PaidContent has an update on the status of “For Dummies” publisher John Wiley’s court cases against individuals accused of illicitly sharing various “For Dummies” books via BitTorrent. The company was able to unmask 46 “John Doe” defendants, 40 of whom were dropped from the case after apparently settling for an undisclosed amount. The publisher is going to go forward with suing the remaining, now-identified six. It’s not clear whether any settlements Wiley gets out of this case will cover even a fraction of the costs of bringing it, or whether it will act as a deterrent or just make...

The Literary Platform has a fairly long piece looking at the question of ethical consumerism (primarily focused on books and e-books, but also stepping back to look at the larger picture of consumerism in general). This includes the question of buying versus piracy, but also touches on the wider picture of paying full-price at bookstores rather than buying cheap and/or used books from Amazon: We might now be seeing a better understanding between writers, publishers and agents, but this doesn’t detract from the fact that book prices are being pushed to zero – either through piracy...

Stick a fork in Rights Haven’t, I mean Righthaven—it’s done. Techdirt reports that the company has stopped showing up at court cases altogether, leading them to be dismissed “for lack of prosecution.” CEO Steve Gibson is now working for the Las Vegas office of Detroit-based law firm Dickenson Wright (while being investigated by the Nevada Bar) and main lawyer Shawn Mangano has stopped responding to attempts to contact him altogether. Meanwhile, well-known (and high-priced) copyright lawyer Dale Cendali, whom Righthaven hired last year, has withdrawn from all Righthaven cases (claiming she was only hired for a few small...

Paul Sawers at TheNextWeb reports that Hachette UK has succeeded in getting user-generated-content website Mobiles24 to remove all Hachette-published e-book titles available for download. Hachettes sent the site a “letter before action” giving the site a deadline of February 29th to remove all unauthorized Hachette content from the site, and it has now done so. The Bookseller reports that the site will no longer offer any e-books at all, where it previously offered over 9,000. While “many” of those books were Hachette titles, it is not clear whether any were in the public domain or otherwise authorized for...

An update on that story from a couple months ago about a coalition of Chinese authors planning to sue Apple over their works being sold in the iTunes store without authorization. China’s state-owned news agency Xinhua reports that the coalition has grown to 22 authors, who are claiming that 95 of their works have been sold without their permission. The story doesn’t really have many details about how these books got into the store. It does say Apple was “too slow” to remove them after the authors complained, though doesn’t say just how slow it was. A local Apple...

hise’s a quite long screed by Bobbi Smith, a media consumer who both buys and pirates a lot of material, in the form of an open letter to content creators. To sum it up, Smith finds he actually buys significantly more media since he started pirating than before he could ($2,500 per year, he says, according to his credit card statements: “A $200 per month entertainment habit that is unequivocally fueled by file-sharing”), but he has no patience for media publishers and producers who do not make their media available in a manner in which he desires to buy and...

From an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers reached one consensus: Fighting online piracy with legislation is not the way to go.  However, they agree that online piracy must be fought and controlled.  With what? That seems to be the question... still. Cary Sherman, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, agreed that "legislation brings out the worst in people" and that voluntary agreements are more flexible. After "the digital tsunami" of opposition that brought down SOPA and PIPA, he said, it's hard now to imagine...

The practice of windowing—staggering releases of some media work in different places or formats—has been common practice for the movie and television industry for some time. It used to be mainly a feature of staggering film releases from one part of the world to another, then from theater to video once video became an established format. Lately, it is being used to hold movies back from Netflix and Redbox after their release on home video. An example of windowing prompted The Oatmeal comic about someone seeking to buy the first season of A Game of Thrones that subsequently...

An update on that Cudo pirated e-books story from last night: an article in the Sydney Morning Herald covers the firestorm of controversy that has erupted around the offer of a $99 e-reader shipped with a CDROM full of 4,000 e-books, many of which were illicit copies of still-in-copyright titles. Cudo very quickly backpedaled, shifting blame for the debacle to the vendor, “grabargains.com”, which offered the bundle to it. ''Despite the merchant's assurances that the offer complies with all relevant Australian laws, including copyright laws, our assessment of the 4000 e-book titles being offered...

That The Oatmeal strip I mentioned a few days ago has stirred up some controversy. A post on TechDirt links to both a rebuttal from Andy Ihnatko decrying the culture of entitlement that leads to people thinking they have a right to download content just because they can’t buy it, and a post by Instapaper’s Marco Ament that takes a more pragmatic stance. Ament uses the example of a public restroom where people kept throwing wadded up paper towels on the floor by the door because they wanted to use them to avoid touching the restroom door handle and...

Australian bargain site Cudo is offering, for 8 more hours at the time of this posting, a $99 budget e-book reader bundled with a CD of 4,000 written works—whose list of titles includes hundreds of works that are verifiably still within copyright, and enough duplicates and wrong author-title matches that it looks as though the seller simply grabbed the highest-ranked e-book torrents off any site they could find. I have to agree with John Scalzi here: this is some pure, high-quality premium-grade stupid, soliciting a list of so many copyrighted titles on a major bargains site like that. Add...

Here’s another one of those webcomics that calls attention to the issue of piracy as service problem. (Note: not really worksafe due to some R-rated language.) Although the strip concerns a television series, anyone who has ever wanted to buy an e-book that is not sold in his particular country or format will recognize the situation. (We once covered a different comic on a similar idea about the problems with audiobook DRM.) The strip chronicles The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman’s effort to find and purchase HBO’s Game of Thrones series. He is fully willing to pay to see it,...