Ed McCoyd
AAP
Director of Digital Policies
File Sharing
Journals
- STM Journal publishers don’t use encrypted protection
- Subscription models and licensing agreements usually provide sufficient protection
- Aries’ “docurights” solution used by some publishers in connection with pharmaceutical reprint license for PDF documents.
E-Reserves
- Materials scanned and posted electronically for remote access by college students
- Faculty sometimes do not seek a license form the publisher, instead relying on conceptions of fair use
Books
- Envisional study: 7,500 book titles available on pirated electronic book form as of Sept 2001
- All genre
- Vast majority were scanned hardcovers or paperbacks.
Formats
- Works converted from pure text into proprietary reading formats
- Do-it-yourself conversion tools (Reader works, Palm Drop Book, Acrobat)
Forums (where piracy takes place)
- News Groups
- IRC’s
- FTP sites
- P2P
- HTTP
- Auction sites
[I get the feeling the publishing industry is not very tech savvy – for example, hardly anyone can run the laptop that has powerpoint presentations hosted]
[This is not to be dismissive of legitimate copyright issues – but no one is asking how to move product to the alternative formats that the “wild wild west” is creating on the black market]
Motives of Pirates
- Often not money
- Acceptance in online trading communities
- “Information wants to be free”
E-books
- AAP has no data to suggest these activities have meaningful bottom line impact
E-books
- Small, but growing
- 2001 – 500,000 copies sold
- 2002 – 782,000
- 2003 – 1,300,000 units
E-paper
- Promise is that you can read in various environments as the natural light around is illuminating the page
- Expected to use less battery power
- [no analysis as to market impact
AAP Online Book Piracy Scans
- Performed by Media Sentry
- Crawled the web – looking for pirated books
- Over 50 search terms used (like ISBN, e-book, etc)
- Data is not useable right away – requires human intervention to become meaningful. Have to check each entry to see if “likely” infringement –[ this is a rough guess – no validity here]
- So far found
- 61,134 likely infringing files
- Only retrieved title and size not actual file
- Trade books, technical books and college textbooks
- Half in pdf format
[Ed is trying to describe XML – you tag elements of the page, beauty is different platforms can read using same file.
- Majority of piracy is on P2P networks (70%)
- Second was IRC
- FTP third
- Common web sites very little – thinks DMCA giving ISPs rights to pull down sites is affecting this number
Questions
We are concerned that if e-books are 5-10% of marketplace then propensity to hack the medium will increase (ie they are afraid they will suffer fate of recording industry)
[BSA once advocated a chip like security control to manage piracy of software and their own clients shot it down as they correctly saw the solution as a tax on their own future.]
Industry might authorize authentic stamp that verifies legitimate copy of e-book.
Ebook sales are less than 1 one hundredth of percent of market.
Do publishers see open access as a threat? What actions can you take?
Consensus is that open access model should be allowed to compete. Concerns us if government intervention gives open access preference.
Copyright 2004 Jim Flowers
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