@BM: Copyright infringement is not “stealing authors’ hard work”. It is also a clear mischaracterization to declare that no one seems to care. Essentially, you need the people willing to buy ebooks to care and, since Fictionwise and Amazon both seem to be profitable, we seem to be doing a pretty good job of convincing people.

But people are stealing authors’ hard work, and no one seems to care. Filters aren’t going to turn the entire internet into one big censorship Disneyland. They are going to keep authors’ copyrighted works from being made available to the public on CERTAIN SITES. They are designed to work with the author’s name and titles. The owners of these sites are in it for the money, so are they going to censor anything they don’t have to censor? And even if they do, so what? It’s THEIR site, and they can do what they want with it.

This isn’t an internet-wide filter system. It’s a filter system for sites plagued with piracy.

If you have a better solution, bring it to the attention of publishers and authors. In the meantime, maybe people could leave their doors unlocked so others can help themselves to things other people buy with their hard-earned money.

. . . why not spend the same amount of money with a high powered software house to help develop filters that companies like Scirbd or Wattpad could use to screen out copyrighted material.

The problem with this approach is that it is worse than the current approach — for both the publishers and the public. If or when filtering systems are implemented, who is to say what will be filtered and what will not? There is a huge potential for arbitrary censorship here. Who will be checking to see whether the filtered material was legitimately censored? How will and average user know if something he has a right to view has been taken from him without notice? If a full document cannot be accessed, how can anyone prove false positives?

Filtering is a frightening concept. It is Winston Smith’s profession in 1984 made convenient. Filtration will make the Internet a Disneyland, a place where the public does and sees what it is told to do and see. Filtration is also server side DRM.

This was the entire point of Lessig’s Code. This type of filtration, while effective, is a truly great threat to Free Speech.

Instead of spending lots of money hiring a major international law firm to prosecute take down notices (which they did), why not spend the same amount of money with a high powered software house to help develop filters that companies like Scribd or Wattpad could use to screen out copyrighted material.

I think that this type of software already exists in the “plagiarism detection” industry. For example, the checker program at the website TurnItIn is used by high schools and universities to compare student papers to a large database of texts. Publishers and authors could seed a database with copyrighted texts that they wish to forbid and ask Scribd and Wattpad to compare any submitted works against the database. Any matches would have to be reviewed by a human to see if the submitted text violates copyright law.

Of course there are potential problems with this approach. For example, a copyrighted text might include a subtext that is in the public domain, and hence matches with the subtext would be false positives. A long quotation might cause a match; however, it might still qualify as “fair use.” Also, some will complain of prior restraint, onerous responsibilities, unaffordability, copyright bullies, trampled free speech rights, and etcetera.

Personally, I think that this overall approach is wrong. Generating “take down” notices is a task that even Sisyphus would reject. Also, pirates can simply move to other venues that already exist.

I am only reiterating what has been said thousands of times before, but when will we see the study that indicates fostering this level of negativity in the market increases sales? The publishers spend a lot of time and money trying to convert freeloaders to customers, but I can imagine some of that effort would be better placed simply trying to get more customers.

I understand, though, I really do. It’s really hard to let go, seeing someone as a “pirate” rather than “free publicity”. It is also really hard for a publisher to say yes to a 1-year project which would simplify customer access to your product, but quite easy to justify paying a company that will shut down a handful of file-sharing sites.

We see progress made, however slowly, but there will always be organizations like the U.K. Publishers Association that will thrive in the fight against such progress. Just as there will always be pockets of people like the TeleRead community who are anxiously pushing at that glacier hoping to make it go faster.