The publishing industry outsources their anti-piracy efforts to 3rd parties such as Rightscorp. They target file sharing websites, forums and blogs that give audiobooks and e-books away for free. Google has just reported that they processes 24 million links to “pirate” pages per week, which is more than double the amount it received around the same time last year.
Five years ago the search engine received ‘only’ ten million takedown notices during the entire year, but today it processes the same amount in less than three days.
In North America links to torrent or file sharing websites are just removed when Google receives a take down request, but things are quite different in Europe.
The vast majority of e-book companies in Europe use digital watermarks, instead of Adobe DRM. Vendors connected to the eBoekhuis platform share previously-private customer data directly with copyright holders and anti-piracy group BREIN. This means that should digital books turn up on BitTorrent networks or Usenet for example, with a minimum of fuss BREIN will be able to match the embedded watermarks with the customer who bought them. Instead of going after the pirated content, BREIN is targeting pirates directly.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
