Internet Book Piracy Page 14
“Without the ability to earn a living from their work, authors will not have the incentive to create books in the first place. Moreover, publishers won’t be able to develop powerful content resources and educational tools that help to improve the academic and professional performance of the people who use them. Quality and readability would suffer, and distinguishing credible, quality information from that which is unreliable and untrustworthy would become a gargantuan task. If that happens, we all lose.”107
Then, after a long investigation to identify the site owners, a February 2012 international coalition of seventeen publishers, including John Wiley, began legal proceedings in Ireland and Germany against two site operators of two websites, library.nu and iFile.it. The industry considered the latter to be “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world,” as Jeff John Roberts noted in his posting, “Updated: Book Publishers Force Down Piracy Sites.”108 Library.nu itself offered over four hundred thousand copyrighted titles, and the site operators reportedly earned millions in advertising revenues. The result was that on February 13 a Munich judge granted injunctions against the illegal posting or sharing of these two websites. Among other things, library.nu was alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies since December 2010, and the majority of these uploads went through the iFile.it website. The ruling came after seven months of investigations by private investigators led by a German publishing association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the International Publishers Association.109
At the time, this joint action by publishers was considered unusual, since their usual response was to send a takedown notice from their lawyers ordering the website company to take down copyrighted material. But in this case, these two websites were doing more than hosting a small number of book files. Instead they were “allegedly hosting and providing links to illegal PDF files of more than 400,000 books,” which included some well-known authors, among them Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Franzen, and many expensive textbooks.110
What made investigating this case difficult is that the owners of Library.nu had used false names and addresses in registering its web domain names. To find them, the publishers’ lawyers hired private investigators with the help of an organization in Ireland—the Irish National Federation Against Copyright Theft (http://infact.ie)—since the registered addresses for the owners of both sites were based in Ireland. Initially, they couldn’t prove a link between the owners of both companies, but eventually they got their break on PayPal where users could donate to Library.nu in order to gain access for more files. Then, after they got an email from PayPal stating that admin@library.nu has received your donation, they found a real receipt from PayPal with the real names of the owners of the account, which matched the owners and directors of iFile.it. So with the proof that both sites were owned by the same individuals, the judge granted injunctions against both, after which Library.nu was shut down and visitors were directed to Google Books, while iFile.it could no longer allow unregistered users to upload files.111
Meanwhile, John Wiley began domestic efforts to retaliate against the individuals who downloaded its For Dummies books through a series of John Doe suits, beginning in October 2011. It filed the first of seven of these suits in New York against unknown defendants only identified by their IP addresses, and in December, January, and February 2012, it filed additional suits. One of its reasons for launching the suit was to get contact information for hundreds of sharers so it could offer them settlements—about $3,000 per person—and the courts were generally amenable to these requests, enabling the company to subpoena the Internet service providers for the information they needed.112 As noted by their attorney Bill Dunnegan of Dunnegan & Scileppi in New York, the litigation was designed to “demonstrate or educate people that this type of infringement is not a no-risk proposition,” and thereby “dry up the demand for (pirated) ebooks.”113
Wiley also won a default judgment against one BitTorrent sharer of WordPress for Dummies for $7,000–$5,000 for copyright violation, plus $2,000 for violating counterfeiting Wiley’s trademarks—substantially less than the $150,000 Wiley requested, but twice as much as the average settlement amount.114
A reason Wiley fought the For Dummies infringers was because the amount of revenue lost was enormous, with over seventy-four thousand copies of its Photoshop CS5 All-In-One for Dummies guide stolen over a sixteen-month period. Plus, it went after infringers for WordPress for Dummies, Hacking for Dummies, and Day Trading for Dummies.115 It took four people to court, since they refused to settle, after Wiley asked the infringers to pay the minimum due under the Copyright Act as statutory damages: $750 versus a potential of loss of $150,000 per infringement.116 Then, in January 2013, it won a lawsuit against another two downloaders, who were found guilty as charged and fined $7,000 in damages.117
While Wiley’s lawsuit was successful in getting some small damages, it also put pirates on notice that the publishers might sue them. This led to some blowback, such as from author John Paul Titlow, who complained in his article, “Why Winning a $7,000 Piracy Lawsuit Could Be the Worst News Ever for Book Publishers.” He suggested Wiley’s strategy would only anger the most avid book readers, much like the RIAA’s earlier attack on thousands of music pirates angered the “most avid, dedicated music fans.”118 But the strategy proved effective in that it eventually contributed to the music industry’s success in creating another model for fans to pay. Moreover, Wiley’s approach has differed from the music industry’s shotgun approach, since it more narrowly targeted “the worst of the worst and people who are profiteering,” thereby distinguishing between large-scale operators and small-scale downloaders.119
Other Strategies to Fight the Pirates
On another front, leading independent ebook publisher RosettaBooks achieved success in using Attributor’s Digimarc Guardian system (http://www.digimarc.com/guardian) to prevent online piracy of its catalog of backlist and original titles. As described in its presentation at the Digital Book World Convention in New York, January 2013, the company began using the Guardian system in June 2011 to identify infringing websites and then send them takedown notices and warning letters. If the site didn’t comply, the next step was contacting the hosting provider and the site might be delisted from search engines. Finally, payment providers and advertising networks were notified of the violation as well as domain registrars. The result was that legal action was only necessary in less than 5 percent of cases.120
In March 2013, Simon & Schuster entered the battle by sharing piracy statistics with authors and agents. Since 2011, the company also used Attributor, a company that scans hundreds of millions of web pages every day, including peer-to-peer networks, to fight ebook piracy by sending the infringing sites takedown notices to remove pirated content.121 When Simon & Schuster began sharing its privacy stats, it enabled authors and agents to report piracy by using its online piracy report (http://www.simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report). The way it works is that you put in your email, publisher, book title, author, the offending URLs, and any comments, after which the offending sites are quickly notified to remove that content. Additionally, Simon & Schuster CEO and president Carolyn Reidy compiles these into a report that provides “information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific URLs and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered, and more.”122
Then, in June 2013, several large publishers—among them Wiley, Elsevier, and McGraw-Hill—filed a joint lawsuit against file-sharing system Usenet, forcing them to reveal the names of two members who uploaded illegal ebooks under the user names “Hockwards” and “Rockhound.” Presumably, anyone who downloaded anything from them could become a part of this suit.123
However, such lawsuits are actually quite rare. According to a 2012 study by the American Assembly at Columbia
University, 46 percent of Americans and 70 percent of young Americans eighteen to twenty are copyright pirates. Though copyright holders can sue them for a lot of money—up to $150,000 in statutory damages per copyright infringement—these laws are mostly unenforced. Aside from the cases involving Wiley, with multiple defendants settling for a few thousand dollars, there have only been a few headline cases in which some unfortunate individuals have been targeted for punishment. An example is the case of thirty-seven-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a mother of four in Minnesota, who was ordered to pay record labels $222,000 for downloading and sharing two dozen copyrighted songs on the file-sharing network Kazaa, which is now out of business. Her case even went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court’s verdict in 2013.124
To some extent, federal agencies have contributed to reducing the number of pirates of books, films, games, and software, since the US government’s action led to the closure of Megaupload, which was one of the biggest cyberlockers in the world.125 Though similar sites sprung up or continued to operate, there was a decline in the number of users; however, these agencies have done little to go after the book pirates, as well as those pirating music and films. This is perhaps because they are focused on other types of Internet crime, most recently on the hacks into major corporations resulting in the theft of all types of data, including customer and personal information.
The Growing Difficulty of Battling the Pirates
But other publishers have felt powerless to do anything to stop the pirates. as Rick Townley addresses in a Washington Times article, “Frustrated Publishers Find There Are No Easy Solutions to Book Piracy.” According to Townley, digital editions of Stephen King’s new book Joyland were pirated and began circulating on the Internet within days of its publication by Hard Case Crimes. But the publisher felt that it was impossible to do anything, as is the opinion of a growing number of publishers because, as Townley points out: “With a little online searching you can find unlicensed copies of most current bestsellers and thousands of backstock books. Pirates seem to pride themselves on variety and selection.”126 And in some countries, book pirating is especially rampant, such as Russia, Spain, Nigeria, Pakistan, Germany, Peru, and India; in fact, in some of these countries, the number of pirated books are greater than the number of legitimate books being sold, such as in Russia and Peru. For example, in Russia, in 2012, over one hundred thousand pirated ebooks were available online; in Peru, more people are employed in pirate firms than legitimate publishers; in India, children on the streets earning $2 for each pirated book they sell average three sales a day and earn more than a father who works at a trade job, such as plumbing, though the children themselves cannot read the books they sell.127
And some types of piracy are worse than ever, such as the piracy of books by students. Science and engineering books are the most pirated, due to the high costs of new editions released annually, along with the big increase in tuition fees, the scarcity of jobs, and a lessening reliance on hardcover copies. And even some lecturers using out of print book titles encourage students to download illegally.128
No wonder the publishers feel frustrated. It is like they are snuffing out a few weeds in a garden, but then the rains come and the weeds are out in even greater force. Even the lawsuits targeting hundreds of users and some of the biggest piracy offenders have done little to stem the tide. Now that the technology is available for ebooks and scanning technology is even better for copying legitimate books to make illegal copies, piracy is easier and more rampant than ever. Like traffic tickets, the lawsuits may have stifled some pirates, but many return to the business under another name, while other eager pirates return to continue to distribute the pirated books, whether through uploads and downloads, streaming services, scanning counterfeit copies, or other means.
So while legal efforts have gained some monetary return and stopped some pirates, the high cost of an investigation and lawsuit, which often involves tracking down piracy sites in other countries and downloaders around the world, means that this is a response limited to those with means—namely the biggest publishers. But writers and small publishers generally can’t afford this approach, and because of the vast number of pirates, these efforts can only take down a few of the most notorious pirates and individuals obtaining pirated materials from these sites. These legal battles may result in winning a particular battle, but it doesn’t have much effect in losing the larger war.
Some Technological Responses to Piracy
It’s possible that some technological responses may provide an answer to reducing piracy. One is the sticks approach of making it harder to find or duplicate pirated books or watermarking them to indicate this book has been pirated and by whom. The other is the carrots approach of providing easier and cheaper ways to obtain legitimate books, similar to the music and film industries providing services like iTunes, Netflix, and Redbox for inexpensively obtaining music and videos. Though the problem is not completely eliminated, it is much reduced. David Price, the director of piracy analysis for the online data monitoring company NetNames, explains: “The best way to beat piracy is to get your content out there, to give it to people in some way or make them buy it in some simple, cheap, easy way.”129
The takedown notice, which has long been a standard approach, advises the owner of a website or the hosting service to take down the site or else be subject to penalties for copyright infringement. And mostly the services, if not the website owners, do take down the material, though it may pop up again elsewhere, and these notices can be a prelude to subsequent litigation. However, this is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that can take publishers and writers away from publishing and writing books. So now a number of piracy-protection companies have emerged that can send out automated notices for its clients. The way this works is that these companies use algorithms to find illegal copies of books and other materials. Then, they send out the DMCA takedown notices, which include the links to specific URLs, hosting sites, Internet service providers, and search engines. The result is that in a day or two, the notice recipients will take down the offending files and the search engines will remove their links from their search results pages.130
Muso, one of these companies, has removed over 580,000 illegal files for its publishing clients in 2014. This is a substantial savings for the companies, since the average file is downloaded three hundred times, and even with a low estimate of one hundred downloads per file, that is potentially almost sixty million downloads, according to Muso’s client manager for publishing.131 In turn, this removal process has tangible results in reducing piracy. For instance, to take just the results of one company, ebook publisher Rosetta Books experienced a 15 percent increase in its sales as a result of Digimarc’s piracy protection program of sending out takedown notices.132
Technology has also come to the rescue in a copyright alert system agreed to by some major ISPs—including Comcast, Verizon, and AT & T—which notifies subscribers in a series of six warnings when they are downloading or streaming illegal content.133
Another strategy involves using technology to reduce the visibility of the piracy sites. Google took this route in August 2012 by adjusting its algorithm to give sites with a high number of piracy notices a lower ranking, as noted by Jason Boog in “Google Gives Lower Search Rankings to Piracy Sites.” The number of complaints Google has reviewed is huge. In September 2012 alone, the company received 4.4 million requests to take down URLs for copyright violations, though unless Google receives a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner, it won’t remove any pages from its search results.134
But more than just lowering the search rankings, Google will remove the violator’s links entirely from its search-engine results pages through its Trusted Copyright Removal Program. This program streamlines the process of eliminating infringing sites for its members, which include a number of piracy protection companies, such DMCA Force, Muso, and Digimarcs. In fact, some companies, such as DMCA Force, have fo
und that this delisting works even more efficiently than sending notices to both the search engines and offending sites.135 Here’s how the program works for trusted submitters: The member sends in a notice to report content they would like removed, and many of these requests are added to a Chilling Effects project, which Google has entered into with US law schools. The project creates a database and information on the requests to remove information from the Internet, though the submitter’s personal contact information is redacted. Additionally, the information from the notice is added to Google’s Transparency Report, which indicates the number of URLs to remove. Google may also send a notice to the alleged infringer, and if Google should suspect the validity of the complaint, a notice will go to the rights holder as well. Among other things, members of the program submit not only their own name, company name, country, and email, but also the copyright owner or owners they represent, the identity and description of the copyright work, the location (URLs) of the infringing material, and where they can see an authorized example of the work. Then, this information is used to remove material from Google’s search engine and then sent to YouTube, Blogger, and Picasa, a photo-sharing site.136
The number of removal requests per month is amazing, according to Google’s Transparency Report. For example, the number of URLs requested to be removed from Google’s Search was 35,787,908 URLs in one month from 56,595 specified domains representing 4,893 copyright owners and 2,124 reporting organizations!137 Also, the Transparency Report includes information on the top reporting organizations—Degban, BPI (the British Recording Music Industry), Takedown Piracy, Skywalker Digital, and Unidam—which have requested between 2.5 to 5.9 million URLs with offending content, on the top copyright owners who had infringed upon material with nearly 2 million to 3.5 million URLs each, and the top domains that were described as having illegal material with 500,000 to 1.4 million URLs on them: unblocked.pw, unblock.re, vmusice.net, uploaded.net, and rapidgator.net.138