the indicated files do indeed violate copyrights that they own or administer. Unfortunately, AFAIK no-one's yet been prosecuted for perjuring themselves in a take-down notice, but that possibility certainly does exist.

[Barty]

So they send the author a ton of links. The author gets to go download them to check if they're for real. That sounds like fun.

What actually happens: author gets a long list, looks through a few, then says yep that looks like my book, company sends out mass DMCA notices, a few innocent sites get snared, bad PR ensues.

[DiapDealer]

Lead.
Balloon.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by charleski

"The author, publisher or agent may view the files to confirm that they are not authorized. Then the user clicks authorization for Muso to issue, to fileshare site administrators, batch takedown emails"

The person issuing the authorisation has a legal obligation to check that the indicated files do indeed violate copyrights that they own or administer. Unfortunately, AFAIK no-one's yet been prosecuted for perjuring themselves in a take-down notice, but that possibility certainly does exist.

SFWA was sued over bad takedowns and settled out of court. I have no idea what the settlement was.

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by molman

... Additionally it's rather cloudy if you loose a sale to piracy or potentially gain a customer for the future (lots of pirates = highest buyers of content reports that keep popping up).

Yeah, I expect their sales in the long run will suffer significantly because of this. Pretty misguided in my opinion.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by gweeks

SFWA was sued over bad takedowns and settled out of court. I have no idea what the settlement was.

Prosecution is not the same as a law suit. Law suits are civil, prosecution is a criminal matter. If you submit a false DMCA takedown request, that's perjury, which is a criminal matter. In the DMCA, there are criminal sanctions for false requests, and does label such behavior as perjury.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Barty

So they send the author a ton of links. The author gets to go download them to check if they're for real. That sounds like fun.

What actually happens: author gets a long list, looks through a few, then says yep that looks like my book, company sends out mass DMCA notices, a few innocent sites get snared, bad PR ensues.

I've yet to see anyone who takes an anti-piracy stance get anything but bad publicity, regardless of whether they make mistakes or not. For what little (or any) benefit you would get from removing unauthorised copies it's just not worth it.

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Lead.
Balloon.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I've yet to see anyone who takes an anti-piracy stance get anything but bad publicity, regardless of whether they make mistakes or not. For what little (or any) benefit you would get from removing unauthorised copies it's just not worth it.

I've yet to see any company take this kind of anti-piracy stance and not screw it up royally at every turn. When SFWA did this, they were sending DMCA notices for works that they did not have any legal right to represent the owners of. It simply cannot be automated, and the gain to be had isn't worth the time it takes to do it right. This will turn out the same way, and the more the authors are involved, the more they'll be tarred with the same brush.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Prosecution is not the same as a law suit. Law suits are civil, prosecution is a criminal matter. If you submit a false DMCA takedown request, that's perjury, which is a criminal matter. In the DMCA, there are criminal sanctions for false requests, and does label such behavior as perjury.

Sure, which is why I said they were sued. I don't think it's ever been held as perjury even though that's what the law says it is.