When people think of unauthorized file sharing, they often focus on music, movies and TV programs, and software. Often forgotten is the magnitude of the illegal file sharing in the book publishing industry. A recent study published by Attributor documents what the Association of American Publishers calls an “Epidemic of Online Book Piracy”.
Posts Tagged ‘Piracy’
The Epidemic of Online Book Piracy
January 18th, 2010Posted in Copyright, Piracy, book piracy
Tags: barry sookman book publishing Copyright copyright infringement Piracy
Critiquing copyright canards
January 7th, 2010I just came across a paper published by the US based Copyright Alliance entitled Critiquing Copyright Canards. Written by Patrick Ross, the paper sets out to debunk some of the arguments or “canards” that are used by opponents of copyright.
ITIF Report: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy
January 1st, 2010Earlier this month, The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a paper called Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy. The aim of the paper is to advance a policy in which illegal sources of digital content is reduced while legal content becomes more accessible. The executive summary provides the following overview of the problem as follows:
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Posted in Copyright, Graduated Response, ISP Liability, Piracy, TPMs, Three Strikes
Tags: barry sookman Copyright digital locks drm Graduated Response Piracy Three Strikes tpms
Toying with funny math to downplay Canada’s role as a piracy haven
December 28th, 2009Several weeks ago TorrentFreak published its Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009. In a blog commenting on the rankings, I pointed out that out of the top 25, 7 of them are located or have connections to Canada and that of the top 10, 4 are located or have connections to Canada. I also pointed out that this meant that Canada, alone, is home to more than 25% of the world’s public English language unauthorized bitTorrent sites and 40% of the leading ones are in Canada.
Fung and Isohunt found liable for inducing worldwide copyright infringement
December 25th, 2009Earlier this week, a US district court granted summary judgement to MPAA members holding that Gary Fung and four websites operated by him, including Isohunt one of Canada’s largest bittorrent sites, contribute to massive worldwide copyright infringement.
Operators of bittorrent sites like isoHunt often claim they are nothing but content neutral search engines like Google. The Isohunt court disagreed holding, based on uncontested expert evidence, that approximately 95 percent of all files made accessible through Isohunt were infringing or highly likely to be infringing.
Canada’s embarrassing place in the BitTorrent rankings, Torrentz.com and IsoHunt world leaders
December 15th, 2009TorrentFreak just published its Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank.
Out of the top 25, 7 of them are located or have connections to Canada. Of the top 10, 4 are located or have connections to Canada. This means that Canada, alone, is home to more than 25% of the world’s public English language unauthorized BitTorrent sites and 40% of the leading ones are in Canada. The sites and their rankings according to TorrentFreak are:
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2009 Ranking |
BitTorrent Site |
Daily Visits |
Pageviews (per visitor) |
Location |
Mininova gone, who’s left and where are they located?
November 27th, 2009In August of this year a Dutch court ordered Mininova to remove all infringing torrents within three months. Yesterday, Mininova complied with the court’s order and disabled all torrents, except those in the licensed “content distribution” part of the service.
Mininova was the world’s second most popular unauthorized BitTorrent site. It facilitated infringement on a massive scale, with more than 10 billion downloads. Its demise follows Pirate Bay which was also ordered shut down following a decision by a Swedish court this past April which found Pirate Bay’s operators criminally responsible for copyright infringement.
OECD counterfeiting report misinterpreted to support myth of Canada as a low piracy country
November 24th, 2009On November 20th, the OECD published a report titled Magnitude of counterfeiting and piracy of tangible products – November 2009 update. The report is an update to a previous major study on counterfeiting undertaken by the OECD in 2008. The report confirms what has been known for a long time: that counterfeiting and piracy of tangible goods is a major impediment to global trade that is getting worse. The report estimates that global trade in counterfeit and pirated tangible goods more than doubled in this decade to approximately 250 billion US dollars in 2007, up from just over USD 100 billion in 2001.
Posted in ACTA, Copyright, Counterfeiting, Piracy
Tags: ACTA barry sookman Copyright Counterfeiting OECD Piracy
MAGNITUDE OF COUNTERFEITING AND PIRACY OF TANGIBLE PRODUCTS
November 19th, 2009The OECD just published an update on the magniture of counterfeiting and piracy of tangible products. The report, Magnitude of Counterfeiting and Piracy of Tangible Products-An Update, is a useful reminder of the problem and reinforces the need for a global agreement like ACTA to address the problem.
An 2008 OECD study concluded that international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods could have accounted for up to USD 200 billion in 2005. The updated estimates, based on the growth and changing composition of trade between 2005 and 2007, suggests that counterfeit and pirated goods in international trade grew steadily over the period 2000 – 2007 and could amount to up to USD 250 billion in 2007.
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