Legal Research

eBook ?Piracy?

By admin

From ReadWriteWeb:

Study: E-Book Piracy is on the Rise

” According to Attributor, a company that develops anti-piracy and content monitoring solutions, the daily demand for pirated books can be estimated at up to 3 million people worldwide. The company’s latest study also highlights that the total interest in documents from file-sharing sites has increased more than 50% over the course of the last year. Interestingly, e-book piracy is moving away from large sites like RapidShare to smaller sites and those that specialize in pirated e-books.”

The executive summary is here as a 5 page PDF.

Now these folks have a vested interest in overstating the case but the numbers are interesting nonetheless. I’d be skeptical but we can’t ignore the risk of piracy any more than the music industry could. Then again I sure hope the same strategies aren’t considered. Indeed I am quite uncomfortable with the word ‘piracy’ which got its start in the old software piracy groups.

Eric Hellman at the GoToHellman blog has this analysis:

Consumer Demand for Pirated eBooks Stopped Growing in 2010

Now this can be confusing but you’re all statistically sophisticated enough to know that reductions in the rate of growth still means things are actually growing. And if e-book piracy has plateaued, we need to look under the hood. Are we waiting for a new device to arrive and make e-books easier to exchange and download? Is there a core group of readers who choose to ignore author’s rights? Or is e-book reading just a niche addiction? Or something else…

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on October 13, 2010 (boomark / email).