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

Pirates, Laughing at Conviction, Ply the E-Seas with Impunity

If you thought that the conviction of four file-sharing copyright thieves last spring by a Swedish court would put a damper on e-piracy, you don't know much about the criminal mentality.

Randall Stross, an author and professor of business in a Silicon Valley college, believes that as e-books achieve mainstream sales volume - they represent less than 2 percent of total book sales right now but they're growing at triple digits - they will become as tempting to rip off as music.

How bad will that hurt? In a New York Times essay, Stross says that "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates that 95 percent of music downloads 'are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.'"

Stross actually managed to interview a spokesperson for RapidShare, the most flagrant of file-sharers, who gave out the party line: they just post URLS on their site, no questions asked. If a copyright owner demands the file be taken down, the company will comply. But it requires such effort and continual vigilance that few complainants have the stamina to pursue their case to the bitter end, particularly because the sites are operated out of offshore venues.

In the case of RapidShare, that venue is Switzerland, a country that recently yielded to international pressure to yield up bank account information, an unprecedented concession. How much easier would it be for nations to band together to take tough stands against book pirates. They must while there is still time.

Read Will Books Be Napsterized?

Richard Curtis

S&S Boards HMS Anti-Piracy

Caroline Reidy (right), publisher of Simon & Schuster, has e-circulated a policy statement about online piracy. Notable is a description of S&S's relationship with Scribd, which she described as "a location where pirated works were easily found." Scribd has made an earnest effort to become respectable, occasioning Reidy to say "Our decision to sell ebooks at Scribd came only when we were satisfied that they would both make our works more available to online consumers and also diligently and innovatively combat piracy on their site."

S&S's anti-piracy initiative follows on the heels of one recently announced by Hachette, which has gone so far as to engage a company to monitor instances of piracy of its books. See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.

We don't think S&S will complain if we pirate its statement in full, reprinted below, but from here on in we'll be very careful about using S&S text. We don't want to walk the plank with Caroline Reidy's sword at our backs.

Richard Curtis
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SIMON & SCHUSTER STATEMENT CONCERNING ONLINE PIRACY

Online piracy of digital books is a matter of growing concern. Even as Simon & Schuster explores and partakes in the many new and exciting opportunities presented by the digital world, at the forefront of our digital strategy is a firm commitment to battling piracy.

Since Simon & Schuster began publishing ebooks more than ten years ago, the security of our authors’ copyrights has been a primary concern in every digital partnership or project we have undertaken. Unquestionably, however, as the digital world has expanded and ebooks have become more popular, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing and sites that feature user-posted content has led to a higher level of unauthorized posting and sharing of our copyrighted content. Responding to these evolving threats requires vigilance and innovation.

We work to stop online piracy as promptly as we can. The Simon & Schuster legal department acts quickly to notify site operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where piracy occurs, by issuing copyright infringement notices both for electronic versions of our books and for the sale of unauthorized physical editions at online booksellers. These notices generally have the desired result with respect to materials posted and hosted on third-party sites. Peer-to-peer file sharing presents more difficult challenges, but we are working to take advantage of evolving strategies to deter this kind of piracy as well.

More broadly, we seek to combat this situation with the wide range of tools at our command, including doing everything we can to create a robust marketplace where consumers can legally purchase the books they want in electronic formats. We have, for example, recently entered into an arrangement with Scribd, an online document site, to sell Simon & Schuster ebooks at their site. This follows a period in which Scribd attracted much negative publicity as a location where pirated works were easily found. Our decision to sell ebooks at Scribd came only when we were satisfied that they would both make our works more available to online consumers and also diligently and innovatively combat piracy on their site.

We are also working with our colleagues at other publishing houses, via the Association of American Publishers’ Online Piracy Working Group, to share information and best practices on an industry-wide basis.

As long as there have been publishers, there have been scofflaws who see fit to deprive authors of their livelihood. Enforcement is by its very nature an imperfect science. But as the potential for this kind of behavior is amplified in the digital world, keeping our content secure, enforcing our copyrights, and creating a robust marketplace for easily accessible, reasonably priced content will be the pillars upon which we build our future as a digital publisher.

As we move forward in these endeavors, the help of readers, authors, booksellers and concerned citizens will be critical. We ask that if you see Simon & Schuster books illegally posted online, you please bring this to our attention and we will review the matter and take prompt and appropriate action. We will need certain specific information in order to act effectively, and have provided an online form that may be used to notify us of any instances of abuse or infringement.

We hope you find this information helpful and thank you in advance for your help.

10 Top Pirated Books Include Sex, Sex, Sex, Sex, Sex and Twilight

Describing itself as a "sister" of BitTorrent fileshare site TorrentFreak, a pro-pirate outfit called Freakbits listed the ten most downloaded books on BitTorrent this year as measured in downloads, with hits ranging from 100,000 to 250,000. The results will come as no surprise to anyone who believes that sex is commonest preoccupation of the human race; nor will they come as a surprise to anyone who guessed that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books would be on the list. Otherwise, there are some unusual wrinkles, as you will see below.

Figure that every legitimate sale is worth approximately $1.00 in royalty (a hypothetical $15.00 trade paperback paying a typical 7.5% royalty). If you're the author of one of these books, that comes to somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 lifted from your bank account, not including secondary sharing. If you're Stephenie Meyer it comes to a lot more, as the listing covers the complete Twilight series.

There's not much we can do about Freakbits or TorrentFreak except not provide links to their sites. Take that, you miserable pirates!

RC

1. Kamasutra
2. Adobe Photoshop Secrets
3. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex
4. The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
5. Solar House – A Guide for the Solar Designer
6. Before Pornography – Erotic Writing In Early Modern England
7. Twilight – Complete Series
8. How To Get Anyone To Say YES – The Science Of Influence
9. Nude Photography – The Art And The Craft
10. Fix It – How To Do All Those Little Repair Jobs Around The Home

Psst. I Can Get You the New Dan Brown for 5 Yuan

Raising impossible barriers against foreign commerce in order to protect domestic industry is among the oldest sources of international friction, and China is no exception. But a recent ruling reveals that the industry China is protecting is piracy. By severely restricting imports of American books, music and movies, China extends an umbrella of protection over institutionalized theft of intellectual property.

Don't take our word for it. Take the word of the World Trade Organization, which has just ruled that Beijing has violated international trading rules. Or you can take the word of the New York Times's Keith Bradsher, who writes, "One reason for the slow growth in imports has been China’s restrictions on imported books and other content. Demand is met by pirated copies made in China; the latest Hollywood movies are on DVDs on street corners across China within days of their release, for $1 or less.

Also, because of piracy, Chinese consumers are so accustomed to paying very little for DVDs, or downloading movies or songs free on the Internet, that American movie companies already sell authorized DVDs of their movies for much less in China than in the United States — and still struggle to find buyers.

US trade organizations and commercial exporters of books, songs and films hope that the WTO's ukase will open the door to direct sales to the consumer. Don't bet on it. China will undoubtedly employ a tried and true tactic for keeping that door shut: “'They’ve got a poor record of compliance,'" Bradsher quotes a Washington lawyer. '"They keep filing appeals.'”

Details in W.T.O. Rules Against China’s Limits on Imports

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

He Should Have Paid the Two Dollars: Student Loses $675,000 Judgment For Downloading FileshareTunes

In a famous vaudeville routine, a man is fined two dollars for spitting in the subway, but his righteous lawyer urges his client to fight the judgment. Every time the lawyer denounces the unfairness of the ruling, the judge bops the defendant on the head with a rubber truncheon, shouting "Pay the two dollars!"

Maybe Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum's lawyer should have counseled him to pay the two dollars. Or, more accurately, the $4,000 that the recording industry demanded of him for downloading copyrighted music from a filesharing website. Or maybe Tenenbaum should have just paid for the 30 songs he originally copped. Instead, his attorney urged him to fight fight fight. According to John Schwartz of the New York Times, "Nearly all of the thousands of people confronted by the industry settle for a few thousand dollars, but Mr. Tenenbaum chose to fight."

He fought fought fought and the Recording Industry Association of America sued him.

He lost lost lost. He lost lost lost to the tune of a $675,000 judgment. That's not the tune Tenenbaum bargained for in 2004 when he downloaded his music at a time when the recording industry went on the warpath to defend its copyrights.

According to Schwartz, Tenenbaum's case was not helped by flamboyant defense tactics by his attorney, which may have been entertaining (they actually quite entertaining) but were not legally persuasive in the eyes of the court.

We report this because of the parallels between the music and book industries. Filesharing and pirate book websites abound, and because many of them are offshore and impossible to prosecute, the next best tactic may be to sue the downloaders. Read Can You Be Sued for Dowhnloading a Book?

Freemongers who think it's cool to thumb their nose at copyright owners might want to take note of Joel Tenenbaum's experience - and just pay the two dollars.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

You Mean You Can Make a Living Being Honest?

It's a story about the music industry but the implications for the book business are obvious. Eric Pfanner in the New York Times reports that most of those who copy music from pirate and file-sharing websites would not do so if there were a legal and convenient way to buy it.

"Over the past year," Pfanner writes, "as sales of CDs have continued to fall and paid-for downloads from services like Apple’s iTunes have fallen short of hopes, record companies have moved to embrace casual file-sharers. Legal services offering free, unlimited streaming of music, rather than downloads, are proliferating. According to a survey published last week, they are taking some of the wind out of the pirates’ sails.

'Consumers are doing exactly what we said they would do,' said Steve Purdham, chief executive of We7, a service that says it has attracted two million users in Britain in a little more than half a year by offering unlimited access to millions of songs. 'They weren’t saying, "Give me pirated music"; they were saying, "Give me the music I want."'

The result is a sharp decline in the number of teenagers who downloaded unauthorized streamed music, according to a British poll. Pfanner's conclusion? "Rather than cannibalizing existing digital businesses, they say, the new services are often attracting people who previously shared files illegally."

The key to profitability of the service is either a cheap subscription, advertising revenue, or a combination of both. We'll be watching these services closely to see if they make money or if, instead, human nature reverts to the something-for-nothing mentality that has driven so many well-meaning people into the arms of pirates.

Read Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites and see what you think.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

How Swede It is! Pirate Site Sold, New Owners Vow To Go Legit

Global Gaming Factory has acquired buccaneer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, whose operators were sentenced to fines and jail terms after being convicted of copyright infringement. Both companies are Swedish.

The price is close to $8 million. The fines levied on the four owners of the pirate site totaled $14 million, suggesting that crime does pay but not enough to cover losses. The pirates generated enough public sympathy to win a seat in the Swedish legislature, however.

Eric Pfanner, writing in the New York Times, reports that the new owners hope "to turn it into a legal source of free music, movies and other content, using a novel, untested business model." The model? "He envisions charging Internet service providers. The Pirate Bay could also generate revenue from advertising." The new company's owner assures us there will be no further violation of copyrights: “'It has to be legal from Day 1,'” says Hans Pandeya. “'We are on the stock market; we can’t start playing games.'”

Well, Mr. Pandeya, as the old Swedish proverb goes, lots of luck.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

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.”

Swedish Pirate Booty: a Seat in Europe's Parliament

This one's going to blow your minds, folks.

BBC News reports that Sweden's Pirate Party, campaigning on a platform of reforming copyright and patent laws, has won a seat in the European Union's Parliament with 7.1% of the vote.

As we wrote in April, four men involved in the Pirate Bay file-sharing website were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay about $4.5 million in damages. Richard Falkvinge's Pirate Party seized on the high profile suit to rally supporters to a victory in EU parliamentary elections. "Last night, we gained political credibility," Falkvinge gloated as his bloc of one began negotiations with other EU parties for political support and credibility. "People were not taken in by the establishment and we got political trust from the citizens. "

It's hard to know what the citizens of Europe trust about the principles on which the Pirate Party bases its quest for power. "Many people just don't see illegal file-sharing as a crime, however hard the media industries try to persuade the public that it's just as bad as shoplifting," writes BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. Falkvinge enunciated the piracy position succinctly: "The establishment is trying to prevent control of knowledge and culture slipping from their grasp."

Well, now, in a development that will delight freemongers, the Pirate Party has joined the establishment. Read about it in Swedish pirates capture EU seat.

RC

Hachette Dispatches Pirate-Busters to Scribd and Other Peer-to-Peers

Hachette Book Group, tormented by pirated and other unauthorized use of its copyrighted books, has taken aggressive measures to curb these practices, including a face to face meeting with Scribd, the peer to peer file sharing website. Though Scribd has pledged cooperation, its prophylactic protection remains porous enough to alarm many authors, agents and publishers. HBG is pressuring another site, Wattpad, and enlisting the publisher community to join the action.

Hachette has circulated a statement via email to the publishing industry. Below is the text in full.

RC
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As Hachette Book Group’s CEO, David Young, noted in a recent New York Times article, online piracy is “exponentially up.” The rapid growth in e-books has resulted in a dramatic increase in pirated or unauthorized editions on peer-to-peer file sharing websites that allow users to upload, share and download content of all kinds, free of charge. Two such websites, Scribd and Wattpad, are particularly active. While some of the content appearing on these sites is lawful and user-created, an alarming number of unauthorized book titles are uploaded by people without authorization and shared for free on both sites.

HBG is firmly committed to combating this type of blatant online piracy, and our Legal Department reviews those sites on a periodic basis for unlawful copies of a sampling of HBG titles. The Legal Department sends various document sharing sites, including Scribd and Wattpad, numerous copyright infringement take-down notices each month. In addition to the checks being made by our legal department and our editors, we hope that authors and agents will check frequently for infringements and report them to us. The most efficient method of reporting piracy is to complete the Online Piracy Report Form attached and email it to HBG’s Legal Department at piracy@hbgusa.com. We will then pursue the take-down process. If an author or agent is unable to complete the form for any reason, they should notify their editor.

HBG has sent stern legal letters to some of the sites, alerting them to the potential legal recourse for permitting or hosting repeated infringements. HBG is also a member of the AAP’s Online Piracy Working Group (“OPWG”), which coordinates anti-piracy efforts among member publishers. Despite these efforts, we recognize the daunting challenge we all face in combating online copyright infringement. Even when we succeed in getting an author’s titles removed from a site, the same titles can easily pop up again, uploaded by new users.

In an attempt to address the problem head on, HBG recently initiated a face-to-face meeting with Scribd to discuss its antipiracy efforts. Scribd described to us its newly implemented text-matching copyright protection system, which Scribd claims been highly effective at detecting and removing hundreds of unauthorized uploads every day (although it admits that its system is not perfect). Scribd also committed to us that it disables, without notice, the accounts of repeat infringers on a “three-strikes” basis, and that all documents previously posted by that infringer are automatically withdrawn. Scribd pledged that it has a zero tolerance policy for users who post advertisements offering to send pirated e-books to personal email addresses. We discussed ways to strengthen Scribd’s text matching filter and Scribd has recently published a more complete set of antipiracy policies. Scribd recently met with the AAP’s OPWG to discuss its procedures in detail and agreed to follow-up on a number of questions and issues raised by the OPWG.

HBG hopes to persuade Wattpad to implement more robust procedures. Wattpad confirmed recently that they have begun implementing their own text matching filter. We hope that pressure from HBG, other publishers, and the OPWG will cause document sharing sites, such as Scribd and Wattpad, to address this problem proactively.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue. Should you have questions about online piracy, please email us at piracy@hbgusa.com.

This may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, delete immediately, and understand that no disclosure or reliance on the information herein is permitted. Hachette Book Group, Inc. may monitor email to and from our network.

Click here for Hachette's Online Piracy Report Form.

Stephenie Meyer, Ursula Le Guin, J. K. Rowling Mugged

Digital pirates have good taste; they've stolen Stephenie Meyers' Twilight, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling.

These are some prominent victims of digital piracy, according to the New York Times's Motoko Rich, who notes that while the crime was bad enough in the age of print, it's become pandemic in the e-book era when digital files are so easy to pilfer. Rich cites such websites as Scribd and Wattpad and file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire. Scribd asserts it has stepped up efforts to police its site, but filters are pretty porous and it's not that hard to pass off a copyrighted work. Many websites wear pursuers down with legal maneuvering and place on authors the burden of proof of ownership of the copyright, adding insult to injury.

Lawyers, agents, publishers, and authors themselves have been working time-and-a-half to subdue perps but, as Science Fiction Writers of America president Russell Davis, himself an author, says, “It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole...You knock one down and five more spring up.”

And, says Hachette CEO David Young, “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented." And Young doesn't mean presented through authorized channels. "John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the 'Dummies' series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies," writes Rich. "Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books."

Freemeister Cory Doctorow is not bothered, taking the position that giving away content - even having it taken by pirates - leads new readers to his door, where they will ultimately purchase his books. If tenure on the bestseller list is any measure, his philosophy and strategy are working. Here's how Doctorow justifies it: “I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy. It’s obscurity.”

Harlan Ellison has never had a problem with obscurity, but he fearlessly sued an Internet service provider for its failure to stop someone from displaying some of his stories. "Since settling that suit," Rich reports, "he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. 'If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,'" he told her.

We've reported extensively on efforts to control book piracy, including the conviction of the operators of a file-sharing website. You might also check out our ruminations on whether you can be sued for downloading a book.

RC

Can You Be Sued for Downloading a Book?

E-book piracy is a billion dollar business, and a good percentage of it comes from user-generated shared files. Pirate websites list millions of these files, enabling visitors to download music, movies, pictures, and e-book texts that their Internet peers are sharing, all free. As E-Reads' Michael Gaudet pointed out in his analysis of e-book piracy, "Most of the listed files are ripped from purchased media, and in some cases they are leaked material that has yet to be made available at retail."

Though the operators of pirate websites are cagey and some are downright defiant, a recent Swedish court decision found four co-founders of one such site, Pirate Bay, guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement. The perpetrators have each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total).

While copyright owners rejoice in the decision, their happiness may be short-lived, for there are numerous websites ready to take Pirate Bay's place. If the beast grows ten more heads, legitimate publishers may be forced to seek other measures. One of them is to sue visitors to these sites who download shared files. People like, um...you?

Surely, no book publisher is going to sue some kid for sharing an e-book file, right? Well...

Consider the case of one Patricia Santangelo of Wappingers Falls, N. Y. It happens that four years ago she was one of thousands of people accused of illegally downloading and distributing music. They were sued by the Recording Industry Association in a bid to make an example of ordinary people whose file-sharing activities were draining publishers and recording artists of legitimate, copyright-protected revenue. The plaintiffs didn't care how much it cost to bring the action - that's how much it meant to them.

Many of those sued settled, but Ms. Santangelo decided to fight it out in court. According to the New York Times, "The industry eventually dropped its suit against the mother. But it filed a new one against two of her children, Michelle and Robert, ages 20 and 16 at the time." Just recently her family and the recording industry reached a settlement, and it will cost the Santangelos $7,000. They have denied wrongdoing.

So we ask again: can a book publisher or association of publishers sue participants downloading texts from an e-book file sharing site? The answer is - sure. Would a judge throw the suit out as frivolous? Not if he or she bought into the arguments of such righteously indignant copyright owners as the victim who recently posted a blog asserting that piracy was no better than mugging or shoplifting.

See you in court.

RC

Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn't Think So

"Before you click that download link at a torrent site or megaupload or sendspace ask yourself one question. If I was in a bookstore, would I just drop this book in my purse and walk out of the store? Because that is exactly what you are doing when you download a book without buying it." So says Delilah K. Stephans in a blog entitled "Think before you download".

It's easy to talk theoretically about crime as long as nobody puts a face on the victim. Stephans puts a face on a victim of e-piracy and it's her own.

"My book sells for $2.99 of that I make just over a dollar on every sale. So if say 50 people download the book those 50 people have reached into my wallet and removed a $50. What if it was a hundred? A thousand? Now, ask yourself would I reach in a stranger’s pocket and take a fifty? Of course you wouldn’t. Recently a fellow author found his book on a pirate site – there were 150 downloads. That’s 150 books or in his case $300.00 that was stolen from him."

The author asks, "Do I think you are evil if you pirate a book? Of course not." But why not, Ms. Stephans? Last time we looked, stealing was a breach of the eighth commandment. Some may shrug off e-piracy as a misdemeanor, but there is no footnote for "Thou Shalt Not Steal" distinguishing between e-books and bank vaults.

So, we support Ms. Stephans's admonition: "Before you click that download button – consider the money you are pulling out of the author’s wallet."

RC

Aarrr! Pirates Forced To Walk The Plank Thanks To Latest Swedish Court Ruling

The other shoe dropped for the Pirate Bay today (news here, and for the first act, see The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For a Generation of Blackbeards). The four co-defendants were each found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement in a Swedish court. The court's documents say that the Pirate Bay co-founders helped promote theft and so they've each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total). If the judgment stands, maybe the next files they'll be looking to share in secret will be in a cake.

Sweden had already been strengthening its reputation for being hard on piracy since they recently began requesting that local internet service providers log all the IP addresses of computers involved in file sharing starting at the beginning of this month. Consequently, Swedish internet traffic has fallen by over 30% (see this BBC article). If something similar were to be enacted in the U.S., it could be decried as further infringement on our right to privacy and it wouldn't be tolerated well at all.

Much is going to be made about this Swedish court decision and the forthcoming appeals in the short term, but it's hard to predict if the outcome is really going to deliver much of a blow to file sharing in general until the stigma of copyright transgressions is something that's educated effectively to scoffing young users.

The Pirate Bay is akin to a fleet of off-shore gambling boats floating in international waters. Even while the main defendants are caught up in Swedish courts, the operations can and probably will continue under the supervision of other affiliated groups. And it's not like the Navy can escort our copyrighted materials. So, while this news is fresh validation for the media rights holders, it's still not the end of the battle.

- Michael Gaudet

The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For A Generation Of Blackbeards

Perhaps the most significant issue emerging in 21st century publishing is the tension between copyright protection and a general sense of entitlement expressed in the motto, "Information Wants To Be Free." Though we've tried to take a balanced view, it's hard to be neutral in the face of blatant, institutionalized piracy. As the legal and moral issues come to a head in a trial that has just commenced, E-Reads' Michael Gaudet analyzes the cynical and contemptuous justifications given by the operators of one website trafficking in copyrighted work. Unnamed and unindicted in the Swedish proceedings are, in Michael's words, "millions of tempted, anonymous Internet users in homes around the world." Would one of them happen to be you?

- Richard Curtis

This week in Sweden, the people behind the infamous website 'The Pirate Bay' are going to trial again for facilitating copyright infringement among file sharers. It isn't the first time Sweden has tried to take them down on behalf of plaintiffs like Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. But this international group has proven to be a lot more slippery than past violation targets like Napster in the United States.

The defendants have launched a full blown new media campaign they call "#Spectrial" to promote their defense, speak about their motivations, and mock the proceedings. After the first day at trial, the prosecution decided that half of the charges probably wouldn't stand up against The Pirate Bay (reported by the UK Register) and the defendants began to boast more loudly that their movement won't be stopped (“EPIC WINNING LOL,” was what one of them commented on Twitter).

Even though The Pirate Bay doesn't distribute any illegal files itself, its website is essentially an enormous pirate map that lists millions of user-generated shared files, so that visitors from all over the world can quickly find music, movies, pictures, and e-book texts that their internet peers are sharing. Most of the listed files are ripped from purchased media, and in some cases they are leaked material that has yet to be made available at retail.

The Pirate Bay Makes No Apologies For Promoting Theft

The Pirate Bay's advocacy for unrestricted file sharing is one of the most confounding issues for modern publishers with digital distribution. Evangelists for piracy appeal for protection by evoking moral outrage at the injustice of governments policing private communication and hindering fair use. And they raise some difficult questions: does DRM curb our most basic liberties to communicate and creatively manipulate new ideas? Is copyright unlawful? Is copyright infringement fair retribution for inefficient corporate distribution practices? Should governments keep all internet traffic private? A grassroots movement to protect the opportunity to share pirated files says the answer to all of the above is an overwhelming "yes."

All the defendants (Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström) sincerely believe they've done no wrong in ignoring all the requests from copyright holders to prevent the copyright abuse rampant among the Pirate Bay users (see their page of dozens of spurned "takedown" notices and Pirate Bay retorts - "Legal Threats Against The Pirate Bay").

When asked if they felt like "defendants, or defenders of technology,” Peter Sunde replied: "I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case - the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.” (sic, via TorrentFreak)

A screen grab of the "Top 100 Audio Files" at The Pirate Bay (click for larger version)

If you're relatively unfamiliar with The Pirate Bay, keep in mind that it's a short but important part of the file-sharing wheel using a technology derived from BitTorrent software. BitTorrent, Inc. is the San Francisco-based company that helped develop the technology to assist everyday users in distributing files more efficiently, and while they now have partnerships with many of the plaintiffs, BitTorrent and the similar companies designing software based on BitTorrent have no control over how The Pirate Bay operates.

As More People Share A Seed, A Torrent Gets Faster

When users want to share a file from their computer, they create a "torrent", which is a small proxy file that is "seeded" to the internet, allowing anonymous users to find and download the master file. The benefit is that download speeds typically increase when many users are sharing the same file. If you download without sharing, you're identified by the system as a leecher (to encourage reciprocity). The Pirate Bay servers are what is known as a torrent tracker, a website where torrent seeds are listed by anonymous users like classified ads. Visitors can sort through pages of organized listings for seeds of the latest television shows, albums, and movies that users dare to share. A quick glance at today's "Top 100" listings showed that the most popular movie to download at that moment was a pirated version of The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008), with over 16,000 people actively sharing the file at any given moment, meaning that the whole film could likely be downloaded in less than half an hour.

Even though The Pirate Bay is the most famous destination, other popular torrent tracker sites exist, frequently below the radar of Google and other internet search engines because they list files that break copyright laws.

Keeping It Off The Record

With a name like "The Pirate Bay," no one believes the group's intentions were entirely legitimate to demonstrate freedoms. The Pirate Bay was designed to harbor pirate traffic safely from government authorities. Individual torrents communicate across the users' computers, not over The Pirate Bay servers, which makes the technology so popular with anonymous users anxious to avoid obvious digital trails that could turn up on court seized computers. Anonymous tracker websites are usually expensive to maintain, because the visiting traffic requires remote servers and extensive bandwidth that can cost a small fortune each month to keep online. The Pirate Bay sells advertising space on its website to offset these costs, however it's unknown what their revenue really is.

“We know that about 80% of all the traffic on the internet is torrent related. About half of these 80% are our traffic. Therefor, 40% of all internet traffic is passing through The Pirate Bay." (sic) - Peter Sunde

If that's truly the case, then it's safe to assume they've had the opportunity to capitalize on their traffic, benefiting them more than covering basic infrastructure costs, which is why MGM, Microsoft, and the others feel they will be compensated for the requested $14 million in damages by The Pirate Bay with this latest trial. The defendants insist they haven't become rich and they won't be able to pay any possible court ordered payments - another reason they believe the whole case against them is misguided.

"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," said their lawyer, Per Samuelsson. (The Local)

The effort to shut down The Pirate Bay website and stem the flow of illegal material is unlikely to happen with this court case (or ever, because of their server fail safes - Wired, 2006). The Pirate Bay has been dodging legal bullets for many years by disrespecting lawsuits, hiding its practices, and cleverly documenting that it is not actually ever in possession of the offending material. As difficult as it is to prosecute individuals who are caught with illegally obtained files, it's actually much more complex to argue that the network technology itself is partially liable, especially when the technology is constantly evolving. It's much like trying to shut down the entire English language so that individuals can't utter offensive (or proprietary) words, especially when the individuals are using Morse code.

But the underbelly of this incredible defense of technology is that the primary use of The Pirate Bay is to traffic valuable media for free without the consent of copyright owners and to obfuscate the thieves' trails. The prosecutors are hoping to make it clear that The Pirate Bay's intentions are malicious, and eventually someone will succeed.

Theft Prevention Vs. Freedom On The Internet

The current trade-off for a marketplace that employs copyright is that some usages will be unfairly prohibited and some theft is to be expected, but the marketplace is broader because of the overall financial incentive to content creators. If the courts should ever decide that an individual's right to privately communicate over the internet, even if it's to share stolen material, is worth more to society than copyright protection and Draconian preventative measures, most digital media would be rendered worthless to retailers and there would be a dangerous upheaval for most industries. Luckily for publishers, the file sharing crisis isn't seen by authorities as the "freedom" case The Pirate Bay wants it to be. But nervous industries are still trying to placate disgruntled internet users by finding acceptable common ground, like cheaper, DRM-free MP3 sales, to keep their content from being further devalued by theft.

Companies that are slow at adapting to new market demands to ease theft prevention are facing the worst of the backlash from consumers. Many of the anonymous users of The Pirate Bay are also quick to complain that they can't afford the high prices of the latest entertainment media and software tools, or that they can't buy it in the formats they want (high bit-rate audio files, DivX, etc.). They also feel that "free" acquisition contributes valuable mind share and publicity for companies, which turns into revenue in the future; the popularity of a hit album in file sharing circles might mean more long-term sales because the number of satisfied listeners increases (although the correlation is a dubious one outside of the most exceptional scenarios, such as Radiohead's release of In Rainbows). Some file sharers gloat how they enjoy "sticking it to the man" as retribution. And more and more are arguing that copyright itself is an unfair hegemonic practice that has evolved into a monster (see Richard Stallman's "Misinterpreting Copyright"). This attitude hasn't diminished any in the 8 years since the court rulings that shut down Napster. But it's unclear how many people tacitly understand that these arguments are all being used in defense of negligence to pay what content creators have asked for their work.

Ultimately, The Pirate Bay is quickly becoming more than just another famous example of how the internet offers temptations to transgress social taboos and ignore local authority. Its enormous scale indicates that it has become the latest spearhead of a generation's full-on war against copyrights and preventions against theft. And, what's worse is that today's court battles can't represent the best defense when the real fight takes place daily in the minds of millions of tempted, anonymous internet users in homes around the world.

- Michael Gaudet

Music Biz Pirates a Page from Pirates' Playbook. Lesson for Book Publishers?

The Nokia cellphone you buy will Come With Music. The capital letters are intentional: purchase of the phone entitles you to unlimited downloads from a catalogue of more than five million tracks, according to Eric Pfanner of the New York Times. "Comes With Music" is the name of the benefit that comes with your purchase.

This is the latest ploy in the music industry's war on pirates, and of course we're not necessarily talking about an organized cabal of evil offshore thieves, but also about garden variety citizens who simply can't understand what's wrong with ripping a CD, even though the accompanying text has one of those funny (c) symbols next to the song title, composer or performer.

Does this mean the music business has finally surrendered to the Music Wants to Be Free Army? Not at all. When you buy that Nokia, the price of the "free" music is built into the price of the gadget. “Two thousand nine should be the year when the music industry stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb,” Pfanner quotes Feargal Sharkey, head of UK Music, a trade group for the British music industry.

The Nokia scheme is just one of a number of strategies employed by the music industry to counter piracy. You can read about others in Pfanner's Music Industry Imitates Digital Pirates to Turn a Profit.

The same issues confronting music are operative in book piracy, and the Nokia approach may be appropriate for manufacturers of e-book reading devices as well. But it is the polar opposite of what might be termed the "King Gillette Strategy". Gillette, the genius who invented disposable razor blade and founded the shaving products business named after him, exhorted emulators to give away the razor and sell the blades. Nokia is selling the razor and giving away the blades.

Which is the better business model? Though disposable and electric razors rendered the question moot, when it comes to music and literature I'm with Gillette.

Richard Curtis