The publisher has worked with Attributor since 2011, a company that searches millions of pages for pirated copies and sends takedown notices every day. Authors can report piracy by using the publisher’s Online Piracy Report Form to report piracy to Attributor. In a letter, Carolyn Reidy explained the new reports:

The reports that you will see provide information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific urls and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered and more.  (We expect that in the future we will expand upon the information currently available.) We have also provided a set of Frequently Asked Questions to increase your understanding of how piracy occurs and how we are combatting it. All the information we are providing is confidential and private, but please note that we are making the same information available to agents at the Simon & Schuster Agent Portal.

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Carnegie Mellon University IT & marketing professor Michael D. Smith talked about digital book piracy: “‘Piracy harms sales,’ he said, claiming that while 3 studies have been published suggested that piracy doesn’t hurt sales, 25 others have shown that piracy is bad for sales. ‘There are options to use legitimate distribution channels to convince people who have stolen your content to buy it.’”

Don’t forget to explore our list of practical resources for publishers: how to fight eBook pirates.

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Instead of “NYT Bestseller” can I put “Torrented by ALL the major pirate sites!” on the covers of my books?

— Diana Rowland (@dianarowland) January 3, 2013

Frustrated novelist Diana Rowland wrote on Twitter today: “Instead of ‘NYT Bestseller’ can I put ‘Torrented by ALL the major pirate sites!’ on the covers of my books?”

If you think book piracy is hurting your book sales, you can confront pirates online by using the tools listed in our Five Ways To Fight Book Pirates post at AppNewser.

At the same time, a few readers suggested that authors engage with pirates instead of taking legal action…

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Google has decided to give lower search rankings to piracy sites, revealing that the company’s powerful search algorithm has been adjusted so that “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”

The company now counts a staggering amount of copyright notices. According to company records, Google received 4.4 million requests in the last 30 days to take down URLs for copyright violations (see chart above). If you want to learn more about book piracy, explore our posts on How To Fight Book Pirates and Why Readers Pirate eBooks and Writers Engage with eBook Pirates.

Here’s more about the new Google policy:  “Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And we’ll continue to provide “counter-notice” tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.” (Via Victoria Strauss)

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While searching for a digital copy of The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, Pogue posed a hypothetical question for publishers: “How about worrying about the thousands of dollars a month you’ve been leaving on the table by not offering the books to the public who’s willing to buy it?” He ended up going to a popular site with pirate copies of eBooks.

Check it out: “Eventually, I did what I’m sure thousands of frustrated Ludlum fans wind up doing: I downloaded the book from a BitTorrent site. I know this is wrong. I sure wish I could have paid for it. So I sent the publisher a check for $9.99 for the e-book.”

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We’ve collected seven responses below, complete with links to the comments thread. Publishers, authors and readers should all pay attention to these rationalizations–they will play an important role in the future of publishing.

If you are an author or publisher struggling with pirates, check out our two posts about dealing with piracy: How To Fight Book Pirates and Writers Engage with eBook Pirates.

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Reader MaxEd had a different strategy: “you can stop worrying about piracy. Join those sites you’ve found in step 1&2, start a polite conversation in comments, get free publicity, sell more copies, make people feel good.” Reader P. Bradley Robb added: “I like how you leave out the part about engaging with pirates, asking them if they liked the book and using the initial experience to foster future business relationships.”

What do you think? Should authors fight eBook pirates online or should they engage with these readers? If you choose to take legal action, we outlined the steps in this post. (Photo via fdecomite)

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According to the court filing, the fine includes $5,000 for copyright infringement and $2,000 for the “counterfeiting of Wiley’s Trademarks.” The publisher had sued a number of BitTorrent users for pirating books, and the plaintiff was the last defendant in the legal action.

TorrentFreak has more details: “This means that aside from the $7,000 in damages from Carpenter, the book publisher may have raked in more than a million dollars though private settlements. Private settlements are usually around $3,000 per person, which quickly adds up with hundreds of defendants.”

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But when author Lloyd Shepherd got the dreaded Google alert linking to a request for an eBook version of his book The English Monster on file sharing site Mobilism, he decided to respond directly.

In an essay in the Guardian, Shepherd recounted how he told the book pirate how much time he spent writing and editing the book. Shepherd wrote: “This is my first book, and this is my first experience of someone attempting to produce a pirate version of it (I do not use the word ‘pirate’ pejoratively, mind). Is there any reason why I shouldn’t expect to be compensated for the time I have put into this?” continued…

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eBookNewser has more: “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.”

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.”

Currently, library.nu redirects to Google Books and ifile.it has an error message that says “No upload servers currently available, try uploading at a later time.”

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Coelho praised the piracy site and urged his readers to download his work on peer-to-peer file sharing sites. The decision has already generated hundreds of comments–what do you think?

Check it out: “The Pirate Bay starts today a new and interesting system to promote arts. Do you have a band? Are you an aspiring movie producer? A comedian? A cartoon artist? They will replace the front page logo with a link to your work. As soon as I learned about it, I decided to participate. Several of my books are there, and as I said in a previous post, ‘My thoughts on SOPA,’ the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites. Welcome to download my books for free and, if you enjoy them, buy a hard copy – the way we have to tell to the industry that greed leads to nowhere.” (Image via)

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Below, we’ve embedded the complete indictment–alleging that the pirated material on the site caused “estimated harm” of $500 million for copyright holders. How do you think these massive piracy cases should be handled?

Here is an excerpt: “Since at least September 2005, Megaupload.com has been used by the defendants and other members and associates of the Mega Conspiracy to willfully reproduce and distribute many millions of infringing copies of copyrighted works, including motion pictures, television programs, musical recordings, electronic books, images, video games,and other computer software. Over the more than five years of its existence, the Mega Conspiracy has aggressively expanded its operations into a large number of related Internet businesses, which are connected directly to, or at least financially dependent upon, the criminal conduct associated with Megaupload.com.”

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Nearly all digital books currently contain some sort of DRM protection–making it harder for readers to take notes, read on different devices or share the book. Publishers and authors should read Louis CK’s argument against using these tools to restrict your readership.

Here’s more from the post: “This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use.”

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According to TorrentFreak, the complaint lists charges that include copyright infringement, trademark infringement and trademark counterfeiting. They also noted that the ‘BitTorrent for Dummies‘ book is not mentioned in the suit. Publishers Weekly reports that the publisher intends to combat piracy by “educating and stopping people from illegally copying its content.”

Here’s more from the complaint: “Defendants are contributing to a problem that threatens the profitability of Wiley…For example, BitTorrent users on a single site, demonoid.me, have downloaded one of the works that is the subject of this suit, Photoshop CS 5 All-In-One For Dummies, more than 74,000 times since June 6, 2010 … The damage to Wiley includes hark to its goodwill and reputation in the marketplace for which money cannot compensate. Wiley is particularly concerned that its trademarks are used in connection with unauthorized electronic products, which could contain malicious viruses.”

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They have enlisted the technological assistance of Muso TNT, a company that targets piracy for other media industry clients. Muso developed a system that targets popular file sharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload.

Here’s more from the article: “Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine ‘spiders’ to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.”

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