Népszabadság – Támadnak a könyvkalózok
Az év legveszélyesebb szerzői jogi kalózakcióját hiúsította meg a hazai könyves egyesülés. Egy amerikai szerverről vetettek le egy több mint ezer népszerű könyv letöltését ingyenesen kínáló honlapot. Ez két éven belül már a második próbálkozás volt. A kalózkodásnak azonban ezzel nincs vége: az e-könyv bevezetése újabb veszélyeket rejt.
Necessity knows no laws – the role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem from printing to file sharing networks
This is the title of my PhD turned into a forthcoming book in Hungarian.
 In this book my aim was to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity, or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be; what sharing and online cooperation means in a p2p setting; what privacy is and how it can be protected; how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment, just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on the cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being –and the power vacuum that enabled it – have passed.
The notion that piracy is more than just a legally contested shadow economy is further supported by the body of research that documents historical examples of copyright piracy either from a social/media history, literary studies perspective (Bender & Sampliner, 1996-1997; Darnton, 2003; Feather, 1987; Heylin, 1995; Judge, 1934; Kaser, 1969; Pollard, 1916, 1920; Rose, 1993; Wittmann, 2004, Johns 2010) or from a legal history standpoint (Khan, 2002; Khan & Sokoloff, 2001; May & Sell, 2006; Redmond, 1990; Scott, 1998). These historical accounts of copyright piracy describe the internal norms of information markets both before and after the establishment of national and international layers of regulation. The faces, motivations, and fates of the copyright pirates are many, but there is one thing that is common to all of them: they all exist in the extra-legal domain at the edges of state authority. In this semi-autonomous space, “Honor Amongst Thieves,” “synthetic copyright”, entries in the Registry of the Stationer’s Company, server-enforced share ratios, and other non-legal structures organize pirate activity. In each and every case we find norms that — while competing with the legal – act to encourage the production of a common pool resource, offer methods to settle disputes and limit free-riding. In other words these bottom up norms sometimes substitute, sometimes replicate state sanctioned layers of regulation that are missing or being denied.
Why is the study of piracy especially interesting today? For several reasons. First, even though on paper we have seen a steady strengthening of the protection of Intellectual Property, the inability to enforce them resulted in a significantly weaker copyright protection than any time during the last hundred years. That vacuum is partly caused, partly filled by the competing, bottom up norms of file-sharing communities. The weakened property rights, along with the emergence of filesharing networks created a de facto common pool of resources from the musical, audiovisual, textual works circulating in the digital underground. This commons has proved to be quite resilient to attacks from the outside as well as to those internal issues that can lead to a tragedy of commons. Many file-sharing communities seem to have successfully solved the problems of managing a common pool resource as well as protecting it from – in this case (re) – enclosure. There is, however, little to no research on the actual mechanisms of how these commons are maintained, protected and replenished. Only a few unconfirmed accounts describe the internal workings of online cultural black markets (b-bstf, Summer 2004; Howe, January 2005).
Second, even from these shallow accounts it is evident that non-monetary incentives and complex social motivations play a crucial role in the existence and successful survival of file-sharing communities and of those resource pools around which these communities gather. To illustrate this point it is worth examining the ways community norms manifest themselves in the technological restraints and defaults (Strahilevitz, 2003). Employed at the level of both software clients (like the design principle of bittorrent) and servers (minimum shared library size or upload/download ratio) technology is fine-tuned to reflect the characteristics of content flows, the relative popularity of different titles, the aesthetic judgments, and the thematic preferences of file-sharers. Global, open, mainstream bittorrent trackers for example set no minimum level of contribution – they rely on the sheer number of users and the loyalty of some to provide the necessary level of resources for all. On the other hand, while many national level trackers prohibit the exchange of current local goods, they highly reward the making available of local back catalogs and out of print works. Some allow only a trusted circle of releasers to provide them with digital copies of new titles. Others allow, even encourage each and every user to upload and seed whatever they see fit. From this latter group some set and enforce highly detailed technical specifications regarding video encoding, sound quality, etc. Others provide the community collaborative filtering tools to assess the quality of contributions. Beyond the technologically enforced compulsory rules, informal community norms encourage voluntary cooperation. The exclusivity, notoriety of some communities guarantees a loyal and enthusiastic user base. Their fame inspires others into competition, trying to replicate their success. Many fail, a few prefer to stay small and secluded, but some develop into big, extraordinarily powerful underground marketplaces.
Third, none of these subtle differences between different pirate communities is described with the current economic and legal language used to discuss copyright piracy, despite the fact that they have profound economic and legal consequences on legal markets and on general copynorms (Schultz, 2006) alike. Current discourse on copyright piracy tends to homogenize a wide variety of fundamentally different practices with reductionist legal /economic arguments.
Following the footsteps of Lessig (2004) I hope that the time is now ripe to step beyond the monolithic understanding of p2p file-sharing by enriching the currently fragmented research landscape with a social-sciences based piracy research that
- describes the role copyright pirates played throughout the history of printing,
- describes the international flow of intellectual property to explain piratical states such as China,
- based on these findings situates current file-sharing and assesses its impact on legal markets.
Technology | guardian.co.uk
I’m not suggesting that the only way the electronic book industry can succeed is by promoting piracy. But without it, there’s no whip to crack. There’s no easy cause and effect to startle the publishers out of their leather armchairs and into action.
I suspect that the real change will come as more authors who are already part of the digital age push for new things. But that’s a generational shift, and we’re still a long way from it.
It’s not that I don’t believe electronic books can’t be a success – just that without an outside factor that can push things faster than the industry is comfortable with, progress is always going to be very, very slow.
On the XVII. Budapest International Book Festival I was talking about the Goggle Book project and led a panel about the online book black-markets at the Book publishing and distribution in the age of electronic copies conference, co-organized by the Hungarian Patent Office, and the National Anti-counterfeiting Committee, the Ministry of Justice, and the Book Trade.
Book marketing conference was a trade conference where all the major publishers and distributors were present. I talked them about the fate of the local markets if they do not match the efforts of Google Books in terms of digitizing and making accessible of books.
ekonyvolvaso.blog.hu
Decemberben már emlegettük,
hogy a négy nagy magyar terjesztő közül a “kicsi, de dinamikus”, a
Bookline belecsap az elektronikus-tartalom értékesítésébe is. Az
anyacégtől átvett idegennyelvű anyagok azért nem verték le forgalmukkal
a biztosítékot (az áraik már inkább).
Szerencsére nem állt meg itt az élet, a magában sem kicsi Bookline közös céget alapított az elsősorban nagykereskedelmi vonalon erős Lírával, a beszédes eKönyv Magyarország Kft néven. A
téma még nagyon friss, ezért mélyelemzésbe még nem mennék bele, de
talán végre látható közelségbe került az értelmes (értsd kurrens
tartalom, megfizethető áron, szabványos formátumban) magyar
e-könyvkiadás. A Bookline erős az internetes piacokon, a Lírának nagyon erős saját brandjei (kiadói) vannak, és a nem sajátokkal sem rossz a kapcsolata.
Elfért
nagyon ez a manőver az Alexandra és Libri uralta kicsit langyos
állóvízben, de ne felejtsük el, hogy nekik is lehet még egy-két szavuk
a dologhoz.
Maradjanak velünk, a reklám után jövünk a részletekkel.
Elfért nagyon ez a manőver az Alexandra és Libri uralta kicsit langyos állóvízben, de ne felejtsük el, hogy nekik is lehet még egy-két szavuk a dologhoz.
Maradjanak velünk, a reklám után jövünk a részletekkel.
EXCESS COPYRIGHT: Some Thoughts on the Google Book Settlement Hearing of February 18, 2010
1. Is this an appropriate use of the class action process, especially in view of the many prestigious groups, corporations and individuals who have objected to the ASA? In other words, to what extent does the class involved adequately represent affected authors and publishers, not to mention countless other stakeholders, including librarians and scholars?
2. Can a class action settlement go well beyond the original pleadings and, effectively, change the law both for the past and for the future in a way that would otherwise be impossible at this point in time if it were to be attempted in Congress and/or through a treaty?
3. Given the extraordinary complexity of the settlement documentation and the relatively short notice period, can affected authors, publishers and other stakeholders realistically come to informed conclusions?
4. Is it appropriate to use class action litigation to arguably transform the normally “exclusive rights” basis of copyright law, which requires explicit permission, into an opt-out regime, where permission will be given unless specifically refused in writing? The deadline for total “opting out” was January 28, 2010. Google argues that even those who didn’t opt out by January 28, 2010 will have plenty of opportunities to exercise control over their works down the line for many purposes – but this will still require further “opt out” or other action.
5. Would the Settlement, if approved, put the United States into contravention of international law with respect to such basic concepts as those of national treatment, mandatory exclusive rights, and the three step test? None other than the Hon. Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights raised the national treatment issue in her testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.
6. What will be the antitrust implications of the ASA, given the dominant or monopoly position that Google will have with respect to several markets that it is creating by virtue of this Settlement, i.e. access to orphan works, and, above all the sole portal to search engine access to the database of tens of millions of books (the great “Library to Last Forever”, as Sergey Brin himself calls it)?
7. What are the implications of views such as this by prominent US IP antitrust lawyer Gary Reback?
8. What are the extraterritorial implications of this agreement, which requires authors of books published in Australia, Canada (including French language books) and the UK (the “foreign publishing countries”) to have opted out by January 28, 2010 or be bound by it? It also covers books published in these countries, even for the countless authors who are not citizens or residents of these foreign publishing countries or the USA. Unlike United States works, there is no requirement for the foreign works to have been registered in the US Copyright Office. Given the practice of simultaneous or near simultaneous publication of countless English language books in the foreign publishing countries, Google will acquire an enormous number of books in their database that would not fit into the necessarily tighter definition of a US work, which requires publication and registration in the USA. Moreover, many French books published in Quebec but originating from anywhere in the world including France would be included.
9. What about the countless past agreements signed between authors and publishers that were silent or at best ambiguous about electronic rights?
10. What about the privacy rights of potential users?
Here are some Canadian-focussed questions, which Judge Chin will not likely answer but others may eventually have to face:
1. Why has the Government of Canada apparently been uninvolved and uninterested in the GBS? There has been no public consultation that I am aware of. France and Germany have become engaged at the official level. On the other hand, Canadian officials who would normally be involved in an issue such as this haven’t been.
2. Where are the several prominent Canadian trade associations and collectives that should have provided some useful specific advice and potentially some representation for Canadian authors, publishers, librarians etc. on these issues?
3. What are the implications of the Google Partner Program, which appears to allow publishers to feed into Google’s database for very extended access the books of many authors, who may have been and still may be unaware of the Program?
4. Why is this shaping up to be a battle between scholarly and other individual authors. ranging from the most obscure to J. K. Rowling herself on the one hand and big corporate publishers on the other? I note that the Canadian Publishers’ Council and the Association of Canadian Publishers (which together represent the big multinational and major Canadian publishers) are recommending approval of the Settlement at the same time that they attempting to intervene to fight “flexible fair dealing” and push back on the CCH v. LSUC decision in the Access Copyright K-12 case currently before the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal. On the other hand, many independent Canadian authors and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (“CAUT”) are opposing the GBS. Naturally, the database will be far more important for innovation and research purposes with respect to scholarly works than, for example, light romance novels (no offence to the fan fiction crowd).
5. Although vast numbers of Canadian published books by thousands of Canadian authors will be drawn into this settlement, most of the bells and whistles of the Google Books database will presumably not be available in Canada with respect to most of the database. This is because Google is necessarily putting up something of a firewall around this database since, even though there may be some extraterritorial aspects to the settlement, the Settlement not surprisingly purports not to affect activities implicating copyright rights in foreign countries outside of the USA.
6. Canadians may wish to read, if nothing else, the submissions of Google itself and the US Department of Justice (which supports the basic goals of the ASA but reiterates that it is still “a bridge too far” and should not be approved as is). Canadians will also want to read the few but important submissions from Canada. As well, there are “must read” submissions from Pam Samuelson and many notable advocacy groups on all sides, and corporate interests, including Microsoft and AT&T.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Total number of books in the world = 174m.
Total number of books held by Google partner libraries = 42m.
Total number of books subject to the amended settlement = 10m.
~5 million are in-print
~5 million are out-of-print
~1 million of the out-of-print works would turn out to be true “orphan works”
Google has scanned 12 million books so far,
2 million scanned through its Partner Program,
2 million public domain works, and foreign works that are outside the amended settlement.
Authors Guild claims a membership of over 8,500
Association of American Publishers claims to represent over 300 publishers,
30,000 authors and publishers have already struck deals to be in Google Books through Google’s Publisher Partner Program.
44,450 claim forms (both
online and hardcopy) have been received as of February 8, claims relate to
approximately 1.13 million books and 21,829 “inserts” (i.e., things
like a short story or article in an anthology).
Of the 1,107,620 books
claimed online,
619,531 are classified by Google as out-of-print
488,089 are classified as in-print.
Total number of claimants: 44,450
Total books claimed: 1,125,339
Total inserts claimed: 21,829
Percentage of books claimed (online only) that Google classifies as out of print: 56%
Percentage of books claimed on Google’s numbers: about 10%
50,000 rightsholder
responses,
87% choosing to participate in some form
13% opting out altogether.
Percentage of books claimed by publishers: 71%
Percentage of books claimed by authors: 29%
Ars technica
On Thursday, Macmillan CEO John Sargent met with Amazon representatives to discuss the pricing of the publisher’s titles on the Kindle e-book reader. Negotiations didn’t go so well, with Sargent wanting to exercise absolute control over the prices of e-books sold through Amazon. According to the New York Times’ sources, Macmillan wanted Amazon to raise prices from $9.99 to $15.
Since launching the Kindle, Amazon has kept the price of best-sellers steady at $9.99, reportedly taking a loss on each title in order to make content for its e-book reader more attractive and drive hardware sales. That hasn’t gone over too well with some publishers, but the dispute with Macmillan is the first one to carry over from the boardroom into public.
In an advertisement (via Silicon Alley Insider) that ran Saturday in Publishers Lunch, Sargent gave his company’s side of the story. He says that Macmillan would make less money under a new distribution model that it will be using with other retailers (including Apple) beginning in March. Called the agency model, it has Amazon and other retailers taking a 30 percent commission on all sales, but with the publisher setting the price on each title. New releases would retail for between $12.99 and $14.99, while older titles would be as cheap as $5.99. Amazon would prefer to go with a one-price-fits-all model.
The last few weeks were busy. I had many media appearances partly because of the p2p study, partly because of the interest generated by these appearances.
On the recently released p2p study:
On other issues in the media:
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Baen Free Library is a digital library of the science fiction and fantasy publishing house Baen Books where (as of December 2008) 112 full books can be downloaded free in a number of formats, without copy protection. It was founded in autumn 1999 by science fiction writer Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen to determine whether the availability of books free of charge on the Internet encourages or discourages the sale of their paper books.
The Baen Free Library represents an interesting experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright. It appears that sales of both the books made available free and other books by the same author, even from a different publisher, increase when the electronic version is made available free of charge.
The Millions: Confessions of a Book Pirate
Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?
I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.
I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand.
AAP November Sales Rise 10.9%
Book sales in November rose 10.9%, to $808.5 million, at publishers who reported to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the year through November rose 4.9%.
Among categories:
* E-books exploded 199.9%, to $18.3 million.
* Audiobooks jumped 69%, to $18.4 million.
* Adult hardcover rose 26.9%, to $204.4 million.
* Higher education rose 24.2%,, to $197.1 million.
* University press hardcover rose 21.9% to $5.4 million.
* El-Hi basal and supplemental K-12 jumped 18.4%, to $136.9 million.
* University press paperback climbed 2.7%, to $4.2 million.
* Professional and scholarly rose 2.7%, to $57.1 million.
* Children’s/YA paperback inched up 1%, to $43.9 million.
* Religious books were flat, at $48.7 million.
* Adult paperback fell 3%, to $92.3 million
* Adult mass market dropped 9.8%, to $53.2 million.
* Children’s/YA hardcover fell 13.5%, to $63.9 million.
Books | guardian.co.uk
The family of John Steinbeck has reversed its decision to oppose Google’s controversial plans to digitise millions of books, but a growing chorus of authors led by acclaimed science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin have registered their resistance to the scheme.
BEA 2009: The Truth About Book Piracy : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits
According to O’Leary’s subsequent report, “Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales,” book piracy wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as some had suggested. While O’Leary’s report had only O’Reilly and Random House as participants, it appeared that some of the publishers’ fears about piracy were unsubstantiated. Only eight frontlist titles published by O’Reilly in 2008 could be located as torrent files. When these books did become available as torrents, the torrents were uploaded to the Internet far later than expected: some 20 weeks after publication date on average. Furthermore, for the titles available as torrents, on average, sales were 6.5% higher for these books during the four weeks after they were uploaded.
Go To Hellman
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly
that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online
book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the
viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned”
last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American
city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman
has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities
totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at
least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported
yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.
From
what we’ve been able to piece together, the book “lending” takes place
in “libraries”. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a
dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available
to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange
for a “card”. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz
sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of
other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost
anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous
overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle
of not paying for copyrighted material.
To get to the bottom of this story, Go To Hellman
has dispatched its Senior Piracy Analyst (me) to Boston, where a mass
meeting of alleged book traffickers is to take place. Over 10,000 are
expected at the “ALA Midwinter”
event. Even at the Amtrak station in New York City this morning, at the
very the heart of the US publishing industry, book trafficking culture
was evident, with many travelers brazenly displaying the totebags used
to transport printed contraband.
As soon as I got off the train,
I was surrounded by even more of this crowd. Calling themselves
“Librarians”, they talk about promoting literacy, education, culture
and economic development, which are, of course, code words for the use
and dispersal of intellectual property. They readily admit to their
activities, and rationalize them because they’re perfectly legal in the
US, at least for now.
Typical was Susanne from DC, who told me
that she’s been involved in lending operations for over 15 years. This
confirms our estimate that “lending” has been going on for over ten
years, beyond even Google’s memory. Our trillion dollar estimate may
thus be on the conservative side. Of course, it’s impossible to tell
how many of these lent books would have been purchased legally if
“libraries” were not an option, but we’re not even considering the huge
potential losses to publishers when “used” books are resold for pennies
on the black markets.
ed peto — fake books
A fake book cart in the French Concession, Shanghai – Nov ‘08
Crudely bound, yet functional copies of English language texts
Digital Domain- NYTimes.com
YOU can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.
Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.
With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.
The book industry has not received cheery news for a while. Publishers and authors alike have relied upon sales of general-interest hardcover books as the foundation of the business. The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008, versus the previous year. This year, these sales were down 15.5 percent through July, versus the same period of 2008. Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.
“We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books — pretty much every category is turning up,” said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at the association. “What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy’s a big concern.”
Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, said: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”
We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry’s inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple’s highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads “are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.”
Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. RapidShare does not list the files — a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one.
But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the U.R.L. and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.
“As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material,” Mr. McCoyd said. “Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it.”
When I asked Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, if the company had a general sense of what kinds of material were most often placed on its servers — music? videos? other kinds of content? — she said she could not say because “for us, everything is just a file, no matter what.”
At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that offers publishers antipiracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.
Ms. Scheid said her company complied with publishers’ take-down requests. But the request must refer to a particular file and use the specific U.R.L.; it’s left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers. (I can report that RapidShare acted promptly in September when my publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked it to remove an audiobook version of one of my own books and provided the U.R.L. for the one file.) According to Ms. Scheid, the company gets requests to remove about 1 to 2 percent of the files that are uploaded daily.
To protect users’ privacy, however, she said RapidShare does not attempt to block the uploading of infringing material in the first place: “We don’t do content filtering; we don’t look into uploaded files.” Once a file is removed, the company tries to keep perfectly identical files from being uploaded again, but she listed various ways that determined users can alter the files just enough to effectively circumvent these measures. (My book reappeared on RapidShare a few days after it was taken down.) Hotfile and Megaupload did not respond to requests for comment.
RapidShare and fellow online storage services say that their services help users share large files easily or store personal data without having to carry around a memory stick. On the F.A.Q.’s page of its Web site, Megaupload depicts its customers as the most ordinary of citizens: “Students, professional business people, moms, dads, doctors, plumbers, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, you name it.”
Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”
I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.
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