BitTorrent now being used for piracy of textbooks

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:24 PM
To: Ip ip; David Farber
Subject: BitTorrent now being used for piracy of textbooks

Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of
textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used
to steal music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are
stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.

One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000
textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original
textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set
up a free account and download a free software program that uses a
popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other
textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital
books at the click of a mouse.

"There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that's
what we're here to change," says a welcome message on the Textbook
Torrents site. "Chances are you have some textbooks sitting around,
so pick up a scanner and start scanning it!"

In response to such sites, the Association of American Publishers
hired an outside law firm this summer to scour the Web for
illegally offered textbooks. Already the firm has identified
thousands of instances of book piracy and has sent legal notices to
Web sites hosting the files demanding that they be removed. The
group is looking for all types of books, though trade books and
textbooks, which generally have high price tags, are the most
frequent books offered on peer-to-peer sites.

"In any given two-week period we found from 60,000 files all the
way up to 250,000 files," said Edward McCoyd, director of digital
policy for the publishing association. Mr. McCoyd, who leads the
Online Piracy Working Group, said the group has been performing
periodic scans for piracy since 2001, and that it has seen a
gradual increase in the number of titles available.

"It is troubling that there is a culture of infringement out
there," said Mr. McCoyd. But as more publishers offer books online
and readers become more familiar with digital formats, he added,
more people are likely to illegally download them.

No Action Against Students

So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action
against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry
Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the
illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has
not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads
either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on
the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove
individual files. "We've just tried to keep sweeping away these
infringements as they continue to come online," he said.

Albert N. Greco. a professor of marketing at Fordham University's
Graduate School of Business who studies academic publishing, said
that publishers expressed even greater concerns in private about
piracy than they did in their public comments. "We knew that this
would happen, and it has happened very rapidly," he said. "It's not
going to go away­it's only going to get worse."

More at http://chronicle.com/free/2008/07/3623n.htm




-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com