Tackling Digital Piracy with the SSP
Copyright violations have been around as long as copyright law (1709, did you know?), but digital piracy is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is a justifiable concern for publishers. A recent SSP web seminar entitled “How to Combat Digital Piracy on a Budget” demonstrated how to do just that, and provided a very interesting overview of the problem and how it affects scholarly publishers.
At the end of last year an independent study by the internet monitoring and enforcement service Attributor tracked 900 book titles over a three month period and concluded that each of the titles was illegally downloaded 10,000 times, with titles in the categories of Business and Investing, Professional and Technical, and Science topping the list (see the report for details - PDF). Ed McCoyd from the AAP explained that over half of these downloads came from just two sites: rapidshare.com and 4shared.com, both “one-click hosting” sites to which users can upload content and share it by distributing the files’ URLs. 4shared.com and other sites also offer a search function whereby anyone can download from other users’ public folders (I found articles from a number of CrossRef members’ journals with just a few clicks on 4shared).
But it’s not all bad news: when the authors of the study followed up with these sites, 85% of the illegal copies were subsequently removed or blocked. There’s work, however, in contacting these sites, and to this end the Publisher’s Association has launched its Copyright Infringement Portal. Members submit details of a reported infringement to the portal and it identifies the offending site, sends an appropriate takedown notice and tracks progress through to removal. To date, Scribd is the biggest offender but also the most cooperative partner, removing 98% of offending works almost immediately (the overall removal rate is currently 61%). Alicia Wise from the PA demonstrated how the portal is also useful as a discovery resource, allowing publishers to see notices issued by others and thereby identifying the most frequently offending sites.
The seminar finished with Daphne Ireland talking about the ways in which Princeton University Press is attempting to fight piracy. PUP is alerted to much of its pirated content by its authors who come across it on the web, yet they estimate that 50% of these illegal copies are author copies that have been redistributed. Educating authors on copyright is, as you might imagine, high on their agenda. They are also making use of watermarking and tightening their license agreements with all third parties who handle their content. But on a more strategic level, Daphne’s advice to other publishers was to “embrace the digital marketplace”. If your content is available to purchase in many places at a reasonable price then people will have fewer reasons to seek out pirated copies.
Chuck Koscher, CrossRef's Director of Technology, begins his term as Chair of the National Information Standards Organization. Here's an exerpt from NISO's press release: 
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