The below announcement from the Authors Guild reports that Barnes & Noble has acceded to pleas from the Guild not to make authors collateral damage in the war with Amazon over the latter’s business practices including exclusive content agreements.

Here’s the Guild’s announcement in full:

Richard Curtis

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Here’s some welcome news: Barnes & Noble has agreed to our request to bring Marshall Cavendish children’s books back to their stores’ shelves. By our count, more than 250 authors and 150 illustrators have been affected.

How these books got pulled in the first place is a lesson in how exclusive content agreements have begun balkanizing the book marketplace.

In December, Amazon Publishing purchased Marshall Cavendish’s children’s book list, more than 450 children’s and young adult titles. The next month, Barnes & Noble announced that it would not be stocking any Amazon published titles in its stores. B&N released a statement from Jaime Carey, its chief merchandising officer, saying that it would not stock books published by Amazon, “based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent.”

With this announcement, B&N pulled Marshall Cavendish children’s books from its shelves. For Debby Dahl Edwardson, the timing could not have been worse or more devastating. Her most recent book, “My Name is Not Easy,” had been selected as a 2011 National Book Award Finalist. This sort of recognition can transform an author’s career, and authors typically visit countless bookstores to make the most of such opportunities. Ms. Edwardson, however, found her opportunity drastically curtailed. Barnes & Noble removed her book from its shelves (including from the shelves of its store in Fairbanks, Alaska, the one nearest the author’s North Slope home) about two months after the National Book Awards ceremony.

As we’ve made clear over the last several years, we’re very concerned with Amazon’s rapidly growing dominance of bookselling. Exclusive content is a big part of that story. With $9 billion in cash, Amazon can afford to cut more deals as it did with DC Comics to acquire exclusive e-book rights to titles, as it tries to gain the upper hand in the e-reader and tablet market.

So we’re sympathetic to the position of brick-and-mortar booksellers, even the largest of them: this isn’t a fair fight, by any stretch. Still, it’s essential that authors and readers not become collateral damage. The authors and illustrators who signed contracts with Marshall Cavendish had no way of anticipating that the publisher would assign their contracts to Amazon. For these authors to lose their vital showroom presence in Barnes & Noble stores was clearly unfair and harmful. Children’s books, especially picture books, need to be seen to be appreciated by readers.

We fear that more and bigger battles in bookselling and book publishing loom in the months ahead. For the sake of authors and readers, we hope those fighting it out will avoid using access to vital literary marketplaces as a weapon.

Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. Amazon is seizing an ever-growing share of the bookselling market, but it’s after far bigger game. Deploying some of its cash to buy publishers with deep backlists is an inexpensive way for Amazon to ensure that its Kindle Fire is an essential device to many readers, who then can be sold movies, TV shows, and music through the platform. Amazon’s history suggests it won’t be shy in these efforts.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble isn’t backing down. Its executives made clear to us that it is making this exception because it announced the policy after Amazon announced its purchase of the Marshall Cavendish titles. For any new Amazon acquisitions, Barnes & Noble’s policy is to ban the books from their shelves.

For now, however, some good news for Marshall Cavendish authors and illustrators.
We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

This statement from Authors Guild President Scott Turow just in…
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Dear member,

Yesterday’s reports that the Justice Department may be near filing an antitrust lawsuit against five large trade book publishers and Apple is grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether those publishers colluded in adopting a new model, pioneered by Apple for its sale of iTunes and apps, for selling e-books. Under that model, Apple simply acts as the publisher’s sales agent, with no authority to discount prices.

We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing. We do know that collusion wasn’t necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple’s offer and clung to it like a life raft. Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open.

Just before Amazon introduced the Kindle, it convinced major publishers to break old practices and release books in digital form at the same time they released them as hardcovers. Then Amazon dropped its bombshell: as it announced the launch of the Kindle, publishers learned that Amazon would be selling countless frontlist e-books at a loss. This was a game-changer, and not in a good way. Amazon’s predatory pricing would shield it from e-book competitors that lacked Amazon’s deep pockets.

Critically, it also undermined the hardcover market that brick-and-mortar stores depend on. It was as if Netflix announced that it would stream new movies the same weekend they opened in theaters. Publishers, though reportedly furious, largely acquiesced. Amazon, after all, already controlled some 75% of the online physical book market.

Amazon quickly captured the e-book market as well, bringing customers into its proprietary device-and-format walled garden (Sony, the prior e-book device leader, uses the open ePub format). Two years after it introduced the Kindle, Amazon continued to take losses on a deep list of e-book titles, undercutting hardcover sales of the most popular frontlist titles at its brick and mortar competitors. Those losses paid huge dividends. By the end of 2009, Amazon held an estimated 90% of the rapidly growing e-book market. Traditional bookstores were shutting down or scaling back. Borders was on its knees. Barnes & Noble had gamely just begun selling its Nook, but it lacked the capital to absorb e-book losses for long.

Enter Steve Jobs. Two years ago January, one month after B&N shipped its first Nook, Jobs introduced Apple’s iPad, with its proven iTunes-and-apps agency model for digital content. Five of the largest publishers jumped on with Apple’s model, even though it meant those publishers would make less money on every e-book they sold.

Publishers had no real choice (except the largest, Random House, which could bide its time – it took the leap with the launch of the iPad 2): it was seize the agency model or watch Amazon’s discounting destroy their physical distribution chain. Bookstores were well along the path to becoming as rare as record stores. That’s why we publicly backed Macmillan when Amazon tried to use its online print book dominance to enforce its preferred e-book sales terms, even though Apple’s agency model also meant lower royalties for authors.

Our concern about bookstores isn’t rooted in sentiment: bookstores are critical to modern bookselling. Marketing studies consistently show that readers are far more adventurous in their choice of books when in a bookstore than when shopping online. In bookstores, readers are open to trying new genres and new authors: it’s by far the best way for new works to be discovered. Publishing shouldn’t have to choose between bricks and clicks. A robust book marketplace demands both bookstore showrooms to properly display new titles and online distribution for the convenience of customers. Apple thrives on this very model: a strong retail presence to display its high-touch products coupled with vigorous online distribution. While bookstores close, Apple has been busy opening more than 300 stores.

For those of us who have been fortunate enough to become familiar to large numbers of readers, the disappearance of bookstores is deeply troubling, but it will have little effect on our sales or incomes. Like rock bands from the pre-Napster era, established authors can still draw a crowd, if not to a stadium, at least to a virtual shopping cart. For new authors, however, a difficult profession is poised to become much more difficult. The high royalties of direct publishing, for most, are more than offset by drastically smaller markets. And publishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. They will necessarily focus their capital on what works in an online environment: familiar works by familiar authors.

Two years after the agency model came to bookselling, Amazon is losing its chokehold on the e-book market: its share has fallen from about 90% to roughly 60%. Customers are benefiting from the surprisingly innovative e-readers Barnes & Noble’s investments have delivered, including a tablet device that beat Amazon to the market by fully twelve months. Brick-and-mortar bookstores are starting to compete through their partnership with Google, so loyal customers can buy e-books from them at the same price as they would from Amazon. Direct-selling authors have also benefited, as Amazon more than doubled its royalty rates in the face of competition.

Let’s hope the reports are wrong, or that the Justice Department reconsiders. The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.

This would be tragic for all of us who value books, and the culture they support.

Sincerely,

Scott Turow
President

If you’re a fan of  Clash of the Titans you’re in for a real treat: two titanic lobbying groups are on a collision course.  Ground zero for the impact is the United States Congress. The issue is piracy.

Bills currently being written in House of Representatives committees are aimed at curbing search engines like Google and Yahoo that link to illegal file sharing and bitTorrent websites, and stopping payment facilitators like PayPal that enable transactions for unauthorized books, movies and music. (In fact, you can use Google to link to free versions of Clash of the Titans here, but we urge you to be very careful  clicking on links to free downloads as they may be phishing for your bank account information.)

Among the parties lobbying for passage of a tough law are the movie and music business, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the book industry (see Authors Guild President Scott Turow’s testimony before Congress). Even big unions like the AFL-CIO are pushing for passage, because piracy, particularly the offshore brand, steals American jobs.

On the other side of the issue are Yahoo, Google, Mozilla, the Tea Party and a lobby-full of freeists including, predictably, the Civil Liberties Union, all rallying under the banner of Down With Censorship. “Naturally,” writes Edward Wyatt in the New York Times (Lines Drawn on Antipiracy Bills), “the howls of protest have been loud and lavishly financed, not only from Silicon Valley companies but also from public-interest groups, free-speech advocates and even venture capital investors. They argue — in TV and newspaper ads — that the bills are so broad and heavy-handed that they threaten to close Web sites and broadband service providers and stifle free speech, while setting a bad example of American censorship.”

“Google itself,” Wyatt informs us,  “has hired at least 15 lobbying firms to fight the bills; Mozilla has included on its Firefox browser home page a link to a petition with the warning, ‘Congress is trying to censor the Internet.’” Texas representative Lamar Smith takes a different view of the Silicon Valley pressure groups: “They’ve made large profits by promoting rogue sites to U.S. consumers,” he contends.

Last May, when Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt declared in unequivocal terms that he opposed any effort to curtail Google’s right to link to piracy websites like Pirate Bay, we declared “Game Over.“  Now, with US lawmakers taking up the issue, there’s a glimmer of hope that the game is back on.

But it’s only a glimmer, and if our legislators are true to form, the Right-to-Information promoters will either kill the bill or water it down to the same kind of joke that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That piece of legislation is ostensibly designed to punish pirates, but the Silicon Mafia prevailed on the lawmakers to create a “Safe Harbor” provision that gives accused infringers a period of time in which to respond to accusations. Safe Harbor also puts the burden of proof on rights holders, causing them to go through  hoops of flame to prove they are the true owners of the stolen content.

We have been criticized for supporting tough antipiracy measures because they might lead to government censorship. The chances of the pendulum swinging from its current position to state censorship are so absurdly long they are not worth discussing.  Meanwhile, the pirates continue to screw legitimate copyright owners while the search engines hold down their arms and legs.

Richard Curtis

This afternoon, we filed suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan and four other universities over their storage and use of millions of copyright-protected books. The press release follows. AUTHORS AND AUTHORS’ GROUPS FROM AUSTRALIA, QUEBEC, THE U.K., AND U.S. SUE HATHITRUST, THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, AND FOUR OTHER U.S. UNIVERSITIES FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT Digital Files Provided by Google at Issue, As Plaintiffs Seek to Impound Unauthorized Scans of 7 Million Copyright-Protected Books, Pending Congressional Action NEW YORK – The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. Plaintiff authors include children’s book author and illustrator Pat Cummings, novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Danièle Simpson, and Fay Weldon, poet André Roy, Columbia University professor and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning biographer T.J. Stiles. The universities obtained from Google unauthorized scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books, the rights to which are held by authors in dozens of countries. The universities have pooled the unauthorized files in a repository organized by the University of Michigan called HathiTrust. In June, Michigan announced plans to permit unlimited downloads by its students and faculty members of copyright-protected works it deems “orphans” according to rules the school has established. Other universities joined in Michigan’s project in August. The first set of so-called orphans, 27 works by French, Russian, and American authors, are scheduled to be released to an estimated 250,000 students and faculty members on October 13th. An additional 140 books, including works in Spanish, Yiddish, French, and Russian, are to be released starting in November. “This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it to some, but writing books is an author’s real-life work and livelihood. This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books.” “I was stunned when I learned of this,” said Danièle Simpson, president of UNEQ. “How are authors from Quebec, Italy or Japan to know that their works have been determined to be ‘orphans’ by a group in Ann Arbor, Michigan? If these colleges can make up their own rules, then won’t every college and university, in every country, want to do the same?” The complaint also questions the security of the 7 million unauthorized digital files. The numbers are staggering. The universities have, without permission, digitized and loaded onto HathiTrust’s online servers thousands of editions, in various translations, of works by Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Bernard Clavel, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Michel Houellebecq, Clarice Lispector, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburō Ōe, Octavio Paz, and Jose Saramago, among countless other authors. Works from nearly every nation have been digitized. HathiTrust’s databases house more than 65,000 works published in the year 2001, for example, including thousands of works published that year in China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, and the U.K., and hundreds from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, The Netherlands, The Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. “These books, because of the universities’ and Google’s unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk,” said Authors Guild president Scott Turow. “Even if it weren’t for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we’d have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors shouldn’t have to trust their works to a group that’s making up the rules as it goes along.” Google’s library scanning project is already the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit in New York. A status conference in that case is scheduled before Judge Denny Chin this Thursday, September 15. Attorneys Edward Rosenthal and Jeremy Goldman of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz are representing plaintiffs.

In what Publishers Weekly aptly describes as “a stunning setback”, the judge poring over the Google Book Settlement for more than a year rejected it as “not fair, adequate, and reasonable.”

The judge, Denny Chin, said that while he recognized the importance of Google’s initiative in digitizing countless books, he also felt that Google had dealt itself an unfair advantage over the competition. ”While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far…Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

Of course, when Google undertook to digitize millions of printed books there was scarcely anything by way of competition, and it was only after Google brought forth its achievement that competitors appeared to cry “unfair.” (See Jealous Rivals Determined to Tank Google Settlement?) The Authors Guild among others brought a lawsuit but reached a settlement with Google that it hoped would satisfy all parties. It satisfied all of them except the one that counted – Judge Chin.

On the bright side Chin noted that a rather simple fix could persuade him to reverse his position. Instead of offering authors the negative option of optioning out of the settlement, he suggested the positive approach of letting authors choose to opt in.

“As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an opt-out settlement to an opt-in settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.”

To read the complete decision click here.

Scott Turow launched his legal thriller career with Presumed Innocent. But his testimony before the Senate on piracy, in his capacity of President of the Author’s Guild, could have been called J’Accuse. What he was accusing Congress of was enabling copyright piracy to destroy literary and artistic creativity in the United States.

Turow had been invited to enlighten lawmakers about the devastating effect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 piece of legislation designed to punish digital thieves.  Tragically (we use this term deliberately), a provision of DMCA lets criminals off the hook, with the result that authors and other legitimate copyright owners stand by helplessly as these larcenists dance around the ruins of their labors. (See Takedown Notices: Antipiracy Weapon or Exercise in Futility?)

The DCMA, according to Wikipedia, “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works.”

Well and good. But powerful Internet service providers lobbied for an escape hatch called “Safe Harbor”, which says that if an ISP is notified by a copyright owner that that ISP is carrying infringing or allegedly infringing content and promptly removes or blocks access to that content, the ISP does not incur liability.

That’s the theory. In practice, pirates plying this safe harbor make it almost impossible to get ISPs to take down stolen files.  What is worse, the fileswappers and hijackers are being egged on by Information-Wants-To-Be-Freeists, counseled by misguided libertarians and pampered by do-gooders whose pockets have never been picked. To hear these pilferers whining about being harassed by legitimate copyright owners, you have to wonder who is the victim of whom (See Is This Watchdog Guarding the Bad Guys?).

That’s the background for Guild President Turow’s devastating testimony before the Senate, which finally considered the trillion dollar piracy cesspool to be worthy of its attention.  Just a week before, he and two Guild colleagues had run a clever op-ed piece in the New York Times speculating Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? But on this occasion he was deadly grim. For a full transcript of Turow’s testimony you may click here. Here are some extracts.

“After 300 years as one of history’s greatest public policy successes,” he told the lawmakers, “copyright is coming undone. As we meet here this morning, our well-intended policy toward copyright online is undermining our virtual and physical markets for creative works. That policy is in desperate need of update. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ‘safe harbor’ for online service providers has turned out to be an exploitable gold mine for unscrupulous online enterprises. That safe harbor allows these rogue enterprises to profit from services that encourage and conceal the trafficking in stolen books, music, and movies, while disclaiming responsibility for that illegal traffic. The DMCA safe harbor has turned copyright’s incentives inside out, encouraging massive, global investment in piracy technologies and services…

“We have, inadvertently and with the best of intentions, instituted a policy that not only tolerates, but encourages investments in technologies and services that undermine our markets for creative work. We have, oddly but unmistakably, created the ideal environment for nurturing an innovative, global, networked industry that directly profits from trafficking in stolen books, music, and movies. In a digital age, where tipping points are always close at hand, the pirate economy can subvert an industry in a heartbeat…

“One is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: it operates in plain sight, as I will describe. Money clearly suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work. Excluded from this flow of cash are the authors, musicians, songwriters and the publishers who invest in them. The only benefit to the individual author is a parody of a benefit: that the work of the author will be better known.”

Turow offered five recommendations for reversing the assault on copyright:

1. Make online file-sharing service providers liable for facilitating the trafficking in stolen books, music, and movies if they frequently host and distribute stolen creative works or provide services that regularly facilitate the secret or rapid transmission of stolen creative work.
2. Require online file-sharing service providers to register an agent for service of process for copyright infringement actions with the Copyright Office as a condition to accepting credit card payments from the U.S. or ad feeds from U.S. online advertising suppliers.
3. Remove the DMCA safe harbors for online and Internet service providers that provide routine access to online file-sharing service providers that a federal court has found guilty of Facilitating the Trafficking in Stolen Books, Music, and Movies.
4. Remove the DMCA safe harbors for online and Internet service providers that provide routine access to online file-sharing service providers that have not registered an agent for service of process for copyright infringement actions and for which the Copyright Office has received at least 50 DMCA take-down notices.
5. Ensure that new legislative action can keep pace with developing technologies.

We’ve never been ones for urging anyone to write their congressperson, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  Write your congressperson.

Richard Curtis

Testimony Before the Senate of novelist Scott Turow, President of the Authors Guild.

My name is Scott Turow. I’m the president of the Authors Guild, the largest society of published authors in the U.S., representing more than 8,500 book authors and freelance writers. Our members represent the broad sweep of American authorship, including literary and genre fiction, nonfiction, trade, academic, and children’s book authors, textbook authors, freelance journalists and poets. Guild members have won countless honors and all major literary awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Authors Guild promotes the professional interests of authors: we’re advocates for effective copyright protection, fair contracts, and free expression.
It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here this morning. I’d like especially to thank this committee for recognizing the severity of the problem we all face and getting the ball rolling with COICA in the fall, which recognized this central and unavoidable truth: any serious attempt to address online piracy must address the third-party enablers of infringement. Anything that doesn’t address those enablers is, frankly, a pretend solution to a real problem.

Our Copyright Policy Inadvertently Encourages Investments in Technologies and Services That Promote Trafficking in Stolen Books, Music, and Movies

After 300 years as one of history’s greatest public policy successes, copyright is coming undone. As we meet here this morning, our well-intended policy toward copyright online is undermining our virtual and physical markets for creative works. That policy is in desperate need of update. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” for online service providers has turned out to be an exploitable gold mine for unscrupulous online enterprises. That safe harbor allows these rogue enterprises to profit from services that encourage and conceal the trafficking in stolen books, music, and movies, while disclaiming responsibility for that illegal traffic. The DMCA safe harbor has turned copyright’s incentives inside out, encouraging massive, global investment in piracy technologies and services.

Our nation’s founders gave Congress the authority to enact copyright laws “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Copyright laws do this by establishing legally protected markets for creative work. Those laws, and those markets, have worked beyond any reasonable expectation our founders could have had. Copyright’s markets have for hundreds of years encouraged authors here and abroad to spend countless hours writing books that they hope readers will value and the marketplace will reward. Nonfiction authors spend thousands of hours immersing themselves in their chosen subjects — poring over documents, interviewing experts, examining and interpreting facts, theories and events – with the hope that they will be able to contribute something new to public discourse on their subjects and that they will express it in a way that will resonate with readers. Novelists strive to entertain readers and perhaps shed some light on our world and our place in it. Children’s book authors devote themselves to reaching our nation’s youngest minds, using literature to entertain and enlighten them in ways that no other medium can.

Copyright’s markets have also drawn massive, irreplaceable investments from publishers and others in our intellectual and cultural life. Those investments have paid off. Our great research libraries, holding the carefully crafted thoughts, composed over billions of hours by many of our nation’s finest minds, are ample proof that copyright has succeeded brilliantly. So is our nation’s economic success, nurtured by the books that have educated and informed our citizens throughout its history.
We have, inadvertently and with the best of intentions, instituted a policy that not only tolerates, but encourages investments in technologies and services that undermine our markets for creative work. We have, oddly but unmistakably, created the ideal environment for nurturing an innovative, global, networked industry that directly profits from trafficking in stolen books, music, and movies. In a digital age, where tipping points are always close at hand, the pirate economy can subvert an industry in a heartbeat.

One is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: it operates in plain sight, as I will describe. Money clearly suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work. Excluded from this flow of cash are the authors, musicians, songwriters and the publishers who invest in them. The only benefit to the individual author is a parody of a benefit: that the work of the author will be better known. Authors and artists have always been free to give away their work to build an audience, but there had always been the prospect of making a bit of money in the end, that there would be a functioning market to take advantage of. That prospect is disappearing before our eyes.

Piracy has all but dismantled our recorded music industry. Any business plan in the music industry must now take into account that piracy is the rule, not the exception. In this environment, about the only value a legitimate provider can add is convenience and safety — the comfort in knowing that the downloaded music is genuine and contains no malicious code. Finding comparisons for the state of the recorded music industry is a near impossibility, because the situation has no precedent. It’s as if shopkeepers in some strange land were compelled to operate with a wide-open side doors that would-be customers can sneak out of with impunity, arms laden with goods. In that bizarre place, an ever-growing array of businesses that profit only if the side exit is used eagerly assist the would-be customers, leaving the shopkeeper with only one thing to offer paying customers: the dignity of exiting through the front door.
To get a sense of the scope of the problem we face, I’ll describe a couple of businesses operating in the pirate economy.

Case Study #1: BTGuard.com
BitTorrent, a landmark technological development for trading stolen digital works online, is wildly popular. It’s estimated to account for 18% of global Internet traffic. According to its website:
BitTorrent is the global standard for delivering high-quality files over the Internet. With an installed base of over 160 million clients worldwide, BitTorrent technology has turned conventional distribution economics on its head. The more popular a large video, audio or software file, the faster and cheaper it can be transferred with BitTorrent. The result is a better digital entertainment experience for everyone.
(http://www.bittorrent.com/btusers/what-is-bittorrent.)

Though its defenders and promoters proudly point to a handful of legitimate uses for BitTorrent technology, everyone knows the real, primary use of the technology: BitTorrent is to stealing movies, TV shows, music, videogames, and now books what bolt-cutters are to stealing bicycles. A recent study of BitTorrent traffic showed that of the 10,000 most popular files torrented, 63.7% were “non-pornographic content that was copyrighted and shared illegitimately.” (“Technical report: An Estimate of Infringing Use of the Internet” by Envisional Ltd. January 2011.) 35.8% of the content was pornographic (the authors of the study did not try to determine how much of the pornographic material was pirated). Of the remaining 0.50% of the 10,000 frequently torrented files, 0.48% could not be identified. That leaves, according to our math, 0.02% — precisely 2 files out of the 10,000 studied — that were known to be neither pornographic nor infringing.

Demand is booming for torrented content, so service providers have stepped forward to assist those eager to use BitTorrent technology. Visit the website BTGuard.com (tagline: “Anonymous BitTorrent Services”), for example, and you’ll find an operation that cloaks torrents. There’s an animation on BTGuard’s home page that illustrates the benefits of its service, using the example of a BitTorrent transfer between two computers in New York. (See Exhibit A, Figure 1). The animation begins with the words “Without BTGuard” (in caps) and “You downloading with BitTorrent.” In the animation, the recipient’s IP number, which uniquely identifies a recipient’s online location is plainly visible, so is the recipient’s location: New York. The IP number and New York location of the sender are also displayed. The animation briefly shows a dashed line representing the BitTorrent transfer proceeding between the two New York computers. Then, in red letters, the animation warns, “BEWARE: EVERYONE KNOWS WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOUR DOWNLOADING!”

The animation then restarts, and once again it displays, “You downloading with BitTorrent” but this time it’s “With BTGuard.” (Exhibit A, Figure 2). Now the animation shows the torrent’s dashed line going from the New York sender to an IP number in Toronto associated with BTGuard’s red-and-black logo, before proceeding to the recipient at the other New York location. The animation then reads: “BTGuard gives you a anonymous IP address and encrypts your downloads.” It continues: “Not even your ISP will know what you’re doing. BTGuard is very easy to use: just install our secure client!” It ends with a red-button call to action “JOIN NOW.”

It seems BitTorrent is terrific for sharing stolen works, but the downside is that you might get caught: if IP numbers can be discovered, the traffickers in stolen creative works are at clear risk. BTGuard and other companies have stepped into the breach.
BTGuard is doing its best to make the benefits of its services clear to the public. On August 14th and 15th of last year, BTGuard (or at least a YouTube user named “BTGuardcom”) posted YouTube videos that show how users can “BitTorrent anonymously with BTGuard.” These videos, which YouTube reports to have been watched more than 18,000 times in fewer than six months, are also viewable at the BTGuard website. BTGuardcom opened a YouTube channel at apparently the same time. At least one of the commenters at the YouTube channel saw the potential value of the product, but wasn’t yet sold: “in the video you never show how its making you anonymous. show me that then ill buy your product.”

BTGuard goes to great lengths to reassure users that their systems will protect anonymity, that users won’t get caught. At the bottom of its home page, along with “unlimited download speeds” BTGuard promises “no records of usage stored.” At the bottom of every page at BTGuard’s website is a link for its “privacy policy: “Netcrawled LLC [the apparent owner of BTGuard] is committed to protecting your privacy. Netcrawled LLC does not sell, trade or rent your personal information to other companies. Netcrawled LLC will not collect any personal information about you except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information.” Then, in bold letters, the operators promise that no traceable information is gathered: “Netcrawled LLC DOES NOT collect your Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or customer usage.”

BTGuard wants its customers to know that not only is its service private, it’s also first rate. It boasts that its servers are hosted “at Canada’s premiere carrier hotel in Toronto & at the world’s largest Internet exchange in Frankfurt, Germany. We have multi-homed bandwidth to multiple tier one networks to provide you with optimum reroute speeds.” It lists its “backbone providers” as including such industry leaders as “Level3, Teleglobe, Deutsch Telekom, Global Crossings, Tiscali, and Cogent Communications.”

So here, in a nutshell, is BTGuard’s service offering: it will arrange virtual, clandestine “meetings” in Canada for the exchange of large computer files via BitTorrent, and it will do so using state-of-that art facilities. It charges $6.95 per month for this service and accepts payment through Paypal, so subscribers may use their Mastercard, Visa, American Express, or Discover cards. Those in need of cloaking their other online activities can step up to an enhanced service: for $9.95 per month, BTGuard will secure a subscriber’s “entire Internet connection: BitTorrent, E-mail, Web Browsing & all other net services become anonymous!”

As with many online enterprises (and nearly all service providers that help customers trade stolen creative work), BTGuard has an affiliate program. BTGuard’s program pays a generous $10 per referral and shares 5% of the earnings of webmasters whom affiliates refer to the service. BTGuard compensates affiliates via Paypal, wire, or check. Appearances matter, it seems, BTGuard’s affiliate agreement warns that sites that “promote illegal activities” or “violate or infringe upon intellectual property rights” are unsuitable for their affiliate program. BTGuard is forgiving, however, rejected affiliate applicants “are welcome to reapply to the Program at any time.” (Exhibit A, Figure 3.)

As with much of the support system for trafficking in stolen creative work, BTGuard is hiding in plain sight. The contact information at the site is Netcrawled LLC, 151 Front Street West, Toronto, M5J 2N1 Canada. Its phone number is 415-762-3688.

Case Study #2: ifile.it
Next, I’d like to discuss to discuss ifile.it, an online file-sharing service that seems to be a one-person operation. Although the proprietor – I’ll assume he’s male and call him Mr. I for convenience — appears to work alone, he has know-how and moxie. In a few years Mr. I’s been able to bootstrap his little start-up to an operation using two datacenters in North America and at least one in Europe, with year-over-year growth that would make Facebook swoon.

Here’s the most useful thing about Mr. I, for our purposes: he’s done us the favor of blogging about his efforts. (Exhibit B) He’s not a bad blogger, though his posts are a bit infrequent: he’s got some personality, and he’s brash. Mr. I gleefully takes shots at one of the file-sharing industry leaders, Rapidshare. Mr. I celebrates his operation’s successes as it hits milestones, he posts YouTube videos to show people how a new download feature works, and jumps on the Twitter bandwagon. Mr. I even opens up a Google Project page, an online collaboration tool, with the apparent hope of getting others to develop applications that use his service. In the process of blogging, he gives us an insider’s view into the business of facilitating online piracy.

Chronology of a File-Sharing Startup, from Launch to One Million Users
Mr. I launches his blog on January 2, 2008, before his new file-sharing website, ifile.it, is in beta. He’s still running his prior website, mihd.net, which apparently was also dedicated to online file sharing. On February 21 he decides to speed up the process of transferring content to some of his new servers and moves “a dozen thousand files” onto one of them. On February 29, he apologizes that one of his servers is down for the day, because of some network problems that were “causing me hell for 2 days.” Nevertheless, he’s live by 10 a.m., which seems to mean that he’s no longer in beta with ifile.it.

A series of March 2, 2008, entries in the blog describe many of the details of the file-sharing service. The site’s available in about a dozen languages, and it automatically detects a browser’s language settings. The site uses “a new distributed filesystem … sort of similar to Amazon’s S3 service but specifically aimed at large file hosting.” Mr. I describes ifile.it’s support for two types of URLs for download links on March 6: a short one and a descriptive one. “You can share either types of URL’s with your friends ”

On April 1, Mr. I thanks his users for helping add languages supported by ifile.it to the list. He reports, “Looking thru’ the logs there are some languages such as Japanese, Dutch and Russian which are not on the list but are a sizable percentage of our users.” He asks for help in adding additional languages to the list. On April 7, Mr. I reports that users will now have usage statistics available to them in their accounts. He gives as an example a user with 65 GB of storage at ifile.it in nearly 3300 files. The user in the example had downloaded 7.41 MB of files in the last five days.

On May 13, 2008, ifile.it hits a milestone, with more than 100,000 members “who registered and activated and use their accounts regularly!” Mr. I provides a graph showing the healthy growth in ifile.it in its first five months. On June 10, Mr. I reports major upgrades: all of ifile.it servers are getting replaced “new Intel quadcore beasts also a new internal network will be added to make it easy to balance high loads and bandwidth usage (we use alot of bandwidth) , hopefully this will lead to a marked improvement of the services.” On July 1, however, 10 servers on ifile.it’s new cluster “are down.” On the bright side “The network at the Chicago datacenter is being updated with several Comcast 10gbit connections being added.” Mr. I apologizes for the inconvenience.

On July 18, 2008, ifile.it hits a new milestone, 250,000 users.
On August 8, ifile.it increases its upload limit to 250 MB, but then finds that bandwidth is inadequate during peak hours. On August 13 ifile.it doubles its bandwidth at its Chicago network center.
On October 24, Mr. I welcomes “rapidshare refugees.” His post describes Rapidshare’s business model and is worth quoting at some length:

I get asked a lot, “how do you plan to compete with the 300lb gorilla in the room called rapidshare?”
Well firstly I would like to think (hope?) that ifile.it doesn’t end up like rapidshare, judging by emails received from users this sentiment is shared.
Secondly we don’t have to compete, they seems to shoot themselves in the foot every few months, it’s sort of amusing as ifile.it doesn’t have premium system (not for the foreseeable future anyways) and yet we let people download humongous amounts, in hope that they might become customers one day, I figure the carrot approach is better than the stick and a bit of respect for users is not optional but a requirement.
So welcome aboard and enjoy the ride.

On February 8, 2009, Mr. I asks users to limit heavy downloading to offpeak hours if possible. “[ifile.it] does not block users from downloading at any time but you might find the downloads being slow during peak hours, this is a result of hundreds of thousands of users a day who are not being blocked (unlike other filehosting sites)”

On July 23, Mr. I announces a large number of upgrades to the site and a redesign. He’s also posted a YouTube video to describe ifile.it’s new upload system. On August 24, he reports that a major site overhaul is complete. His file sharing service can now upload 50 files at a time “(that’s quite a crazy amount)” and he’s providing an API upload so that developers can more easily “script uploads.” He also opens a Google Project so ifile.it users can share their code for the new API. (The Project hub is at http://code.google.com/p/ifile-it/)

Mr. I keeps innovating. On October 19, “thanks to Yahoo Browser+ Plugin” ifile.it offers an advanced uploader “drag and drop” option. Then, on October 30, his site suffers a dedicated denial of service attack. Mr. I promises to “keep an eye on this disturbing development,” which caused site usage to drop 20% in an hour.”

November 29, 2009, is a red letter day. Mr. I’s hard work pays off as he hits a major milestone: “one million registered and verified users.” His site is less than two years old.
On February 5, 2010, Mr. I notes that some of his users have built some open source uploaders for his service. They’re described at his Google Project Page. He also has posted a new YouTube video.
On March 18, ifile.it gets five new servers (making 45 in all) at a new network operation center in Washington, D.C. The datacenter has multiple 10GB connections through many top level service providers.
On January 31, 2011, a couple weeks ago, Mr. I posts that the maximum file size has been increased yet again, to 1 GB. “Enjoy!”

The Business Model: Ads
Through all of this growth, despite the hardware and bandwidth expenses that Mr. I incurs, ifile.it doesn’t charge for its services. How does it make money? Through ads at its website. One million users apparently pays for 45 servers and all that bandwith. Mr. I explains in his blog on July 28, 2008, when some users complained that they have to wait for the downloads of their files to begin. “[B]ut unfortunately the server bills don’t pay themselves, this free service exists thanks to our advertiser (who beside our users they are one of the main stakeholders). ifile.it doesn’t charge users for his file-sharing services.” (Emphasis added.)

Mr. I’s company, for all of its servers and breathtaking growth, is tiny by piracy industry standards. In a chart prepared by compete.com, we see that the number of unique visitors at ifile.it, measured at 110,184 last month and growing 117% in the last year, barely shows up when compared to the big operators, such as Rapidshare.com and Hotfile, each of which are reported to have had nearly 3 million unique vistors in January. (Exhibit C) We need, urgently, to take the profit out of facilitating piracy.

Recommendations
The Internet presents challenges to our markets for creative works that we have never previously encountered. Infringement that would potentially undermine our domestic markets for creative works has historically taken place within our borders (or could be stopped at our borders), and those who profited from those activities could generally be held personally accountable. That’s no longer the case. Facilitators of piracy now operate in every corner of the globe, and their activities directly undermine our markets for books, music, and movies.

Online trafficking in stolen creative work revolves around one core activity: secret, anonymous online file sharing. Facilitators of online piracy host or provide support for that core activity, and they do it while disclaiming responsibility by taking shelter in the safe harbor protections of our Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A key part of the solution to the piracy problem is to hold those who profit from online file-sharing activities legally responsible for those activities. We therefore urge the committee to consider the following as steps, among others, to address online piracy:
1. Make online file-sharing service providers liable for Facilitating the Trafficking in Stolen Books, Music, and Movies if they frequently host and distribute stolen creative works or provide services that regularly facilitate the secret or rapid transmission of stolen creative work. Online services that allow anonymous, secret sharing of digital files are clearly subject to enormous abuse. All available evidence suggests that such services will be used as hubs for trading stolen works unless the service provider takes steps to prevent it. Any company proposing to make a business of providing or facilitating file-sharing services should have a clear plan for preventing routine piracy. This should be seen as an essential part of responsibly operating such an enterprise, just as any business has to take care to avoid the public dangers inherent in their operations. Service providers can tackle this issue, just as they’ve addressed far less destructive menaces such as spam, but they need to accept responsibility for the business activities from which they profit.

2. Require online file-sharing service providers to register an agent for service of process for copyright infringement actions with the Copyright Office as a condition to accepting credit card payments from the U.S. or ad feeds from U.S. online advertising suppliers. Foreign file-sharing service providers can too easily evade our laws while they take money from our residents. Some, such as BTGuard, provide services that encourage the secret transmission of files from one U.S. resident to another by cloaking the exchanges through a foreign service provider. We wouldn’t tolerate this meddling in our domestic market in other areas of commerce, and we shouldn’t tolerate it in our markets for books, music, and movies. As a matter of common sense, and as a matter of basic fairness to law-abiding U.S. and foreign file-sharing service providers, all those who directly profit from the U.S. market for file sharing should be subject to U.S. rules.

3. Remove the DMCA safe harbors for online and Internet service providers that provide routine access to online file-sharing service providers that a federal court has found guilty of Facilitating the Trafficking in Stolen Books, Music, and Movies. After a reasonable notice period, service providers should not be able to disclaim liability for contributory copyright infringement if they provide routine access to a service provider that has been held to be facilitating piracy.

4. Remove the DMCA safe harbors for online and Internet service providers that provide routine access to online file-sharing service providers that have not registered an agent for service of process for copyright infringement actions and for which the Copyright Office has received at least 50 DMCA take-down notices. After a reasonable notice period, allowing adequate time for the online file-sharing service provider to register an agent for service of process for copyright infringement actions, service providers should not be able to disclaim liability for contributory copyright infringement if they provide routine access to an online file-sharing service provider that has been the subject of numerous DMCA take-down notices.

5. Ensure that new legislative action can keep pace with developing technologies. Although online file sharing services are one of today’s major piracy threats, illegal streaming is rapidly gaining in popularity and can pull in audio books as easily as it does music, movies, and TV programs. Any congressional solution needs to take the pace of technological change into account, or we’ll all be back here in twelve months.

Conclusion
Facilitating online piracy has become far too widespread, because it’s far too profitable and easy. To protect and re-establish our markets for creative work, we need bold, immediate reform of our copyright law.
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For a complete archive of piracy related articles visit Pirate Central.

Up yours, authors! Screw you, publishers!

Those are the messages communicated by the come-ons displayed on the websites of pirate publishers and torrent file-sharers. Our surfing trips, aided by tips from our network of pirate spotters and even by contributions by anonymous pirates themselves, have produced countless examples of arrogant defiance by a host of thieves who pick the pockets of copyright owners in broad daylight.

Below are a few brazen solicitations.

Richard Curtis

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55 COMPLIMENTARY BOOKS. GREAT SELECTION, BOOK MIX 19

Dear Members

We are sure you will find something of interest in this terrific mix of complimentary books!

55 Free Books for Everyone! (Book Mix 19). When you click the link below, follow the simple instructions on the book page to arrive at the download links page. Easy!
Click Here to View Book Mix 19

To obtain ALL the books below, we ask for a small $2 service charge to help cover our research costs. It takes us a lot of time to find all these freebies!

Please note that we are not the ‘hosts’ of any books, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply find links to books, that were freely available on the web and share our findings with our members!

[Among the "freely available" books shared with members are works by Jonathan Franzen, J. R. Ward and Patricia Briggs.]

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Are you tired of high E-book prices on Amazon or Barnes and Noble for your E-Reader? Most E-Book Stores charge 9.99 a book, to 14.99 or more!

Many people when they buy an electronic reader do so, to save money. When you subscribe to our forum you get unlimited downloads on the latest E-books! Why pay over $9.99 each when you can get as many as you want per month, for as little as $11.99 a month. Most members download between 5 to 10 books a month!

We support all Electronic Reader Formats such LTR, LST, MOBI, PDF, DOC, RTF, PRC, PDF, EPUB and more! This means if you have a Kindle, Nook, Sony or any other e-reader you can download books.

We also provide extensive one on one technical support for your Electronic Readers! Are you having problems? Are you wondering if your unit is defective or just needs settings adjustments? Our Service is free with taking out a subscription.

Whether you have a Kindle, Nook, Sony, Jetbook, Opus or any other E-Reader we support over 50 different ereaders, from the most popular to the most obscure!
Feel free to check out our forum! We have a huge free section for our members, and a hidden section for paid members! Check it out today by clicking here! If you want to read more about the benefits of being a VIP member of [Deleted] read more
You may subscribe by clicking on the below links! Remember we accept Members in any country in the world! Europe, the USA, England, Australia and more! All of our books are in English.

Click here to see what New E-Books we have Added Recently

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I have attached FEBRUARY’S Current lists of ebook sets and price’s for you. The 2nd list has all the titles and formats I have available for that set.

All you need to do if you see a set you would like to purchase just list the authors name and the price next to it and email me back.

I will then send you a invoice for those sets from Paypal so you know your order is safe & secure. Upon receiving your payment I will then send you a
file down load link from [Deleted].

I can make a back-up disk for you if you so wish for an additional $2.50 (USA ONLY).

Please feel free to contact me at any time with questions you may have or to place a order.

HAPPY READING….
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[One of our spotters brought a website to our attention that offers downloads of such authors as James Patterson, John Grisham, Thomas Harris and Scott Turow. Ironically, Turow is the President of the Authors Guild, which has undertaken an initiative to combat piracy.

The site's webmaster adds insult to injury by reprinting an article on the subject by Turow and mocking it with this statement:]

Editorial:

Now, the latest, is the fear that with the success of the iPad in the market that it will become a popular platform for unauthorized sharing of ebooks. Apparently, author Scott Turow has recently taken over the Authors Guild, and has decided that ebook “piracy” is a “big problem” that has to be the focus. Perhaps next time the Authors Guild wants to show itself to be forward-looking and able to change with the times, it shouldn’t put a 60+ year old lawyer in charge. Just a suggestion… Rather than saying that unauthorized file sharing is such a big problem, perhaps Turow should take a look at the music industry more closely. He seems to only be superficially aware of what’s happening in that industry. Instead of recognizing that the industry wasted over a decade fighting what fans wanted, he seems to think that he can magically fight what every other industry has failed to fight. That doesn’t seem like a strategy that has a high likelihood of success.

Perhaps, instead of automatically blaming those involved in file sharing, Turow should take some time to understand why it’s happening, and look at those who have figured out interesting and unique models to provide more value for consumers who want it, rather than just focusing on the impossible task of trying to punish those whose actions the Authors Guild doesn’t like.
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For a complete archive of E-Reads postings on piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Richard Curtis

“The copyright termination time bomb is ticking away,” writes Lloyd J Jassin in the summer 2010 Authors Guild Bulletin. Jassin is a publishing and entertainment attorney and an authority on copyright, and “time bomb” may be an understatement.

“Starting in 2011,” he writes, “the publishing and entertainment industries will be looking at the possibility of thousands of negotiations with copyright owners seeking to recapture their rights. Some call it ‘contract bumping.’ This powerful ‘re-valuation mechanism’ found in the Copyright Act allows authors (and their heirs) to terminate contracts 35-years after the contract date. The termination right trumps written agreements — even agreements which state they are in perpetuity.”

If you are a member of the Authors Guild you may read it in the organization’s invaluable magazine. Though we are not yet able to access it on the Guild‘s website Jassin has posted it on his own. You may – should – must – read it here.

That said, you can read here the piece we posted a piece in the spring of 2009, which we reproduce below in full. The issues raised a year and a half ago are even more critical today as the e-book industry matures and skirmishes have begun breaking out everywhere over reversion of rights to backlist titles.

The clock is ticking on the time bomb as we talk, and any author or agent who is not aware of the issues may pay a dear price for his or her ignorance.

Richard Curtis

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May 2009

Evan Schnittman observed it as a smear of light on the fringe of our galaxy, but it took media guru Mike Shatzkin to fully articulate its significance. And significant it is, a possible game-changer in the internecine struggle among authors, publishers, and Google. It has to do with a little-known provision of the US Copyright Act of 1978.

Schnittman, a Vice President of Business Development and Rights for Oxford University Press, mentioned it almost as an afterthought at the end of “There Will Be Disintermediation”, the final installment of a brilliant three part analysis in his Black Plastic Glasses website. “Mark your calendars, folks,” he declares, “the disintermediation begins on January 1, 2013. What happens on January 1, 2013? See for yourself in the US Copyright Act of 1978, section 203. {…Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant…}” [bold print is Schnittman's.]

“What if this change,” asks Schnittman, “was so significant that it could possibly even spawn an industry wide reset of the way we do things?” He leaves us panting for an answer, and Shatzkin provides it:

“It turns out there is a clause in the 1978 copyright law that allows any author to reclaim any copyright despite any contract with a publisher, simply by serving notice. The copyright can be reclaimed no less than 35 years and no more than 40 years from the book’s original publication. So books published in 1978 can be reclaimed by their authors from 2013-2018.”.

“One wonders” Shatzkin ruminates, “how many agents are aware of this law and are preparing for it.”

Actually many agents have been aware of it for years, and a number have invoked it. It’s commonly referred to as the “Widows and Orphans Provision,” because it entitles immediate family members to recover from publishers or certain derivative licensees (like movie companies) the copyrights to works published by a deceased author. (Don’t worry, men, widowers are included!) What some agents may not be aware of is that an author doesn’t have to be dead for the reclamation to take place; he or she simply has to live long enough to take advantage of the provision. For books licensed to publishers after January 1, 1978, the law is effective “thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier.”

What surprises Shatzkin is that Article 203 has not come up in discussions about the Google Settlement, and we owe him and Schnittman a debt of gratitude for placing it on the table.

Until recently we’d have said that (except for a small number of evergreen backlist books) most titles coming up for reclamation under the Act are worth little or nothing. But with Google’s push to monetize old books, even moribund ones may have value either to their authors, their publishers, or Google. As Shatzkin puts it, for some old books “it looks like a new payday has been set up.”

For the full text of Article 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act, click here.

Richard Curtis

Psst! Wanna download a collection of Kevin Andersons? 48 titles for an unbelievable $8.00! How about Janet Evanovich? 39 e-books for a rock bottom $8.00! Nora Roberts? 161 titles for $13.00. The complete Harry Potter series for $7.00. Seven dollars will also get you 82 novels by science fiction great Roger Zelazny.

Or maybe your taste runs to James Patterson? Would you believe 67 files for $10.00? Suzanne Brockman? 51 for $9.00. 42 Lisa Kleypases for $8.00. Dan Brown? 6 for $4.00. Sandra Brown? 46 for $9.00. How about 4 Scott Turows for $2.oo? Turow is president of the Authors Guild.

These are a few of the bargains available at one of dozens and dozens of easily accessed pirate and file-sharing websites operating under the very noses of leading authors, publishers and literary agents. In this first of a series of weekly articles addressing the issue of piracy, we’ve posted the complete book list of an all too typical pirate site. Though a great many operate out of foreign lands far beyond the reach of any law, innumerable others ply their trade domestically and defiantly, daring outraged authors and publishers to stop them – or, when stopped, reassembling themselves like lizards that regenerate lost limbs.

In subsequent postings we’ll tell take you for a tour of the pirate underworld, demonstrate how easy it is to steal copyrighted material, and examine the role played by advertisers and legitimate Internet Service Providers. We’ll explore the frustrations of consumers that make them susceptible to the temptations of free or dirt-cheap books. We’ll show you how organized Internet racketeers lure customers to their sites with the bait of free e-books, then plunder their bank, credit, and identity information. And we’ll offer some solutions.

So -  check out the Bootleg E-Book Bazaar. Look for your favorite authors. If you don’t see them here, just search “[Author Name] Free Download”.  But think twice before you open the files.  Many are virus traps or phishing sites waiting to lure victims to grief.

Richard Curtis

Here are the A’s.  For a complete A to Z list click here.

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A

AAMES, ALEXA COLLECTION OF 3 $2.00
AAMES, LANI COLLECTION OF 17 $4.00
AARON, TIFFANY FALLEN 1-4 $2.50
ABE, SHANA COLLECTION OF 6 $2.50
ACEVEDO, MARION FELIX GOMEZ 1-4 $2.50
ACOSTA, MARTHA COLLECTION OF 3 $2.00
ADAIR, CHERRY COLLECTION OF 20 $6.00
ADAIR, DOMINIQUE – JANE PORTER 1-3 $2.00
ADAMS, C.T. COLLECTION OF 10 $3.50
ADAMS, DOUGLAS COLLECTION OF 15 $4.00
ADAMS, ELISA COLLECTION OF 29 $7.00
ADAMS, ROBERT COLLECTION OF 24 $5.00
ADLER, WARREN COLLECTION OF 7 $3.50
ADRIAN, LARA COLLECTION OF 7 $3.00
AGNEW, DENISE COLLECTION OF 31 $6.00
AGUIRE, ANN COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
AHERN, CECELIA COLLECTION OF 7 $3.00
AHERN, JERRY – SURVIVALIST 1-3 $2.00
AINSWORTH, HARRISON W COLLECTION OF 6 $2.50
ALBERT, MICHELE COLLECTION 4 $2.00
ALCOTT, LOUISE MAY COLLECTION OF 20 $4.00
ALDISS, BRIAN COLLECTION OF 57 $7.50
ALEXANDER, LACEY COLLECTION OF 11 $4.00
ALEXANDER, LLOYD COLLECTION OF 11 $3.50
ALEXANDER, R.G. – CHILDREN OF THE GODDESS 1-3 $2.00
ALEXANDER, VICTORIA COLLECTION OF 21 $5.00
ALGER, HORATIO COLLECTION OF 24 $5.00
AKERS, ALAN BURT – DRAY PRESCOTT 1-24 $5.50
ALLEN, GRANT COLLECTION OF 31 $6.00
ALLEN, HARPER COLLECTION OF 4 $2.00
ALLEN, ROGER MAC-BRIDE COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
ALLINGHAM, MARGERY COLLECTION OF 22 $5.00
ALT, MADELYN – BEWITCHING 1-5 $2.50
AMBER, ELIZABETH COLLECTION OF 8 $3.00
AMBLER, ERIC COLLECTION OF 19 $4.00
AMBROSE, STEPHEN COLLECTION OF 3 $2.00
AMIS, MARTIN COLLECTION OF 13 $3.50
ANDEL, LISA COLLECTION OF 6 $2.50
ANDERSEN, JESSICA COLLECTION OF 10 $3.50
ANDERSEN, SUSAN COLLECTION OF 16 $4.00
ANDERSON, CATHERINE COLLECTION OF 18 $5.00
ANDERSON, EVANGELINE COLLECTION OF 35 $7.50
ANDERSON, KEVIN J. COLLECTION OF 48 $8.00
ANDERSON, POUL COLLECTION OF 94 $8.00
ANDEREWS, DONNA COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
ANDREWS, ILONA COLLECTION OF 10 $3.50
ANDREWS, MARY KAY COLLECTION OF 7 $3.00
ANDREWS, TONI – MERCY HOLLINGS 1-3 $2.00
ANDREWS, V.C. COMPLETE COLLECTION OF 65 $10.00
ANJOU, ANGELIQUE COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
ANNA, VIVA COLLECTION OF 13 $4.00
ANSON, CRIS COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
ANTHONY, CAMILLE COLLECTION OF 26 $6.50
ANTHONY, PIERS COLLECTION OF 128 $10.00
ANVIL, CHRISTOPHER COLLECTION OF 18 $5.00
ANWAR, CELESTE COLLECTION OF 13 $4.00
APPLEGATE, KATHERINE COLLECTION OF 68 $9.00
APPLETON, VICTOR COLLECTION OF 55 $6.00
ARCHER, ALEX – ROUGH ANGEL 1-24 $7.50
ARCHER, JEFFREY COLLECTION OF 19 $4.50
AREND, VIVIAN – GRANITE WOLVES 1-3 $2.00
ARMENTA, KELLY COLLECTION OF 6 $2.50
ARMINTROUT, JENNIFER COLLECTION OF 7 $3.50
ARMSTRONG, KELLEY COLLECTION OF 43 $9.00
ARMSTRONG, MECHELE COLLECTION OF 16 $4.50
ARTHUR, KERI COLLECTION OF 25 $7.50
ARTHUR, KERI – Riley Jenson 8 – Bound to Shadows (UPDATE) $1.00
ASARO, CATHERINE COLLECTION OF 22 $5.00
ASHE, ARAN – CHRONICLES OF LIDIR 1-4 $2.00
ASHER, NEAL COLLECTION OF 9 $3.00
ASHLEY, AMANDA COLLECTION OF 25 $6.50
ASHLEY, JENNIFER COLLECTION OF 2 $1.00
ASHWORTH, ADELE COLLECTION OF 9 $3.00
ASIMOV, ISAAC COLLECTION OF 153 $10.00
ASON, JAY – AMITYVILLE HORROR $1.00
ASPRIN, ROBERT COLLECTION OF 41 $6.00
ATWOOD-RHODES, AMELIA COLLECTION OF 10 $3.50
ATWOOD, MARGARET COLLECTION OF 7 $3.00
AUEL, JEAN COLLECTION OF 5 $2.50
AUSTEN, JANE COLLECTION OF 9 $3.00
AUSTIN, LENA COLLECTION OF 21 $5.00
AUSTIN, NICOLE COLLECTION OF 14 $4.00
AXLER, JAMES – COLLLECTION OF 84 $8.00
AZOD, SHARA COLLECTION OF 12 $3.50