Internet Book Piracy

The international battle against Internet pirates has been heating up. Increasingly law enforcement is paying attention to book piracy as ebook publishing gains an ever-larger market share. With this threat to their health and even survival, publishers and authors must act much like the music, film, and software giants that have waged war against pirates for the past two decades. Now, The Battle against Internet Piracy opens a discussion on what happens to the victims of piracy. Drawing from a large number of interviews—from writers, self-publishers, mainstream publishers, researchers, students, admitted pirates, free speech advocates, attorneys, and local and international law enforcement officials—the text speaks to such issues as: •Why pirates have acted and how they feel about it •The conflict over constitutional rights and piracy •The current laws surrounding Internet piracy •Examples of cases taken against some pirates •Alternatives to piracy •Personal experiences of being ripped off •The ways piracy affects different industries and how they’ve responded Author Gini Graham Scott prepares readers to arm themselves against these modern perils by learning about copyright, infringement, and how to prevent, combat, and end book piracy. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

"A collection of texts that takes a broad perspective on digital piracy and attempts to capture the multidimensional impacts of digital piracy on capitalist society today"--

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites") in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene," as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez" itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software." Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

Provides readers with information regarding internet piracy.

The story of bold adventurers who risked death to discover strange life forms in the farthest corners of planet Earth. Beginning with Linnaeus, a colorful band of explorers made it their mission to travel to the most perilous corners of the planet and bring back astonishing new life forms. They attracted followers ranging from Thomas Jefferson, who laid out mastodon bones on the White House floor, to twentieth-century doctors who used their knowledge of new species to conquer epidemic diseases. Acclaimed science writer Richard Conniff brings these daredevil "species seekers" to vivid life. Alongside their globe-spanning tales of adventure, he recounts some of the most dramatic shifts in the history of human thought. At the start, everyone accepted that the Earth had been created for our benefit. We weren't sure where vegetable ended and animal began, we couldn't classify species, and we didn't understand the causes of disease. But all that changed as the species seekers introduced us to the pantheon of life on Earth—and our place within it.

The complex world of online piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing is skillfully condensed into an easy-to-understand guide that provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, while offering guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file-sharing activities. While the actual impact of digital piracy is nearly impossible to precisely calculate, the threat of financial damage from illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to the world's highest-grossing entertainment firms (and even entire industries!) has garnered attention from government, industry, and academic leaders and criminal justice professionals. Oftentimes, those providing access to computers and file sharing capabilities-parents, schools, libraries-don't know about or understand these activities and, therefore, put themselves and their families at risk for criminal and civil prosecution. This work describes the technological, legal, social, and ethical facets of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. Geared toward parents, teachers, librarians, students, and any other computer user engaged in file sharing, this book will help readers to understand all forms of traditional and digital copyright violations of protected music, movies, and software. To date over 18,000 P2P users have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most of these users have been college students and parents of high-school students. While word of these law suits are spreading, and many parents fear that their children may be using a family computer to illegally download and share copyrighted works, few supervising adults have the technical knowledge needed to determine whether and to what extent pirating may be occurring via a computer and Internet connection they are legally responsible for. Additionally, while P2P networks are filled with millions of users with billions of copyrighted files, few users understand the ways in which they are illegally using computers and other mobile electronic devices to download protected content. While describing both technical and social issues, this book primarily focuses on the social aspects of illegal file sharing, and provides technical concepts at a general level. Fisk skillfully condenses the complex nature of file sharing systems into an easy-to-understand guide, provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, and offers guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file sharing activities.

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

This engaging series examines various controversial topics present in today's society.