A novel solution to book piracy
02 June 2009
As ebooks become a larger part of the book industry, publishers and authors could face the same challenges from piracy that record labels and musicians have over the last ten years.
A piece in the Bookseller last week said that the Publishers' Association had identified 800 illegally uploaded works and removed 90% of them using a new anti-piracy tool.
What caught my eye about the story was the suggestion that publishers might adopt similar spoofing tactics to those used by the music industry, where fake copies of a work are uploaded by the copyright owner to confuse the pirates.
The commitment that people make to a song is minimal compared to the commitment made to a book. If you're playing a song and it turns out to be a lecture about how you should be buying it instead, you could just click 'stop'. How annoying would it be if you were 200 pages in to a pirated copy of some romantic fiction novel, when a bunch of pirates swing in on ropes yelping like Tarzan and just start killing everyone? (er... in the book, obviously). I can see a lot of creative opportunities for authors who work with publishers to create spoofed versions of their works...
Labels: books, publishing
Comments
Except pirates are creative and will work around this.
Film distributors tried a similar approach, seeding the filesharing networks with files purporting to be some film or other, but being broken in some way.
But people just find a reliable source and stick to it. Filesharing sites have user feedback mechanisms. The problem publishers have is that pirates seem to be able to innovate faster than them.
Film distributors tried a similar approach, seeding the filesharing networks with files purporting to be some film or other, but being broken in some way.
But people just find a reliable source and stick to it. Filesharing sites have user feedback mechanisms. The problem publishers have is that pirates seem to be able to innovate faster than them.
Thank you both for your comments - the pirates have been one step ahead of the game, but anti-piracy campaigns do at least make piracy hard enough to deter the casual pirate, and also start a discussion so that people can understand the damage that piracy does to creative industries.
I can imagine someone being thrown by a download of 'From Dusk Til Dawn'. "Eh? Where did the real second half go?"
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I can imagine someone being thrown by a download of 'From Dusk Til Dawn'. "Eh? Where did the real second half go?"
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