From the start of the ebook revolution,
piracy has been a thorny issue for authors. Some are outraged while others feel
that it has increased their visibility and ultimately helped boost sales. I recently
read an interesting piece in WritersWeekly, where site owner, Angela Hoy, answered
a writer’s question about whether to worry if her book had been pirated.
Hoy maintains that there are far more
honest book buyers than dishonest ones, and that people who choose the illegal
route probably wouldn’t pay for a book anyway. Hoy also runs a publishing
service and maintains that ebooks are still profitable for her business,
despite piracy issues. In fact, she says she has little piracy problems as she
doesn’t put any security on a book. After all, hackers have the capability to
quickly break codes. Secondly, Hoy states that secure ebooks are not available
to blind readers which is discriminatory and subjects her to lawsuits.
In an earlier article, Hoy writes that many
of those websites that list an author’s ebook for free are overseas operators
who don’t actually have the book. They obtain the title, ISBN, price, etc. from
other sources, then list it on their site to entice people there. When would-be
customers try to download a copy of the book, they wind up with some sort of
malware in their computers.
While Hoy may not be overly worried about
piracy, law enforcement agencies certainly are. Some of you probably heard that
authorities recently shut down the huge, Stockholm-based site called Pirate Bay.
The site has been on law enforcement’s radar for some time and has been in and
out of court for nearly a decade to fight for the right to exist. However,
authorities were finally able to shut them down through copyright infringement
laws. As the Dec. 13th Yahoo article says, this success will not
stop the piracy trade. Incidentally, one of Pirate Bay’s owners claims he
doesn’t care that they shut it down, implying that he has other means of
keeping himself busy. Hmm. If that was true, why did he battle so hard with the
courts to keep the site going in the first place? Let’s be honest. The issue
won’t likely go away, but at least we can decide how we’ll respond to it.
