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An anti-piracy web tool launched by the Publishers' Association in February has recorded around 800 illegally uploaded texts and successfully helped to remove almost 90% of them from the web.
The PA's Copyright Infringement portal combats online piracy by targeting websites offering titles for free download. Publishers log the details of an infringement and the portal and notify the ISP with a request to take it down. The portal also tracks whether an appropriate response has been made.
However, PA digital consultant Alicia Wise, who supervises the trade body's work on e-crime, warned that "proactive and dynamic" work was needed because of the speed with which new sites appear. She added that the portal would evolve within the next quarter to be able to tackle another piracy threat—"torrent sites". These offer peer-to-peer sharing of infringing copies through multiple users sharing content.
Meanwhile, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are in continuing discussions with leading content sites Scribd and Wattpad over illegal downloads. Penguin global digital director Genevieve Shore said the publisher was working closely with Scribd to help it weed pirated copies off the site and said the social publishing site was "incredibly engaged in that process".
Technical solutions to the problem of pirated copies uploaded on to Scribd may include loading Penguin's own files into Scribd's content database so that any matching file uploaded by a site user would be rejected, said Shore.
She added that the publisher was also thinking "creatively and not just in legal terms" about issues of online piracy, considering the example set by the music industry, where fake MP3 files are distributed to cause online pirates confusion.
In the US, where Scribd met with the Association of American Publishers earlier this month, an email on online piracy circulated by Hachette Book Group said Scribd had committed to a number of anti-piracy policies. It added: "HBG hopes to persuade Wattpad to implement more robust procedures."