Hey Somali Pirates -You're Working Too Hard! Hijack E-Books Risk-Free!

E-Book piracy in the United States is a $600 million business according to Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent for The Times of London. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol has been a particularly juicy target.

There's some promising news coming from across the Pond, though: "British publishers are taking action to stop the pirates," says the Times. "The Publishers Association has released a web tool that allows publishers to log the details of an infringement of copyright. It then sends a demand to the offending website for the link to be removed. The portal has been alerted to more than 4,000 cases of online piracy by more than 40 publishers and has succeeded in taking down 2,638 illegal copies of books."

The article doesn't state the name of the web tool, but it might be Attributor, the anti-piracy tool we reported last summer when Hachette employed it.

Despite improvements in piracy detection, we agree with the title of the Times piece: Pirates find easy new pickings in open waters of e-book publishing.

Richard Curtis