Napster for Novels?: Not even pirates like e-books - Culture & Reviews

Reason, Jan, 2002 by Mike Godwin

According to Random House's Dorsen, traditional book piracy, which predates the Internet but is easily facilitated by it, is "something that everybody takes extremely seriously," but adds that at some point the e-book market will be "more substantial" as a subject of piracy concerns. Dorsen says this explains the proactive measures American publishers are taking with the DMCA--not just encouraging the Sklyarov prosecution but also invoking the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provisions to force Internet Service Providers to remove infringing texts that ISP subscribers may be offering.

In the short term, one prediction--increasing piracy of scanner-produced e-books--seems safe. Even such doorstop tomes as Stephen King's The Stand and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising can be scanned and posted on the Internet in files ranging from 2 to 3 megabytes in size. That's smaller than the average MP3 music file.

Not impossibly, given the small size of scanned-book files, a brisk collective-trading phenomenon could arise using existing file-trading systems such as Gnutella or Freenet. But the thing that may be giving publishers some breathing room is the fact that the reading public has not yet shown any deep interest in obtaining books in digital form online. Publishers hope to get the wrinkles ironed out of their e-book systems before it becomes trivially easy for computer users to adapt scanned texts into attractive, readable forms for their laptops and handheld devices. Assuming, that is, that reading books from screens ever becomes popular at all.

But if the publishers don't win that race, it may be Napster all over again.

Mike Godwin is a policy fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.