OPEN

So, the minions of the Web rose in fury to stymie passage by the United States congress of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, thus ensuring freedom of Internet Service Providers from curtailment of their First Amendment rights. Beneath the blare of the victors’ trumpets, however, the pained cries of piracy victims were completely drowned out.  Does no one speak for them?

A recent editorial in the Sunday New York Times, “Beyond SOPA”, reminds us that some legislators speak for those whose right to earn an honest living has been pillaged by unscrupulous criminal syndicates, some of which are supported by foreign governments. “Piracy by Web sites in countries like Russia and China, which offer high-quality bootleg copies of movies and music, is a real problem for the nation’s creative industries,” said the editorial, pointing to “legislation that could curb the operation of rogue Web sites without threatening legitimate expression.”

The bill the editorial referred to also sports a four-letter acronym, but one that we hope will not be as dirty a word as SOPA.  This one is called OPEN: the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act. Here’s how it is designed to work: “Content owners could ask the International Trade Commission to investigate whether a foreign Web site was dedicated to piracy. The Web site would be able to rebut the claim. If the commission ruled for the copyright holder, it could direct payment firms like Visa and PayPal and advertising networks like Google’s to stop doing business with the Web site.”

The Times thinks that OPEN offers solutions that do not have the same pitfalls as those of SOPA, and we share the editorial’s support. We just wonder, though, why all the attention is focused on foreign pirates when a domestic piracy industry continues to thrive. And why just movies and music? What are we authors – chopped liver?

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of E-Reads postings on piracy, visit Pirate Central.

FileSonic, a filesharing website has voluntarily disabled itself, obviously scared out of the game by the Justice Department’s shutdown of MegaUpload and the arrest of its principals.  “FileSonic has disabled all file sharing functionality on its website, restricting access so that users may only download their own files,” reports Ars Technica.

Ryan Paul, reporting on the self-inflicted takedown, expressed puzzlement that Filesonic “already has strong procedures in place to combat piracy” such as digital fingerprinting to detect attempts to upload unauthorized files, and observes the takedown procedures prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Paul should not be nonplussed that a so-called law-abiding website is taking itself down.  The DMCA’s procedures, watered down by powerful web carrier lobbies, has become a travesty, making it so hard for piracy victims to get satisfaction that many give up in frustration. (See Takedown Notices: Antipiracy Weapon or Exercise in Futility?)

Another leading file locker provider, RapidShare, does not seem prepared to follow FileSonic over the cliff.  “Legitimate hosting providers have nothing to fear,” they told Ars Technica, “as long as they comply with requests from rights holders and don’t turn a blind eye to piracy conducted with their service.”

Read details in FileSonic has disabled file sharing in wake of Megaupload takedown

Richard Curtis

The news of SOPA’s likely defeat by Internet activists contrasts bizarrely with the arrest of one of the Web’s most flagrant and flamboyant copyright violators.  Even as the massed forces of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other popular Web interests laid siege to proposed government restrictions of their freedom, the US Justice Department and the FBI terminated the freedom of the notorious Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload, an Internet locker service that facilitates anonymous transfer of movie, music, text and other files.

The indictment against Dotcom and six cohorts, issued by a grand jury, states that they criminally conspired to infringe copyrights to the tune of $500 million. They face 20 years in prison. Dotcom’s website has been shuttered. If you click on megaupload.com you’ll get the above banner.

It will be interesting to see whether the Internet community, so passionate in its defense of freedom – including the freedom to link to alleged infringers (see Game Over: Google Insists on Linking to Pirate Sites) – will rally to the defense of the Megaupload gang. Will Dotcom and Co. be considered brethren to the innocent and ignorant folks who unknowingly download copyrighted music and movies? Or will the immense scale of megaupload’s allegedly illegal traffic cause the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters to distance themselves from the defendants?  It will be instructive to see how it all plays out.

It will also be instructive to see whether the Justice Department’s indictment against the Megauploaders will stick. The case of Pirate Bay, formerly the world’s largest BitTorrent file-sharing tracker, might shed some light on these speculations. In 2009 four men involved in Pirate Bay’s website were arrested, tried, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay about $4.5 million in damages. After their release, the website (apparently under new management) was relaunched from a venue in the Ukraine, then moved again to Netherlands where it is now headquartered in Cyberbunker, a military nuclear warfare bunker built by NATO to withstand a nuclear war and now used as a webhosting data center according to TorrentFreak.

But there’s more: in 2009 Sweden’s Pirate Party seized on the high profile Pirate Bay suit to rally supporters to a victory in the European Union’s parliamentary elections, winning a seat.  (See Swedish Pirate Booty: a Seat in Europe’s Parliament).

Ever since Robin Hood and his merry band roamed Sherwood Forest, the noble, romantic bandido has been a staple of our imagination. So, the reward of a short sentence, a modest fine, and a seat in government for Kim Dotcom will come as no surprise.

For a detailed account of the arrest of Mr. Dotcom and his companions, read Founder of Shuttered Web Site Sought Limelight by Kevin J. O’Brien in the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Piracy is an extremely controversial and complicated subject. For a complete archive of E-Reads postings pro and con, visit Pirate Central.

Simon van Meygaarden, a friend and correspondent based in the Netherlands, holds some views about illegal downloading that diverge from our own (including the term “illegal downloading”). In particular he believes that financial losses due to such downloads are an infinitesimal fraction of the potential legitimate revenues.  He has actually demonstrated mathematically that for every $1000 of potential to be made by an authorized content provider, only $1.40 ends up in the pocket of an unauthorized user.

Read Simon’s calculations.  Then I’ll have a few of my own.

Richard Curtis

***********************************************

Illegal Downloads – What are we talking about?

Let’s start with a term that is misused more than “piracy” and “crisis” together, the illustrious and infamous – turning on my hollow voice – “Illegal Downloads”.

A download is the transfer of data from a server or host computer to one’s own computer or device. Let’s define my number of downloads as “N”.

Now, not every download gets transmitted error-free, and if one bit goes wrong the download is unusable, so let’s define the Corruption Factor “CF” as an error-percentage. If 10% of my downloads is corrupt and unusable, CF = .1

My number of error-free download now is N * ( 1 – CF )

Some error-free downloads are password-protected, and they usually contain viruses or point to infected websites, so let’s define the Viral Factor “VF” also as an error-percentage. If 10% of the downloads is password protected, VF = .1

My number of safe downloads now is N * ( 1 – CF ) * ( 1 – VF )

Some of my safe downloads are never played (or watched or read), so here we have the Play Factor “PF”.

My number of played downloads is N * ( 1 – CF ) * ( 1 – VF ) * PF

Now I have played the download and I am finally aware of the product itself. Clearly, some products are copyright free or public domain. So here is the Infringement Factor “IF”, the percentage which is actually illegal, by American law.

My number of illegal downloads is N * ( 1 – CF ) * ( 1 – VF ) * PF * IF

Some of my illegal downloads are crap, and I would never have bought them anyway. The rest are good, I might have actually bought them, and that’s the Buy Factor “BF”.

The number of product I might have actually bought is N * ( 1 – CF ) * ( 1 – VF ) * PF * IF * BF

So let’s put some numbers to this formula, from my own experience.

50% of my downloads are corrupt, so CF = .5
25% is password-protected, VF = .25

The Play Factor is more difficult, as it varies with the type of product. I have downloaded about 2.000 movies, and I have actually tried to watch about half of them, so PF_movie = .5. Being a D.J., I have downloaded perhaps 20,000 albums, but honestly, I have only tried to listen to about 5% of those, so PF_album = .05. I also like books, my entire house is filled with them, I can’t actually store anymore, but, I shamefully admit I have about 250.000 ebooks, and I only tried to read a fraction of them. Let’s say one in a thousand, so PF-ebook = .001.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say 75% is illegal (IF = .75), and 50% is crap (BF = .5).

Now imagine a publisher, who sells a million ebooks a year, and fears that for every ebook he sells, ten others are downloaded, so N = 10 million. His loss in revenue, in terms of numbers of books, would be:

10,000,000 * ( 1 – .5 ) * ( 1 – .25 ) * .001 * .75 * .5 ==
10,000,000 * .5 * .75 * .001 * .75 * .5 ==
1,406.25 ebooks == about 0.14% of his turnover

Here’s a question: how much money would it cost (advertisement, improving product quality, reducing production costs) to raise one’s turnover with 0.2%?

I admit, my actual numbers are personal, and they are most certainly wrong as a reliable average. But my analysis, I think, is right. Morally, and emotionally, I completely understand and support the fight against piracy, however, rationally, and economically, it is a whole different ball game, and it all boils down to how much money (energy, time and resources) one is currently spending on fighting piracy, and how much it would take to estimate the right numbers and raise one’s turnover accordingly.

Simon van Meygaarden

*******************************

Richard here again.

Let’s concede the correctness of every one of Simon’s calculations and grant his conclusion: that illegal downloading is siphoning off a mere $1.40 out of every $1000. My question for him is simple: Suppose you keep $1000 on your night table and a dozen burglars enter your home, but they remove only $1.40 of it, will you feel as benignly about your loss as you do about mine?

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of articles about piracy, visit Pirate Central.

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

Of the many ways for publishers to combat copyright infringement, the one they have been loath to employ is  to sue the end user.  Because some downloaders may be ignorant kids or confused old people, going after them can be a public relations disaster, making the righteous plaintiffs look like corporate bullies and turning the defendants into  folk heroes. But there’s a limit to restraint, and after Bit Torrent users on the demonid.me website illegally downloaded a Dummies book almost 75,000 times, the publisher of the series reached it.

“John Wiley & Sons ,” reports Publishers Weekly, “filed a copyright infringement suit last week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York involving 27 ‘John Does’ the publisher claims are illegally copying and distributing its For Dummies books through the use of Bit Torrent file sharing software. At present, Wiley only knows the IP addresses and names of the information services providers of the John Does, but a company spokesperson said the intent of the lawsuit is to learn the names of the infringers so the company can contact them to work out a settlement.”

Though Wiley hasn’t actually sued anyone yet, that is clearly an option if one of the John Does becomes a John Screw You.  Lawsuits against end users have been brought by music and movie companies after they exhausted more moderate measures. (See Fileshare This) And though those actions have provoked great outrage by the victims and their libertarian defenders, some pirates have been put out of business and many end users have thought twice before clicking on Download.  But Wiley seems to be a rare instance of such an action in the book industry. For details read Wiley Goes After Bit Torrent Pirates.

For the full archive of E-Reads piracy postings, visit Pirate Central, especially Curtis Agency, E-Reads Launch Program to Neutralize Pirates

Richard Curtis

Start 'em young

The following article was originally published in October 2010.
**********************

The ability of the human mind to rationalize is extraordinary. Take piracy. Among the many comments we have received in response to our postings on the subject, we have heard every rationalization under the sun, ranging from “I didn’t know it was copyrighted” to “I don’t know what copyright is” to “DRM sucks” to “The e-book wasn’t available on legitimate retail sites” to “Information wants to be free” to “I’m not reselling, just sharing with friends” to “The percentage of pirated books is an insignificant fraction of sales through legitimate channels” etc. etc.

Piracy is something that other people do. When we do it there’s always a good excuse. When other people do it, it’s as heinous as grand theft auto.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between the phenomenon of rampant piracy and the scarcity of perpetrators, and the reason seems to be semantic. If we can develop better definitions we may be able to develop better solutions.

Towards that end we offer the following categories of pirate:

1. The Innocent

Young children, technologically inexperienced individuals and others who know nothing about copyright law or Internet etiquette and don’t realize they may be stealing when they download music or e-books. People who simply don’t know better.

2.The Ignorant

These are downloaders who know enough about copyright law to understand the difference between right and wrong, but choose to ignore or flout it.

Though many who fall into this category are young, the classification includes adults, some of whom are highly educated – business people, computer engineers and other professionals who should know better.

We’re giving Innocents/Ignorants the benefit of the doubt by describing their acts of downloading as “inadvertent” or “improper” rather than “illegal.” But if nothing else they must be aware of the legal principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. If an aggrieved publisher decides to sue you for illegally downloading e-books – as has been done in the music and movie fields – your case will not be automatically dismissed because you didn’t know it was against the law.

3. The Customer

These are people who paid for one version of a book and feel entitled to acquire other versions without paying for them. A good example is the case of a consumer who buys a hardcover edition of a bestselling novel and feels justified in downloading a pirated e-book because the publisher’s legitimate e-book version has not yet been released. No less a personage than the New York Times‘s own ethical arbiter felt that a customer has the right to do this. (See NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-Books). In other cases, consumers impatient with DRM restrictions will download a ripped off version of a file instead of paying for it and dealing with customer support.

4. The Philosopher

The Internet era has spawned a generation possessing a strong sense of entitlement, including entitlement to online content whether is is copyright-protected or not. Some members of this generation have rationalized their sense of entitlement and promote it not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. (See When Did “Free” Become a Four Letter Word?)

These philosophers collectively march under the banner “Information Wants To Be Free.” Others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters.

What these philosopher-pirates don’t seem to understand is that, in capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you’re getting something free, someone else is paying for it.

5. The Recreational Thief

For some people acquiring and sharing files is more of a sport than a business or criminal activity. Since filesharing is technically not illegal, it’s a way of belonging to a community. Recreational pirates gain acceptance from peers and notoriety from sharing files. Some forums even have a “thank you” module where other members encourage sharing,. Thank-You’s are displayed like battle ribbons by prolific uploaders.

Another form of recreational pirating is file-hoarding. Like hoarders of material things, digital hoarders collect and save terabytes of pirated files. Their motivation? “Hey, you never know when you’ll need 10,000 fonts.”

6. The Facilitator

This type is analogous to the owner of a head shop that sells bongs, cigarette papers and drug paraphernalia – everything but the drugs themselves – and thus skirt the law. Similarly, many IT professionals knowingly link to pirated material for a variety of reasons that fall short of hardcore criminality.

A common example are webmasters seeking to boost traffic for their websites. They attract traffic from customers looking for stolen files or seeking links to hot pirate sites. Savvy webmasters load up on as many ads as possible to cash in on that traffic. They are well versed in the ways of piracy but aren’t active in file sharing.

7. The Professional

Professional pirates don’t merely steal and sell software. They use pirated files as bait to smuggle phishing software into the computers of their victims. These programs then steal personal information like credit card numbers and bank account logins. Some of these pirates have been linked to organized crime groups. They employ software hackers to crack DRM, program key generators and penetrate security systems.

You can always tell who the professional pirates are: they’re the only ones who don’t mind being called pirates.

Like any community, the ecology of piracy is complex and interwoven, but it’s clear from a glance that the activities of innocents and amateurs enable the sharks to feast on stolen material and prey on the public. By defining each type we can immediately see what sanctions are in order – who needs a tap on the wrists, who needs to be educated and who needs to be tried in civil or criminal court.

For more postings about piracy visit E-Reads’ Pirate Central.

Richard Curtis and Anthony Damasco

Among the many ways that copyrighted texts are misappropriated, none is more prevalent than peer-to-peer file sharing.  Nor is any more pernicious, for it flagrantly flouts the law without appearing to break it.

Though P2P (as it is called) started in the music and video businesses it has spread to e-books.  While pundits scoff at the notion that the e-book industry could be plundered as thoroughly as the music industry, the extent of the outlawry is staggering and is the Number 1 threat to the growth of this nascent field. (See A Bootleg E-Book Bazaar Operates in Plain Sight)

The concept of peer-to-peer file sharing was developed around the turn of the 20th century by a number of brilliant programmers determined to get their hands on the treasure of music that had become abundantly available when the record industry went digital.  The Internet offered a powerful tool for sharing musical files if only a path around copyright laws could be found. Perhaps these enterprising people were inspired by head shop owners who sold the wherewithal for drug use but not the drugs themselves. There was nothing technically illegal about selling cigarette papers, roach clips, bongs and the like. By the same token, a computer through which friends exchanged files should not be considered unlawful, they contended.

By the end of the 1990s the music industry was being ravaged by file-sharing, fueled in some measure by popular anger against a recording industry that was thought to be gouging customers.

The principle is simple: a computer is used as a conduit for persons to share music, video, or texts with each other free of charge.  The downloaders cannot be said to be infringing because they are for all intents and purposes friends sharing content they like, and there is nothing illegal about that.  Nor can the computer owner be said to infringe because he does not possess the property; he is simply introducing friends or managing a channel between them and facilitating their sharing activities.

The forerunner of the file sharing movement was Napster, and for several years it seemed unstoppable. According to Wikipedia, “Napster users relayed search requests through a central server owned by Napster (the Napster central server also maintained an index of users and files available on the network at any given time).”

The centralized computer was Napster’s Achilles heel, because it meant that the company was in a position to block access or remove infringing material when a copyright owner complained. When it would not or could not do so under court pressure, the company went out of business.

The creators of Napster’s successor, Grokster, found a way around the problem of a centralized repository for files and user information. In a 2003 article by Chris Sprigman, the scheme was described thus:

When a user boots the software, his computer is directed to sign on to a “root supernode” …which then directs the user to a “local supernode.” The “local supernode” is some user’s computer, which has been temporarily designated to route file-sharing requests among a large number of other users. (A particular user’s computer may function as a local supernode one day but not the next; the process is largely invisible to the user).

Suppose a Grokster user requests a certain file – it could be a song, a movie clip, a video game, or an e-book. His search request is relayed among a large number of local supernodes and on to individual users. Once the requested file is found, it is transferred directly between the users.

Subsequent programmers engineered the user-to-user concept until it was almost impossible to find a computer, or operator, responsible for disseminating unauthorized files. Nevertheless, a lawsuit was brought against Grokster by MGM Studios. The battle that raged through the court system is well worth reading in Wikpedia’s account, especially because lower courts and appeals supported Grokster.  Finally the US Supreme Court ruled against Grokster and the company ceased operations.

Today if you visit the company’s website you will find the following message:

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.

Napster and Grokster were driven out of business because angry rights holders took legal action and had the time, money and determination to press their case to the limit.  Those cases dealt with music and videos.  No parallel case has yet been brought against book infringers. Should one be?

Richard Curtis

For a full archive of E-Reads postings about piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Photo: Wikipedia

Adopting advanced technology, Curtis Agency and E-Reads have teamed up to locate and take down pirated files of their authors’ books.

The system, developed by Muso TNT, protects against files uploaded by pirates to filesharing sites like rapidshare and megaupload.  Files on these websites show up on Google search results and are therefore accessible to users who might otherwise purchase the files through legitimate channels.

The Size of the Problem

Though we have often contended that piracy is the number one threat to the e-book industry (see A Bootleg E-Book Bazaar Operates in Plain Sight), skeptics may not be aware of the extent of the problem. Boasting that “The Internet is the largest copying machine ever invented,” torrentfreak.com this week ranked filesharing sites according to traffic in the month of July 2011. The first figure represents unique monthly visitors, the second monthly pageviews:

1 4shared Cyberlocker 55,000,000/ 2,500,000,000
2 Megaupload Cyberlocker 37,000,000/ 400,000,000
3 Mediafire Cyberlocker 34,000,000 /330,000,000
4 Filestube Meta-search 34,000,000/ 280,000,000
5 Rapidshare Cyberlocker 23,000,000/ 280,000,000
6 The Pirate Bay Torrent index 23,000,000 /650,000,000
7 Fileserve Cyberlocker 19,000,000 /190,000,000
8 Hotfile Cyberlocker 16,000,000 /110,000,000
9 Torrentz.eu Meta-search 15,000,000/ 340,000,000
10 Depositfiles Cyberlocker 14,000,000/ 110,000,000

How Muso TNT Works.

Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine “spiders” to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.

Lawful Takedowns

The author, publisher or agent may view the files to confirm that they are not authorized. Then the user clicks authorization for Muso to issue, to fileshare site administrators, batch takedown emails that are preformatted to adhere to Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice and takedown procedures. Within hours the files are taken down automatically. In the event you send a takedown notice for a file to which you do not have the rights, the uploader has 14 days to dispute your action.

Results

We recently tested the program.  “The results exceeded our wildest dreams,” says technical director Anthony Damasco.  “On Friday afternoon we identified some 3500 illegally shared files of titles by our authors and ordered them removed. It took me 45 minutes. By Monday just about every one of them had been taken down.”

The program does not cover every type of piracy but filesharing is one of the most commonplace, widespread and persistent.

The two companies have begun taking down unauthorized files of clients and “We will also extend, at no charge, antipiracy coverage to all new clients of both firms,” said CEO Richard Curtis. Authors, agents and publishers interested in Muso’s services may enroll by signing up below.  Enrollment with Muso is $15.00 per month per author. In the event that more take-downs are needed, Muso offers them at the rate of $25 per 250. Full disclosure: E-Reads receives a modest fee for referrals.

For further information contact Anthony Damasco at anthony@ereads.com or call 212 772 7363.

Click here to enroll with MUSO and start protecting your titles.

Instructions

1. Click signup and create an account

2. Select “Publishing” from the dropdown

3. When asked to create a campaign, enter author’s full name as it appear on his or her books

4. Allow the Muso bots to populate all the pirated files over 24 hours.

5. Login to Muso and start taking files down

For a complete archive of piracy-related postings, visit Pirate Central.

The Brits may be behind us in e-book technology but when it comes to righteousness they’re light years ahead of us Yanks.  We reported on legislation they passed to curb file-sharing deadbeats (See Want to Sue a Pirate? Move to England). But now they’ve actually gone and put the clamps on a pirate website.

“A High Court judge has ruled that [British Internet Service Provider] BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies,” reports BBC News. “Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums. The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site.” (Details here.)

Unlike American lawmakers who are cowed by the might of Google and other ISPs (Read Game Over. Google Insists on Linking to Pirate Sites), British legislators recognize that if antipiracy measures are going to be effective, ISP links to pirate sites must be choked off. Listen to the stern words of the judge’s statement:

“This court action was never an attack on ISPs but we do need their co-operation to deal with the Newzbin site which continually tries to evade the law and judicial sanction. Newzbin is a notorious pirate website which makes hundreds of thousands of copyrighted products available without permission and with no regard for the law.”

Can you imagine a comment like that coming out of the mouth of an American judge?

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of E-Reads postings about piracy, visit Pirate Central.