Book Ripped Off? Who You Gonna Call? Pirate Sinker!

Tag - You're IT!

That's the banner that Hank St. James's brandishes as he hurtles into battle with a book pirate. Only that's not what he calls them. His name for them is "parasites".

St. James is a piracy exterminator for hire. For a fee he monitors pirate sites and when he finds a client's book on one he emails a takedown notice to the bad guys. "Sometimes this entails as many as nine emails to get one book taken down from one site," he informs me. "They use some sites where they upload too and that site then re-ups to seven or eight other sites automatically."

He claims a high success rate, about 98% getting links removed within 1-3 days. "I've cracked most of the larger ones," he says.

Like anyone else in the law enforcement field, St. James's job is fraught with danger. "I have been threatened by one clown in Holland connected with [an underground website] when we had a five day running battle to get one of my authors works removed from his site. I've picked up viruses from some sites which my software has caught. Fifteen of those viruses are in quarantine, however, as there apparently is no antidote for the strains that infected my computer. So, the virus software simply isolated the virus."

Is Pirate Sinker cool and dispassionate? Hardly. "It is very frustrating, anger inducing work," he says. "Recently, John Simpson had a new book come out and that same day it was on [another underground website] which kinda sent me into a blue rage. These shoplifting parasites have no shame."

For more information you can reach him at piratesinker@gmail.com .

A number of publishers and organizations like Associated Press and The Financial Times have turned to a company called Attributor. Though not as dashing and glamorous as Pirate Sinker, Attributor boasts solid and respectable chops. "Attributor’s FairShare Guardian is the world’s first web-wide monitoring and enforcement platform," says the company's website. One of the its customers is Hachette, publisher of such imprints as Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing. (See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.)

Richard Curtis

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

Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer

The following release was emailed by Hachette Book Group to literary agents and other publishing industry professionals this afternoon. It is a followup to a tough-talking release issued less than a month ago. We reprint it in its entirety. For information about Attributor, click here.

Last month we contacted you, Hachette Book Group authors and their agents, regarding our position on online book piracy. We’re pleased to announce that HBG has engaged Attributor, a leading anti-piracy protection service, to monitor the web for unauthorized copies of our authors’ titles. Please see announcement below for more details. If you have any questions, please email us at piracy@hbgusa.com.

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June 17, 2009 – Hachette Book Group has engaged Attributor, a leading anti-piracy protection service, to monitor the web for instances of unlawful use of its authors’ books and content.

The rapid growth in digital availability of books has resulted in a dramatic increase in pirated editions on file sharing websites that allow users to upload, share and download content of all kinds, free of charge. While some of the content appearing on these sites is lawful and user-created, an alarming number of unauthorized copies of copyrighted book titles are uploaded and shared for free.

Attributor’s web-crawling tool checks document hosting sites, linksites, and social media and social networking sites, quickly identifying unauthorized copies. Attributor’s monitoring service will enable Hachette Book Group to proactively find unlawful uses of content and have infringing material taken down when necessary.

“Attributor is an essential resource in achieving HBG’s commitment to combating online book piracy and protecting our authors’ work,” said David Young, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group. “With our lawyers and legal assistants spending a significant amount of time checking sites for pirated content, it was clear that we needed to automate and augment our monitoring, while keeping our staff very involved in the process. This automation will dramatically increase our reach and effectiveness.”