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ut illustrated well a widening gap in the public comprehensionof what is right and what is wrong with regard tocopyright.Such oddities have led law professors to acknowledge thatcopyright has become a battleground in fundamental regards:“In legal terms, rights owners, and notably thosebelonging to the copyright industry, have many rights,while users have very few,” argued German law professorKarl-Nikolaus Peifer. “Yet users have in fact all practical possibilitiesto access the content [that they long for]” (quotefrom an interview with Peifer, “Das digitale Urheberrechtsteht am Abgrund” [Digital Copyright Is at the Brink], brandeins,December 2011). Experts such as Peifer argue thatthe law in its current form cannot resolve the resultingconflict.With regard to digital content available on the Internet,many recent studies suggest that piracy “is common”(SSRC, the American Assembly, Columbia University, readmore here). Piracy is clearly ubiquitous in the developingworld (The Media Piracy Report: Media Piracy in EmergingEconomies), yet only imprecise data on its scope and theeffective economic damage are available. In the case ofebooks, a detailed assessment is even more difficult, as theebook market has a history of only a few years in the USand the UK and is only just emerging in most Europeancountries Both data and methodologies for analysis arecurrently limited.In Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Propertyand Growth, released in May 2011, Ian Hargreaves summarizedhis findings (page 10):No one doubts that a great deal of copyright piracyis taking place, but reliable data about scaleand trends is surprisingly scarce. Estimates of thescale of illegal digital downloads in the UK rangesbetween 13 percent and 65 percent in two studiespublished last year. A detailed survey of UK andinternational data finds that very little of it is supportedby transparent research criteria. Meanwhilesales and profitability levels in most creativebusiness sectors appear to be holding up reasonablywell. We conclude that many creative businessesare experiencing turbulence from digitalcopyright infringement, but that at the level of thewhole economy, measurable impacts are not asstark as is sometimes suggested.As early as 2009, Brian O’Leary highlighted the need formore data to differentiate clearly between the fact (or “instance”)of pirated content available on the Internet andits impact on publishing and readers, proposing a differentiatedmodel for the understanding of piracy in a widercontext of freely available content:The potential loss of sales suffered by the mostpopular authors is more than offset by increasedvisibility (and presumably sales) afforded less wellknownauthors when their content is made availabledigitally (Impact of P2P and Free Distributionon Book Sales: Tools of Change for Publishing ResearchReport, 2009, page 23).This model aims to replace the popular binary understanding(good vs. bad) with a more nuanced approach,differentiating between a white market, in which contentis created, marketed, and sold; a gray market for the promotionof a title and author, carrying a risk of pirated content“but accompanied by a quantifiably better result”; andan (illegal) back channel, “in which content is traded andconsumed without fair compensation for its authors orpublishers (resulting in lost revenue)” (O’Leary, 2009, page25).The claim that piracy is not automatically synonymouswith pirated content being a substitute for purchase hasalso been discussed widely with regard to other digitalcontent, notably music, and these arguments are oftenrelevant to the current debate on ebooks and piracy (seeThe Lefsetzletter).Regrettably, the limited available research on ebooks andpiracy in continental Europe —notably Germany andFrance— so far focuses primarily on the simpler model ofa black-and-white juxtaposition of legal and illegal downloadswithout fostering a more complex analysis of drivingforces and the resulting effects on the emerging ebookenvironment. This study can only summarize the initial researchand related critical debate.Coordinated efforts for trackingand takedown campaignsLarge publishing groups have successfully launched coordinatedactions to shut down major piracy sites carryingbooks for which they owned the rights. For instance, inFebruary 2012, two share-hosting services, www.ifile.itand www.library.nu, which offered a library of 400,000ebooks for free illegal download, were shut down in a novelapproach coordinated by both the International PublishersAssociation (IPA) and Börsenverein, together with a groupof publishers including many of the leading houses in sci-The Global eBook Report 118