The past month has seen new anti-piracy efforts from US and UK author-advocacy groups
When the Society of Authors in London issued their “Piracy Is Theft” appeal earlier this month to the UK secretary of state for business, they cited a key figure: it’s estimated that a sixth of ebooks read online in the UK in 2017 were pirated.
Major authors—such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Antonia Fraser, Tracy Chevalier, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Stoppard, and many more—signed on to the Society of Authors’ appeal and letter. When we asked the Society if a response had been received from the business secretary, the answer was no, although a short statement was included in coverage at The Guardian: “This government takes infringement of copyright very seriously, and we understand the damage this can do to authors’ livelihoods. The Intellectual Property Office will continue to work with authors, online marketplaces, and social media platforms to tackle this unacceptable behaviour and agree [on] ways of reducing this infringement.” Hardly a red-alert response.
Last month, the Authors Guild—the US advocacy organization for writers—issued a call to action against the pirate site Ebook.bike. The site was taken down briefly in early March but was quickly back online after it found another hosting provider. The site hosts user-uploaded copies of ebooks; if an ebook is removed for infringement, a user can simply upload another copy. Sites like Ebook.bike claim safe-harbor protections that allow them to host uploaded content until the copyright owner notifies them of infringement and asks them to remove the work. This process must be repeated for each infringing upload.
The Authors Guild says Ebook.bike demonstrates why congressional reform of the Copyright Act is necessary, with a “notice and stay down” regime instead of “notice and takedown.” The stay-down approach, writes the Guild, means “Once a Web host knows a work is being infringed, it should not continue to receive safe-harbor immunity from claims of infringement unless it takes reasonable measures to remove all infringing copies of the same work.”
The Guild’s call to action for authors—as of about three weeks ago—is “to collectively send a message to Google to delist links to a site’s illegal downloads from search results.” In other words, the Guild wants Google to render pirate sites invisible by making them impossible to find in searches.
Meanwhile, as the Digimarc-Nielsen study “Inside the Mind of a Book Pirate” clarified, “The majority of illegal downloaders are 18 to 34 years old, educated, and wealthy.” The study found that, in the US market, more than 70 percent of illegal downloaders had college or post-graduate degrees. Some 30 percent were getting content from friends on social media, email, flash drive, or at open torrent sites.
How much is being lost? The Digimarc-Nielsen study estimates $315 million “in lost sales to the US ebook market per year.” The study’s authors do caution that the number is “ultimately based on self-reported data,” but in this case that means the $315 million figure “could underestimate the total lost sales to the book industry” (emphasis ours).
Bottom line: It’s hard to know how effective an appeal to the government might be. We’re watching to see how the Society of Authors will follow up, should there be no response to this first letter. For a congressional approach like the one the Guild recommends, a member of Congress needs to be willing to take up the cause; fortunately, the Guild staff is experienced in working with Washington. For now, there’s a line in the Digimarc-Nielsen study worth noting: Many consumer-pirates are also at times paying customers and are not necessarily driven by the prospect of free content—and some say they’d be deterred from piracy if they knew such activity harmed the author. A peer-pressure campaign among authors and their reader-fans could help remind consumers to do the right thing.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
