Internet Book Piracy Page 2

  Such efforts to fight back against the pirates are very much needed, because the damage to the industry and writers is enormous. For example, Attributor, a firm that specializes in monitoring online content, has claimed that book piracy costs the industry nearly $3 billion in sales, or over 10 percent of total revenue. In a 2010 study they counted 3.2 million in downloaded books, according to C. Max Magee in an article entitled “Confessions of a Book Pirate” (http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pirate.html). And as of 2014, the costs are even greater, as will be described in this book.

  Even a big raid in January 2012 on the popular cyberlocker Megaupload.com and its CEO Kim Dotcom—headed by US and Hong Kong authorities—didn’t make much difference, since other pirates quickly pulled in their own Internet boats to take up the slack. As described in a March 2012 Attributor report, “The World After Megaupload,” during the raid, the authorities seized and shut down nineteen related domains and reportedly froze $330 million in assets. Soon after, two other sites—FileSonic.com and Fileserve.com—stopped allowing the public to share hosted files. Together, these three sites were responsible for about 33 percent of all the pirated books available for free downloading.

  But soon after that raid, two other sites grew in popularity—Putlocker and RapidShare—and in the first month after Megaupload went down, the number of available pirated books was up 13 percent. In its report, Attributor also identified the top twenty piracy spots, which included share-online.biz and ul.to, with 28 percent of the supply between them. There is even a website that lists the twenty best websites for downloading free ebooks (http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-best-websites-to-download-free-e-books), which might help the anti-piracy crusaders know where to look. While some of these free ebooks might actually be legal, a great many are pirated.

  As of 2014 Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was still at it. Not only had he managed to evade jail by fighting attempts by US prosecutors to extradite him on racketeering charges over his Megaupload site, but he has earned another 40 million New Zealand dollars (about $20 million US) after authorities froze over 40 million Zealand dollars at the time of his arrest. After that he started two new ventures, including file-sharing site Mega and music venture Baboom (http://metro.co.uk/2014/12/01/megauploads-kim-dotcom-avoids-jail-in-trial-for-internet-piracy-4968888). And the news about the Sony hack of data, films, and personal information of Sony personnel puts an even more frightening face on the menace of piracy to all intellectual property, not only books.

  As I wrote back in 2013, the extent of the growing problem is evident in the very numbers reported on the piracy sites and, as will be discussed, now the problem is even worse. For example, bookos.org, which pirated eighteen of my books, proudly announced on its home page that it has 2,028,532 books available for download, and tuebl.com proclaims that it has thirty-five thousand books from nine thousand authors and 7.68 million downloads. The problem is further exacerbated because some of the pirates go to enormous lengths to try to skirt the law.

  For example, according to the article “Book Piracy and Me” by Charles Sheehan-Miles, which is no longer online, TUEBL (The Ultimate Ebook Library) once operated out of Canada, using an IP-hiding service called CloudFare to hide its IP address and claims that it is operated as an Idaho-based ministry of the Kopimist Church, which is recognized by the Swedish government. It was and still may be led by Travis McCrea, who claims that “giving away other people’s intellectual property is his religious vocation,” and his website once claimed this to be a missionary project of the Kopimist Church of Idaho, and as such was a registered 501(c)3 organization, so any fees paid are considered a donation. Sheehan-Miles concluded his post: “So McCrea, TUEBL, and his Kopimist Church are raking in cash from advertising and tax-deductible donations in support of his activity of stealing from me and other authors.” Since then, he filed a complaint on March 29, 2013, with the IRS that TUEBL shouldn’t have tax-exempt status if it is engaged in illegal activities or ones that violate important public policy.

  But now it seems TUEBL has transformed itself yet again. It calls itself “the Ultimate Ebook Library,” and describes itself as a site where authors can make money by giving digital versions of their books to readers, while readers can explore all sorts of books they may not have considered reading. Their idea is that “when a person loves an author, they become that author’s biggest consumer. They see the author in person, they buy the physical copies of the book (frequently multiple, to give to friends and in different editions), and they support the author however they can (http://tuebl.ca/faq). But do readers really do that, or do they mostly just obtain free books? They also claim to be owned and operated by the EVIL LLC, which has a strange rant on its first page about the planet being occupied by the glorious Dominion, and EVIL LLC is seeking to fight against the growing threat of Exile usurpation (https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/71033-evil-llc-evil-a-limited-liability-company). It’s hard to know if this is real or a parody, although it would seem to undermine TUEBL’s credibility. In any case, TUEBL has a disclaimer that states that although they are a Canadian company, they have decided to comply with DMCA rules, so any author can send in a takedown notice and they will take down that book, although few writers have the time to commit to tracking down and sending takedown notices to all of the sites featuring free unauthorized copies of their book.

  The costs of this piracy to individual writers can be devastating. For example, in a heartfelt post which is no longer online, “Piracy Sucks Donkey Balls … And Here’s Why,” Jennifer James (http://www.authorjenniferjames.com) states that pirates “help themselves to your art, the books you’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours busting ass on and give them away for free. Some are even enterprising enough to charge using PayPal and other checkout services for the stolen books!” In her case, one of her novels, Love Kinection, was pirated within hours of being live on Amazon, and since she didn’t receive an advance from her publisher, she ended up earning only $117.76 for a book she spent months of work on. Later, she found LK and another of her books on another file-hosting site, where each book had been downloaded close to a thousand times each. So, as she describes it, “the pirates are robbing me blind” (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/3954696-ebook-piracy-sucks-donkey-balls-and-here-s-why-with-math).

  Thus, as I wrote then and feel is even more critical now, we need to take on the book pirates, much like the music and film industries have done. Waging their own piracy war eventually led to a new model for earning money from downloaded music and streaming films on services like iTunes and Netflix. In this case, the weapons include the criminal penalties that have undone companies like Megaupload and put their operators away for long jail terms. The theft of intangible intellectual property is real theft, much like breaking and entering a home and taking away money and objects of value, although in this case, the property taken is a book that an author has spent months nurturing until it is born.

  But the FBI and other government agencies can only go after so many of the hundreds of pirates out there. So another big weapon is the lawsuit, which can be filed by publishers and authors with a number of pirated books, so taking legal action becomes cost effective and worthwhile. Or perhaps a class action suit might name several dozen of the pirate websites filed on behalf of the writers with stolen books on their site. Additionally, individuals can take assorted actions themselves, including sending cease and desist and takedown emails and collecting information that can help an attorney win a successful suit. And now the anti-piracy services can help by going after the pirates on behalf of writers, using the threat of further legal or criminal action to get some money from the pirates rather than face much more expensive actions against them.

  So it is in this spirit of describing the problem of piracy, especially as it affects writers and publishers, and what to do about it, that I have written this book.

  PART I

  The Interviews

/>   CHAPTER 1

  Introduction to the Interviews

  WHEN I FIRST BEGAN CONDUCTING the interviews with a mix of writers, publishers, lawyers, “pirates,” and others involved in the piracy issue for the documentary The Battle Against Internet Book Piracy, I thought it was a straightforward matter of victims versus pirates, with some help for the victims from law enforcement and lawyers. The goal, I thought, was to help the victims of book piracy, myself included, find the sites where books were pirated, and then seek to get the books removed and possibly get some compensation for the infringement, or interest law enforcement in going after the biggest infringers.

  But as I spoke to the interviewees, my own publishers, and others interested in this issue, it became far more complicated. For one thing, most writers and publishers had a kind of fatalistic “there’s not much I can do” attitude. This was largely true, since about the most anyone could or did do was send out takedown notices to the infringers, and then if they didn’t respond, to the website hosts and domain name servers, who did respond by removing the offending domain. However, often this was only a temporary solution, since the pirate would simply put up another site under another name, and it was back in business as usual. And making matters worse, further research on where one’s books were pirated commonly revealed the book available through dozens if not hundreds of sites. So it was truly a “whack-a-mole” situation. Paying lawyers was too expensive for most writers and publishers, and law enforcement efforts against pirates were largely directed at the film, music, and software pirates, where the levels of piracy and the resources of the large companies that were victimized were much greater, and these companies were part of large industry organizations that helped in the battle. But by their very nature, writers and publishers were much smaller and less organized, so were more readily victimized with little consequence. At the same time, some of the “pirates” I spoke to didn’t consider themselves pirates. This was because they were unaware that the material they received or shared freely was pirated by someone else, or they felt justified sharing it in the case of students because they thought the large companies were charging far too much for the required books often written by their professors and used in their classes. And then some interviews made an argument for free speech, changing the old model of selling books for something new, such as subscription services, or for finding ways to use what the pirates were doing to help promote one’s own books or sell other material.

  The following interviews reflect this range of viewpoints, and apart from my occasional commentary, I have chosen to let them speak in their own words. Then, the next section will discuss the even greater threat of piracy today, which is so vast that it threatens to undermine the very foundations of society. Such a threat is illustrated by the Sony hacking, which not only stole intellectual property but company data and personal records, much of which has been leaked to the media, as well as provided the fuel for the identity theft of everyone whose data is in the system. So the threat to books, along with films, music, software, and other intellectual property, is just the beginning.

  These interviews help to illustrate the concerns and issues from the personal viewpoint of the major players in this struggle today. While these are single voices, their comments reflect similar experiences and viewpoints of others who are also victims, pirates, or others involved in this issue.

  CHAPTER 2

  An Interview with an Intellectual Property Lawyer

  THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW IS WITH Sandra Shepard, an intellectual property attorney based in San Rafael, California, who has been working in this field for about twenty years. She has been involved with licensing and working on Internet issues since 1988, and has sought to help her clients adapt to the way the technology has changed and has been used in different ways. As she describes it, she works with her clients as a strategist to help them monetize their intellectual property and avoid having their work pirated. She helps them take advantage of the situation when their work is pirated, and not become pirates themselves, such as by using the lines of a poem in the beginning of a chapter of their book, thinking it is just fair use when it is not. In her interview, she also explains the difficulties of applying the copyright laws today to protect copyright holders, since the laws were written at a time when there was real, physical property—but when intellectual property is stolen, it is copied and the copyright holder still has the original, no matter how many hundreds, thousands, or millions of copies are out there. As Shepard describes in her interview:

  “Most people don’t realize that half of the stuff they’re doing on their website, they’re pirates, too. I think when somebody finds that they have been pirated, unfortunately, sometimes it’s a little bit too late for that, because a lot of people believe that they have copyright as soon as they write something. That’s actually true because … as you doodle something or draw it or write it, it is the subject of copyright. However, you have to have filed a form with the copyright office, the Library of Congress, and then you have what’s called statutory protection of whatever you filed. What that means is that as long as you’ve already filed that Form TX with the copyright office and then you find the piracy, then you have statutory protections, which means you don’t have to prove it cost you any money. However, if you have not filed that Form TX, you have to actually prove that it cost you a certain amount, and that’s usually a problem. It’s very hard to do that.

  “Also, many people don’t know that they can’t copy your work. I have a number of poets, for example, who are my clients, and they’re forever finding their poem on a plate for sale on eBay, and it might have their name on it or it might say anonymous. Then, they will send out a letter that I have given them a template for. It is usually a very friendly letter that says, ‘Perhaps you didn’t know that you can’t take my poem and sell it.’ And usually people will stop.

  “But if someone is instead a pirate where they really aren’t going to stop, it’s often hard to get them to stop, though most people may not know they can’t take your book or poem or song or even a little piece of it and put it on a plate or include it on a website. So when you say, ‘You can’t do this,’ perhaps they will stop or perhaps there are other things you can do.

  “Usually (the infringed upon material) is on a website, and that website is not run by the person who is the pirate. So what you do is you contact the person who runs that site and you say, ‘I own this poem. Here’s the registration number, here’s my information, here is where it’s located,’ give them the pin site, ‘And you need to stop this because you are providing a forum for them to infringe my work.’”

  But what if the infringer doesn’t stop? Sometimes the organization they work for will take the responsibility and take it down, as an alternative to contacting the website host, such as when one professor used a book he downloaded for his class. As Shepard explains:

  “Fairly recently, I had a client who wrote a book on music licensing, and a professor was actually using that book in part of his curriculum. And my client wasn’t getting any money for it. The professor had just downloaded it and now it was on the college website to download for his class. He told my client that he wasn’t going to take it down, and so my client contacted the college and said, ‘Oh by the way, this book is up there. This belongs to us. We have filed the registered copyright. Here’s the information.’ And they took it down.

  “So that’s the strategy to use if the person who has pirated the material resists removing it. Usually the people that are providing the forum don’t want to have something infringing on it. And they have the right to remove it. For example, when you post on a forum or website, those little click-through things that you never read but indicate ‘I’ll accept that’ state the terms and conditions that usually include a phrase that you understand that posting something there is a privilege and not a right. What that means is that you don’t have a right to post all your stuff here, and the service can take it off whenever they want. So u
sually the Googles, AOLs, or the colleges of the world will take your copyrighted material down, because they don’t want to be the place where that infringing stuff is available.”

  Unfortunately, copyright law as it exists today can make it difficult to make a clear-cut case that piracy is theft. When someone takes your copyrighted material, since it is not tangible, physical property, it can give the pirate a ready out, such as saying they didn’t know it was pirated material or claiming that by taking it, they weren’t causing the owner any harm, because he or she still has the material. Or it opens the door to the many excuses that pirates and their defenders use to support them making this material to others, like claiming they are simply “sharing” something with friends or that they are helping to make an otherwise obscure owner more popular by sharing that work. Shepard explains this flaw in today’s copyright law that can be used to the advantage of the pirates:

  “One of the interesting things about intellectual property is that it is characterized as property, and there are three different kinds of property. There’s personal property, which is like a pencil; there’s real property, which is real estate; and there’s intellectual property, which consists of trademarks, copyrights, or patents. This is property that you own because you came up with it out of your head. But the problem is that intellectual property law is based on personal property and realty law.

  “For example, with personal property, you can readily tell if someone stole your pencil if you don’t have it. With real property, you can readily tell if somebody is trespassing across your land, such as if you find broken grass or footprints there. But the problem with intellectual property is that it’s very difficult to tell if somebody has taken or trespassed on your copyright, because you still have a copy of the physical book that has been scanned or the original digital file. An early example is all of the monks copying books, infringers all. But anybody who’s copied anything without permission, that’s the infringing item.