In addition, the authoritative practices and strategies withregard to piracy —or, more broadly, with regard to creatingthe legal framework to cope with the challenges from digitalmedia— is not well defined in any of the emergingmarkets.While several pieces of international legislation relevant topiracy have been abandoned (the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the US and theCounterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) de facto at the Europeanlevel), a wave of studies and practical initiativeshave hit the media over the past 12 months or so, with littleconsensus on the parameters, drivers, or concrete goals ofthese activities.The issue was at the top of the agenda for industry organizationsacross the US, Europe, and the rest of the world(see the AAP at PW, March 15, 2012). New legislation hasbeen introduced at the national level in a number of countries,including Spain (under the acronym of SINDE, for alaw on the “durable economy, aiming at reforming copyrightSpanish law altogether”; Livres Hebdo, March 1,2012). At the same time, courts at the European level havelimited the direct responsibility and liability of providerplatforms for hosting illegal content on their servers. 1One challenge for the book industry is that the broaderdebate on copyright and infringements is predominantlydriven by the movie and music industry, thereby sideliningissues specific to books and reading. In many statisticaloverviews, ebooks are treated as a niche domain, withoutthe acknowledgment of the factors specifically affectingthis segment. For instance, due to the small file sizes ofebooks in comparison to audio MP3 files or digital video,peer-to-peer (or torrent) sites play an insignificant role inthe distribution of illegal ebooks, compared to file sharingand one-click-hosting (OCH) sites.In addition, the measurement of the number of downloadeditems must be handled differently for ebooks, as theconsumption of an ebook is much more time-consumingthan that of a piece of music. In return, for some marketswith particularly high penetration rates of piracy, such asin the Arab world, huge catalogues of illegal digital copiesof ebooks, together with links to filehosting sites, are availableon legal platforms such as Facebook, providing anarguably better consumer experience than any of the legalsites in the region.However, even for well-documented markets such as Germanyor France, for a number of reasons, no widely acceptedconsensus has emerged as to the scope and impactof piracy with regard to the emerging ebook market, or forthe best practices to act against offerings of illegally digitizedcontent.Controversial debates, legal initiatives,and contradictory practices in EuropeGermany, one of the leading content markets outside theEnglish realm, was rattled throughout the first half of 2012by controversies related to copyright and to practices consideredcontroversial with regard to current law on severallevels. A seemingly technical niche debate about the internationalAnti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) didnot become a front page topic until it was given up, at leastin its current form, by both the German government andthe European authorities. It split society into two sides,with Börsenverein lobbying for the agreement and a growingpolitical majority considering it a threat to civil rights.The very term pirate experienced an about-face, as a newpolitical party even ran in the parliamentary elections infall 2013 under the name of the Pirate Party. After initiallybroad media attention, the campaign had little success,but 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”1. The European Court ruled against the German collecting society (GEMA) on the installation of automated filters to prevent access to illegal contenton platforms such as YouTube, as such practices would impede freedom of information as well as the individual privacy rights of users. (Die Zeit,February 2, 2012)98 The Global eBook Report
(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 Property andGrowth, 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 tracking andtakedown 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 scientificand 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).The 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 sta-The Global eBook Report 99
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ContentsAbout the Global eBook Repo
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Receptiveness for foreign (English)
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Produced in Atlas by O’Reilly Med
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Mapping and Understandingthe Emergi
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publishers’ agreement with Apple
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January 18, 2013; “Un rapport env
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1980s, global cities in the 1990s,
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The ambitions, and thelimitations o
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Metadata is the key to online sales
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English Language eBookMarketsThe fo
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Overall, the spectacular growth in
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hit (source: various reports summar
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Debates Shaping the Book Industry i
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Contributed article BookwireAvailab
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GermanyKey Indicators Values Source
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than 10% of all online sales by the
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warm at best, and the half-year res
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SNE had earlier started to systemat
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ginning by Hachette Livres, among o
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SpainKey Indicators Values Sources,
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focusing on both Spain and Latin Am
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The emerging ebook market may confr
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SwedenKey Indicators Values Sources
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Netherlands2012 was a tough year fo
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