Publisher Thwarts Ebook Copyright Thieves

Publisher Hachette UK has succeeded in having all its books removed from Mobiles24, a user-generated mobile content platform.
Hachette UK is is one of the largest book publishers in the UK, and consists of several publishing companies, including Headline Publishing Group, Hodder & Stoughton, Orion Publishing Group, Octopus Publishing Group and Hodder Education Group. In 2006, it acquired Time Warner Book Group, which then morphed into Little, Brown Book Group.
We first reported back in February that the publisher was moving to have its eBooks taken off Mobiles24, and issued a ‘letter before action’ to the site’s owner, Mark Worthington, after it made a number of its eBooks available to download for free without permission. Worthington had been given until Wednesday 29th February to comply with the request to remove all unauthorized Hachette content, which has now happened. As The Bookseller reports today, Hachette UK CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson said:

“I am delighted with the outcome of our justified action. This sends out a very clear message to anyone who appropriates our files, infringing our copyright and that of our authors. We have always made it clear that we regard copyright infringement as theft: we will pursue any case where we find it and our actions will be upheld by the court.”

This is the latest case in a stream of incidents involving eBooks piracy. We reported a number of weeks back that two websites which had made thousands of eBooks available illegally as free downloads had been forced offline after being served cease-and-desist orders from a global alliance of publishers.
The pirate operation was thought to be turning over more than £7m each year, netted through advertising, premium-level accounts and user-donations. Library.nu had acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted eBooks, and made them available for free on a site masquerading as a legitimate provider. The same operators also ran the affiliated fileshare hosting service at ifile.it, which facilitated the uploads.
It’s not just little download sites that are being taken to task over their illegal publishing exploits. Last May, we reported that a trio of French publishers was suing Google for almost €10m, after claiming that the Internet giant had scanned thousands of its books without consent as part of its on-going Google Books project.
With music and movie piracy dominating most of the pirate content headlines, with the likes of The Pirate Bay facing a number of  legal wranglings, it seems that the flourishing eBook industry is bringing in a new wave of problems for the digital content industries. There will likely be many more similar cases come to the fore in the coming years, as the Kindles and Nooks of the world continue to win ground over their paper-based counterparts.

http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/03/23/hachette-uk-succeeds-in-having-its-ebooks-removed-from-pirate-website/

OfCom Initial Obligations Code

UK communications regulatory body OFCOM has today published an amended version of its Initial Obligations Code, a set of rules relating to the anti-piracy provisions in the country’s controversial Digital Economy Act. OFCOM clarifies the obligations of rightsholders regarding the auditing of piracy tracking systems, and gives them three times longer to produce evidence. On Government order, subscriber right of appeal has been seriously reduced.
The anti-piracy elements of the UK’s controversial and much-delayed Digital Economy Act are continuing their slow march to implementation with the publication of OFCOM’s updated Initial Obligations Code today.
As the DEA dictates, ISP accounts linked to peer-to-peer infringements will be subject to receiving a series of notifications warning the bill payer that their activities (or those of people in their household) are unacceptable and in need of change.
The amendments to the Code, which provides a set of standards and procedures by which the anti-P2P (mainly BitTorrent related) elements of the Act will be governed, are very much a mixed bag.
First, and on the plus side for subscribers, is that evidence collection systems of copyright holders will have to fall into line with OFCOM standards before they can send any CIRs (copyright infringement reports) to ISPs.
Additionally, the Code states that copyright owners may only send a CIR if they have “gathered evidence in accordance with the approved procedures” which lead to the “reasonable” belief that the subscriber has infringed a rightsholder’s copyright or that he has allowed someone else to use his account in order to do so.
In the original version of OFCOM’s Code rightsholders were given 10 days in which to send CIRs to ISPs, but in the updated code they are allowed a month following the time of detection – roughly three times longer than before.
For their part, ISPs were previously allowed 10 days from receipt of a CIR to notify a customer that they had been tracked. That period has now been extended to one month. This means that there could be a 60 day gap between an alleged infringement and a subscriber being notified, up from just 20 days.
On the downside for consumer protection is the complete removal of a clause which allowed ISPs to reject rightholder CIRs if they felt in their “reasonable opinion” they were invalid.
Originally it was envisaged that so-called ‘first and ‘second’ strike warnings would go out via email with only the ‘third’ going out by recorded regular mail. That has now been scrapped. All warnings will now go out by regular first class mail, meaning that there will be absolutely no proof that a subscriber has received his third warning.
In addition to conveying the warning itself, CIRs will now have to show the time and date when any infringement took place (as opposed to simply when the evidence was gathered) and also display the number of previous CIRs sent to the subscriber.
OFCOM reports that it has also introduced a requirement that there be a 20 day gap introduced between the date a previous CIR was sent out to a subscriber and evidence being valid for the creation of a subsequent CIR.
Under the previous iteration of the Code, copyright owners would only be able to request a copyright infringement report from ISPs once every three months, and the service provider would be given 5 days to produce it. That three month period has been reduced to a single month and ISPs will have double the time – 10 days – to produce it.
Under the Code subscribers will be able to lodge an appeal against wrongful accusations of infringement. The time to do so has now been clarified as 20 days from the date of receiving a CIR. It will cost an Internet account holder £20.00 to do so.
Finally, the amended Code ends with notes that the UK Government ordered the removal of two elements, both of which would have given a level of protection to subscribers.
“On the instruction of Government we have removed the ability for subscribers to appeal on any other ground on which they choose to rely,” the report notes, adding:
“On the instruction of Government we have removed the requirement for ISPs and copyright owners to provide a statement showing how their processes and systems are compliant with the Data Protection Act.”
This draft Code is now open for a one month consultation period before being presented to parliament later this year. Letters will start going out in 2014…..maybe.

http://torrentfreak.com/new-details-of-uk-piracy-monitoring-plan-made-public-120626/

Publishers Fight Pirates In Europe

Publishers are going after eBook piracy in Europe. An international alliance of 17 publishers, which includes HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Oxford University Press, is taking legal against the operators of the websites library.nu and ifile.it.
Yesterday, the Irish-based operators of www.library.nu and www.ifile.it were served with court orders. In the complaint, the publishers claim that www.library.nu illegally acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted eBooks and made them available for free. In addition, the site owners allegedly earned more than $10 million in advertising from the site.
This may not be the first kind of attact on pirate sites. Tom Allen, president/CEO of Association of American Publishers stated: “For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort.  I can’t think of a more timely example of the need for additional tools to expedite such action.”
Neither site is currently active. Library.nu currently redirects to Google Books.  Ifile.it has an error message that says “No upload servers currently available, try uploading at a later time.”

http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/publishers-fight-pirates-in-europe_b20291

FACT - The Federation Against Copyright Theft

TO AUTHORS IN THE UK concerned about eBook piracy we all need to come down off the fence and do something about it. Make a list of all sites offering illegal downloads of your book and then report the matter either to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or to the Federation Against Copyright Theft at http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/site/contact/com_form.htm

From the FACT website:

FACT’s primary purpose is to protect the United Kingdom’s film and broadcasting industry against counterfeiting, copyright and trademark infringements.

Established in 1983, FACT works in three key areas:

• Online piracy in all forms – with a focus on those distributing large volumes of illicit film and TV content

• Hard goods piracy – organised criminal networks operating in the UK (and worldwide) have adopted audiovisual piracy as a crime type to generate substantial illegal profits

• Prevention and detection of illegal recording in cinemas – over 90% of the counterfeit versions of movies originate initially from a copy recorded in a cinema

FACT works closely across the UK with Police, Trading Standards, HM Revenue & Customs, UK Border Agency, Serious and Organised Crime Agency and the other agencies. FACT also has a close association with other industry enforcement bodies.

FACT’s Intelligence Unit plays a key role in assessing, analysing and reporting on the threats to its members’ businesses from criminal activity and tasks FACT’s own investigators as well as producing strategic documents available to partner agencies.

FACT plays a key role in creating awareness of the dangers associated with counterfeiting and continually gathers evidence to prove that film piracy is linked to other criminal activities, from benefit fraud to violence.

FACT has an important role in ensuring that the government and public understand the threat to the UK’s film and television industry and to the community at large from the growing threat of DVD and online piracy.

Film piracy in the UK is:

• A business generating £200m a year for criminals
• A crime which affects other people and the wider community – involving benefit fraud, people smuggling, drugs and other serious criminality
• A real crime, punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment

The seemingly innocent purchase of a cheap DVD from an irregular source can therefore have far reaching effects. For further examples of the effects of DVD piracy in the UK, please go to our Media Centre and view the latest case studies and statistics.

While the Federation is not a statutory body, it is accepted as a prosecution authority in its own right and facilitates the investigation and prosecution of those involved in this type of crime.

http://www.fact-uk.org.uk

Ebook Revolution Postponed due to Piracy?

My advice to authors; put the title of your book in Google followed by the word download, you may be horrified by the result. Now I was a lawyer for 20 years so I know it's important to get the facts straight before making wild allegations. However if you click the link below it appears that a bunch of people are offering my book for download without my permission. I've only ever uploaded my book to Kdp.Amazon, Smashwords and Google Books. With all of these I set a price of at least 99c and I thought the files would be rights-protected. Therefore NO WAY should anyone else be offering free downloads of my book. THIS AFFECTS ALL AUTHORS; even if you have not published your book in e-format, the print version can be scanned and offered as a pdf. If piracy is going on then it seems that the Jack Sparrow in question owes me a considerable sum of money. JACK SPARROW BEWARE, I've seen what happens when the lawyers get involved, it's not a pretty sight. 

Link to Echo McCool, Outlaw Through Time

Echo McCool - Review by Colesy999

This book is an absolute must have for 77p on the kindle. Having said that, it's worth £7.00 new!

The description is of an unmatched quality and combined with a breath taking story-line equates to quite literally the best book you have ever read.

And you should see my collection of books...

Colesy999 Review on Amazon.co.uk