Internet Book Piracy Read online

  Thus the numbers illustrating the problem, as well as those who don’t think it’s a problem, are clear. The following chapters will describe in more detail the extent and impact of piracy around the world and in the United States, and discuss what might be done about it as a society, as well as what individuals can do when their own work has been pirated.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Worldwide Epidemic of Book Piracy

  BOOK PIRACY IS AN EPIDEMIC affecting writers and publishers in countries around the world. That’s why law enforcement efforts are involving agencies worldwide, as in the Kim Dotcom Megaupload case, in which the FBI recruited the assistance of the New Zealand police to arrest the key operators in order to shut down the operation. Likewise, the people uploading and downloading pirated files are located around the world. So it doesn’t matter where a locker, storage facility, server, or provider service is located. The offenders, like the victims, are located everywhere, and now, as awareness of the problem is growing, law enforcement agencies are mobilizing globally to fight the problem. So are governments in many countries, because they recognize the threat to their own economies, as the pirates syphon out income from creators and companies selling their work.

  While law enforcement and civil litigation has generally only been able to target the biggest offenders, other regulations and policy changes may have more effect, such as sending takedown notices to the webhosts, so they don’t get shut down for aiding and abetting the pirates, and companies not advertising on identified piracy sites. It may also be possible for Google and other search engines to block access to these domains on their servers, so people can’t find these pirate sites unless they have a correct IP address and use another server that doesn’t block the domain.

  Although piracy and “information should be free” advocates decry the growing Internet piracy crackdown by law enforcement and litigation, these efforts are needed to counteract the growing piracy explosion that could destroy the very industries now losing billions in earnings for individuals and companies worldwide. The problem is much like game poaching because of the high profits the poachers and their buyers can make, such as in killing elephants for their tusks. For a time the poachers and buyers can literally make a killing; but then the population of animals victimized by poaching declines, so they become an endangered species. Though that can initially make the proceeds from poaching even greater, because of the reduced supply, if poaching continues, the species can die out completely. This kills off not only the game, but the income from poaching that species.

  So it is with the worldwide piracy of books, as well as music, films, and other intellectual property. At some point, the writers of pirated books may stop writing because they are not earning enough to sustain them, or publishers will no longer offer them contracts because their books aren’t selling well enough to justify it. And many companies will go under, since they can’t survive the lower earnings, resulting in even fewer books from mainstream publishers. It’s a matter of simple economics and survival. As the pirates become more pervasive and powerful in making pirated books available, and more and more people worldwide upload and download pirated files, writers and publishers are doomed to earn less and less, and may choose to write or publish less and less.

  Worldwide Piracy by the Numbers

  This danger of piracy worldwide—indicating the need for an organized, global counterattack by law enforcement—is evident in recent articles and stats on worldwide book piracy.

  For example, in an article about piracy in Russia from an author who discovered his book was being translated by a rogue translator, Peter Mountford describes how pirated books reportedly comprise up to 90 percent of Russian ebook downloads. As he explains: “According to Rospechat, the state agency that regulates mass media, Russians have access to more than 100,000 pirated titles and just 60,000 legitimate titles, with illegal downloads costing legitimate vendors several billion rubles a year.”17

  Or take what is happening in Africa. While Ebola and other contagious diseases there have been getting massive press coverage and have helped to illustrate the connectedness of all countries in today’s global world, the extent of book piracy in Africa is largely unknown, but similarly pervasive.

  For example, here’s an article about book piracy in the schools of Uganda, where several schools have even connived with book pirates to provide books for less than half the price for the legitimate publisher. As described in an article in the Observer, “Schools Accused of Abetting Book Piracy” by Moses Talemwa, some schools collaborating with the pirates tell the parents there is a list of books needed that can only be acquired at a special price at the school. Then, the pirates buy a genuine copy of the book, scan it into a computer, reprint it, and sell it, mostly to the schools at a lower price than the genuine article. And often there is little difference between the real and pirated book, though sometimes the pirated copies have unclear print, missing pages, or upside-down pages. But even so, many parents are unbothered by the difference, claiming they would rather buy the cheaper, often-pirated copy, as long as it has the same information.18 The result is that the publishers could be losing 90 percent of their proceeds from book publishing, so they have started to fight back. One way is with the help of the East African Educational Publishers (EAEP), which has joined with some of the bigger publishers to print flyers for the bookshops and schools to describe the program. Also, the police, working with the Uganda Intellectual Rights Organization, launched a campaign in which the wares and printers of several pirates were seized. In addition, the publishers signed a memorandum of understanding for the Uganda Revenue Authority to not clear pirates who print their books outside of the country, such as Kenya. And they are appealing to the schools and parents to buy genuine books to support the publishing industry. And that’s just one problem with printed books.

  In Somalia, the piracy problem is made even worse because of the country’s lack of copyright control and professional publishing houses. As a result, as described in the News Blaze story “Somalia: Book Piracy Kills Author Creativity” by Mohamed Abdullahi Abubakar, “if you publish a book in Somalia, within a short period of time, you see your book copied and republished hugely without your permission.”19

  In Zimbabwe, the piracy problem is exacerbated because of a large community of street vendors selling books, especially textbooks. In turn, parents and students are drawn to buying these much cheaper books. It operates by an anonymous supplier who owns the copying and binding machines and sells a high volume of photocopied books at a much lower price than the original. Plus, many books are published abroad. And then, keeping costs down even more, often these books are sold through an open-air market, and many are sold on the sidewalks. Though some vendors justify their business on the grounds they are educating the nation and contributing to the literacy of the country, authors find they are not receiving royalties on these book sales, and the publishers are, of course, losing the income they would normally get for these books to the pirates.20

  The devastation wrought to the local authors and book publishers is described in stark terms by Vincent Gono in the Sunday News article “Piracy Hits Local Book Industry.” As he writes:

  “The proliferation of pirate activities in the country is heavily threatening the book industry with massive reproduction of both fiction and nonfiction books with reckless abandon.

  “The illegally reproduced books are later sold on the streets while authors and publishers wallow in poverty as they get nothing for their intellect …

  “As a result, the authors were becoming increasingly reluctant to write while publishing companies were also collapsing. Bookshops are also not spared the agony as they are facing stiff competition from the illegal but booming street business.

  “Rampant book piracy has led to the closure of publishing houses such as Longman and College Press as well as bookshops throwing hundreds of workers onto the streets where they are exposed to the vagaries of the harsh economy.
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  “In the absence of action from stakeholders and law enforcement agents, the book industry would continue to suffer and buckle under the weight of piracy and in the process the country would be losing various revenue avenues and could soon become an importer of books.”21

  In fact in Zimbabwe, as in Uganda, the schools were actively contributing to the piracy problem. In Zimbabwe it was even conducted within the schools, in that some schools were encouraging the violation of copyright laws by purchasing their own large photocopying machines for reproducing academic books as well as allowing students to copy these books.22

  In Nigeria, book piracy has resulted in domestic publishing houses losing $125 million each year, according to the chairman of a Nigerian publishing company. The result, according to the president of the Nigerian Publishers Association (NPA), Ngwobia Okereke, is that book piracy is the major problem threatening the book industry in Nigeria. He urged the government to increase the enforcement of copyright laws, such as by using special algorithms to detect illegal downloads, security printing devices, and moral suasion to convince people not to engage in piracy.23 One of the major sources of piracy, as in many other countries, is the schools who obtain their books from a pirate rather than the publishing company, as one author’s rep found. When he approached some schools to supply them the books, he learned they had gotten the same book from someone else. Then, he filed a report with the anti-copyright commission that someone had pirated the book.24

  In Kenya, the threat of piracy to the Kenya book industry was a major topic of discussion at the annual Nairobi International Bookfair, organized by the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA) in September 2014. The business of the publishers was down, in part by the high cost of books and the value-added tax under the VAT Act, which added a 16 percent tax to school study materials. But mostly the concern was about the devastating effects of piracy on the industry, resulting in billions of dollars annually—an estimated $2 billion in 2011 and expected to increase even more due to the increasing use of digital technology.25

  Still other countries reporting the devastation of piracy and the difficulties of combatting it include Poland, the UAE, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Peru. Here are some highlights from these reports:

  • According to a study for the broadband industry group Syngal, the Polish economy loses up to PLN 700 million a year due to illegal downloads of video content, which is twice the Ministry of Culture’s annual budget. The study further found that 20 percent of all Poles and 30 percent of Internet users used websites allowing them illegal access to video content. About 400–500 million illegal film streams were accessed each year, as well as 650–750 million episodes of TV programs and 150–180 million sporting events. Why so much? Because users liked the wide range of free content, so they did so, even though 77 percent of the users said they realized their activities were illegal.26

  • According to a report by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), the costs of online film piracy are estimated to be $3.3 billion or KW3.75 trillion won, a year. During the period from February to April 2013, an average of 2,322 films illegally circulated each month on ninety-three online storage and sharing sites.27

  • In Hong Kong, the comic book industry and its writers are struggling against apps and websites that offer their material, usually scanned, from the original for free rather than buying the more expensive individual copies. As an article in the South China Morning Post describes: “The stream of free content has been devastating for local comic publishers, particularly those reprinting Japanese manga.” For example, as reported by the director of the Hong Kong Comics and Animation Federation, at the height of the popularity of comics in the 1990s, a single issue might sell over two hundred thousand copies. But now even the more popular comics don’t sell more than twenty thousand copies—a huge drop, and a new comic might sell less than one thousand copies.28

  • In Lima, Peru, much of the pirated book market consists of sales on the street and in bookstores that sell mostly pirated books. For example, one street in downtown Lima, Jiron Quilca, is one of the major hubs of pirated books, where they are sold by dozens of shops, though sometimes they are sold along with used books and even some legitimate copies. They are also sold by street vendors, on highway stands, inside markets, and on the city’s most popular beaches. The books are produced on old presses in illegal workshops throughout the city’s low-income areas, and unlike digital files, which are easily reproduced and uploaded, sometimes they suffer from being printed on cheap paper with cheap binding, and sometimes the text is even crooked or whole chapters are missing. The extent of this vast enterprise is shown by the fact that Peru’s pirated book publishers employ more workers than do legal publishers, and it is estimated that they cause the industry $52 million in losses each year. And so far the authorities have made little headway. For example, after hearing about the extensive piracy, Peru’s intellectual-property protection agency INDECOPI sought to fight the book pirates and get illegal copies off the streets. But even after raids on informal booksellers by officials, the shopkeepers were able to resupply their popular pirated books within days.29

  • In Indonesia the problem was much the same, with piracy especially appealing to students because of the high cost of college books and the need to get pirated books to support their studies. So even though the pirated books could easily be indicated by the slightly blurry text and black and white pictures, any raids on the bookstores to confiscate pirated books proved generally useless. It didn’t matter if they confiscated the pirated books and fined the booksellers, such as one seller who lost books worth about 500,000 Rp after a raid on behalf of the Jakarta Chapter of the Association of Indonesian Publishers (IKAPI and had to pay a fine of 2.5 million RP after two days in jail). The pirates simply provided the booksellers with more books. As the chairman of the IKAPI, Hikmat Kurnia, put it: “Raiding book stalls is expensive, and the police cannot initiate the measure because piracy is only considered a crime if someone reports it to the police.”30

  There is even a website devoted to keeping track of these global piracy stats: Havocscope, a website dedicated to global black market information. For example:

  • In the UK, over a three-month period ending in January 2013, almost 400 million digital files were pirated by Internet users. These pirated ebooks make up 29 percent of all book downloads in the UK. In 2011, publishers issued 115,000 legal notices to websites offering free pirated copies of books, an increase of 130 percent from the number of notices sent out in 2010.31 And the worst book pirates are the students, according to an online data-monitoring company, NetNames. When the company looked at the availability of fifty popular textbooks in different fields of study in the UK, they found that 76 percent of the titles were available to download for free from one ebook sharing site. Of these, the science and engineering books were the most pirated, mainly because of the high costs of these books, though piracy of films and music is far greater.

  • In Spain, electronic book piracy caused the book industry to lose up to $467 million in income—nearly 12 percent of its total revenue, according to the Federation of Publishers’ Associates and the ISBN Agency of Spain.

  • In Russia, as of 2012, over one hundred thousand ebooks were available on book piracy websites, compared to sixty thousand available on legitimate websites, according to Russia’s Press and Communications Agency. The problem is especially severe there, since as much as 90 percent of the ebook market in Russia is made up of pirated books.

  • In Pakistan, the government loses up to $221 million in tax revenue due to pirating of intellectual property in the country.

  • An estimated 20 percent of all ebooks downloaded onto e-readers were believed to have been pirated in 2011—a percentage that has certainly increased since then.

  • In Peru, more pirated copies of books were sold than legitimate books, and the pirated books publishing industry employs more people than does the legal book industry.

  • In Ch
ile, from 2011 to 2013 authorities seized over 362,000 pirated books, mostly children’s books and literature books, valued at $1.5 million from stores across the country. Increasingly, textbooks are being pirated due to the much lower costs. For example, the main textbook used in health programs in universities throughout Chile is Atlas of Human Anatomy¸ but at $200 a pop for a legitimate textbook, the $35 cost for the pirated books makes for a hard-to-resist bargain. In fact, the trade in pirated books is so great there that smugglers from Peru brings in books strapped to their bodies like drug mules.32

  • In Germany, the book industry has reported that 60 percent of all ebooks downloaded were pirated in 2011. At the time, the ebook market was only a tiny percentage of the market—but now ebook readership has zoomed worldwide, so ebook piracy is even more of a problem (http://www.havocscope.com/tag/book-piracy).

  And one of the worst of the countries for piracy is Australia. For example, according to statistics released by TorrentFreak and reported in the article “Australia Extends Global Internet Piracy Lead,” published on Delimiter, “Australia has dramatically extended its lead over other countries when it comes to the levels of Australians pirating popular US television shows.” As one example, the series finale of the AMC show Breaking Bad was downloaded more than five hundred thousand times in twelve hours after the first copy appeared online, and based on a sample of over ten thousand people who shared the site, Australians represented 18 percent of the total, with the US (14.5 percent) and UK (9.3 percent) second and third, and India (5.7 percent) and Canada (5.1 percent) fourth and fifth. In another TorrentFreak study, Australians were the most prolific pirates of the popular show Game of Thrones.33 In fact, there almost seems to be a perverse pride among Australians in having the title of most pirates, or as one Australian news site put it: “Let’s face it Australia. We’re a nation of pirates. Figures show that we are among the worst in the world when it comes to illegally downloading TV shows and movies.”34 In fact, a further analysis showed that the city of Melbourne had the greatest percentage of pirates, followed by Athens and then Sydney.35