The rise of piracy has affected the publishing industry economically, on a global scale. According to the Association of American Publishers; U.S. publishers lose on average $80-$100m annually through illegal downloads (Association of American Publishers cited in Springen, 2014). When put into context, the most profitable US publisher, Thomson-Reuters generated revenues of $5,576m in 2013 (Publishers Weekly 2014), if privacy wasn’t an issue, their profits would be significantly higher.
Piracy affected the sales of novel: Fathomless- Jackson Pearce, as the eBook file of her book was stolen before the publication date (Springen 2014) —a publishers’ worst nightmare. Author, Martha Brockenbrough believes this is extremely unfair, as ‘the plumber gets paid. The dentist gets paid. Who does work and doesn’t get paid?’ (Springen 2014).
Journals are less at risk of piracy, in comparison to trade- fiction novels because they don’t have a mass-market appeal. Pirated articles may be found from very expensive journals, of which the users cannot afford. Saying this, many publishers now offer open access journals such as: Elsevier and Wiley Blackwell (Ball 2014).
Tech-savvy teenagers are thought to be the biggest culprits, as ‘this generation has the idea that they should be able to have content for free’ (Hopkkins, E. cited in Springen 2014). This mentality is affecting several creative industries, particularly the music industry, which has resulted in retail group- HMV closing down many stores, as they could no longer afford a bricks and mortar presence (Hall 2011). The diagram below illustrates the factors which involve people to pirate (Jackman and Lorde 2014).
Authors’ are fighting back by using services such as Muso for $19 a month; the tool scans the Internet and removes copyrighted content files. Chris Anderson from Muso states that the company has removed 580,000 illegal files, with an estimated total average of 60 million downloads (Springen 2014). Similar to this, Harper Collins use Digimarc, an anti-piracy service, which creates an invisible watermark that is embedded into the metadata of the eBook file. This allows Digimarc to crawl through the Internet 24 x 7 looking for sources where the watermarked content is stored (CNN cited in Dixit 2014). Once the sources have been identified, the publishers can alert the Internet service providers, who are legally obliged to take down the website (Hall 2013).
As DRM locks are so easy to break, and there isn’t a universal copyright law in place, it is hard to control piracy. However, publishers can control the distribution of their eBooks, by using an anti-piracy software.
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Bibliography
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