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entific and professional publishing: Cambridge UniversityPress, Elsevier, Pearson Education, Georg Thieme, HarperCollins,Hogrefe, Macmillan Publishers, Cengage Learning, JohnWiley & Sons, the McGraw-Hill Companies, Oxford UniversityPress, Springer, Taylor & Francis, C.H. Beck, and Walter DeGruyter (The Bookseller, February 2, 2012).UKThe strategy of concerted action for tracking pirated worksin illegal online libraries and engineering the shutdown ofsuch sites was pioneered by the British Publishers Association(PA). Introducing the Copyright Infringement Portal(CIP), the PA launched a dedicated web service for itsmembers that crawls the Web on a daily basis to track titlesthat have been listed by the service’s customers. Whenevera title is identified as being offered for download withoutthe authorization of the rights holder, a takedown noticeis sent to the webmaster of the concerned site. To bothincrease the impact of the service and promote its effectiveness,the CIP displays on its home page detailed statisticsabout its crawling activities, the effective number oftitles that have been cleared successfully, and the illegalhosting sites with the best and the worst track records ofcompliance.In a brochure issued by the PA, takedown rates were documentedby country, with compliance rates of over 90%for territories and countries such as Hong Kong, Gibraltar,and Cyprus and significant levels for countries such as Russia(71.69%), China (65.75%), and Ukraine (60.69%).FranceIn 2013, the French publishers association, Syndicat Nationalde l'Èdition (SNE) decided to license and adapt theUK infringement portal for their French members. (Actualitté,5 August 2013).This pragmatic approach hints at a broader recent policychange, as it contradicts an earlier attitude that focusedmuch more on lobbying the French government to imposestricter legislation rather than promote more practical actions.This move, however, is in line with the Lescure report,a white paper commissioned by the government and publishedin the spring of 2013, proposing even to abolishearlier strict legislation - the Hadopi law - in favor of a “moregradual approach” (Rapport Lescure, summarized in LeMonde, 13 May 2013).Hadopi, the High Authority for the Diffusion of Works and theProtection of Rights on the Internet (Haute Autorité pour ladiffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet)was formed by a law implemented in 2010. Its goal was topromote and encourage legal offers to fight infringement.One of the main actions of the authority is to send warningsto consumers who are infringing copyright law. In acontroversial “three strikes” approach, a user can ultimatelybe banned from accessing the Internet for a certain periodafter being found guilty three times.In January 2012, Hadopi released a study arguing that thepercentage of French consumers who admit to havingdownloaded digital content illegally had dropped fromover 49% to just 29% for the six months prior to their survey,data that illustrate the impact of the authority’s actions(, eBouqin, January 24, 2012). Music (at 57%) andvideos (at 48%) were most popular; books interested only29% of the infringing audience, a scale that might also hintat the limited interest that ebooks have among the generalFrench audience. Overall, Hadopi is not strongly supportedby the book publishing community.Fifty-six of the infringements investigated under Hadopiwere by men and 42 by women, with those from 15 to 24years of age by far the most active (with 70% admittingillegal downloads).Research on ebook piracy in France is carried out withyearly reports by Le Motif, an organization sponsored bythe Ile-de-France region. Its ambition is to provide an observatoryfor the “book in the region,” which includes anannual survey on ebooks, both legal and illegal.In an update, published in March 2012 and includingmostly 2011 data, Le Motif documented a continuous risein available illegal ebook titles —from 4,000 to 6,000 in2009 to between 11,000 and 14,000 at the time of thestudy. A remarkable detail regarding France is the share ofebooks from BD (bande desinnée, or comics, graphic novels,and manga), which currently accounts for 8,000 to10,000 of the illegally available works (Ebookz 3, Etude surl’offre numérique illegal des livres français sur Internet en2011, 3e année).119 The Global eBook Report