Piracy in publishing and how to combat it
Piracy in the publishing industry has seen a marked rise in the last three years, especially following the first Covid-19 lockdowns. In May 2020 publishing overtook film as the second most in-demand media sector for digital piracy, behind TV.
It continues to over-index for piracy demand. MUSO measured 215 billion visits to piracy websites across all media industries in 2022—18% more than in 2021. However, growth in visits to publishing piracy was twice as sharp, rising 37% to 59.2 billion visits. This trend is likely to continue in 2023, as digital formats proliferate and economic pressures drive users to read or download content via illegal piracy sites.
MUSO’s automated anti-piracy services, designed specifically for independent publishers and authors—can protect against this piracy. Based on our experience, here are a few principles to combat piracy, reduce the availability of unlicensed copies of a book and maximise your revenues.
1. Act as early as possible
Don’t wait until you find pirated copies of your book. Be proactive and protect your titles before you find piracy.
2. Protect ALL your books
Ensure all your books are protected, and not just your most popular ones. With a MUSO account you can protect one book or an entire catalogue—which is the most cost effective route if you have a sizeable backlist.
3. Understand the nature of piracy
Piracy in publishing is a complex and multi-faceted issue. There are many reasons for pirating content, many types of piracy and a huge number of channels dedicated to distributing illegal ebooks. The better you understand the contributing factors, the more equipped you will be to tackle them. It’s also useful to understand key piracy types (see below). MUSO’s team of experts will be happy to discuss any aspect of piracy with you.
4. Maintain relationships with authors
Authors are passionate about their work and often find infringements themselves on search engines or social media sites. These can be submitted directly to the search engine by the publisher or author, but it’s time-consuming work with a huge admin and cost burden. MUSO’s dashboard has a built-in ‘submit Infringement’ tool that automates this process and alleviates the pain instantly. You can also use it to remove content from eBay, Amazon, Google and other ‘grey’ market sites.
Glossary of piracy types
Blog or Forum: A web page that includes embedded piracy content and/or links to files that are hosted on another site like cyberlockers. A takedown usually removes the source page, disrupting the path to the piracy file.
Cyberlockers: Sites that offer 'file hosting', designed to accommodate user files and data that can then be downloaded by other users.
Forwarder: Sites to which users are redirected when they click a link for a cyberlocker. These generate profits by showing advertising for a few seconds.
Grey Market: Legitimate sites that sell online material or unlicensed websites selling your content.
Indexer or Search site: Sites that allow searching and return piracy results.
Reading Site: A cyberlocker that allows a book or text to be read without downloading a file.
Spoof Site: Sites that claim to offer pirated content but do not actually have any available and are not indicative of a leak. These sites phish for personal information such as credit card details by asking users to sign up.
Torrent Site: Sites that allow access to content via P2P (peer to peer) downloads via torrent. Downloading peers achieve high download speeds by requesting multiple pieces from different computers simultaneously.
MUSO is a leading content protection solutions provider for the publishing industry.
We work with businesses from enterprise-size global publishers to independent authors, and our founding vision was to empower creative people to be more creative by removing the time-consuming problem of piracy with best-in-class technology. We automatically monitor for illegal links and infringements and issue takedown notices, which remove piracy at scale across a wide range of piracy websites and search listings.
Visit www.muso.com to learn more. To discuss MUSO’s suite of piracy solutions, contact Tom Colyer at [email protected].