That’s the title of an article today by Richard Curtis in his [e-reads] blog. He goes on to say that Bob Pisano of the Motion Picture Association of America quotes this figure. He then goes on to say that society not only tolerates this, but is indifferent to it.
How do I know? In connection with E-Reads’ anti-piracy initiative (See Pirate Central) I wrote to executives of every major author and agent organization inviting them to join in an industry-wide effort to monitor piracy of books written by their author clients and constituents, enforce compliance with copyright laws and pressure file-sharers and other unauthorized users to remove the offending files from their sites.
Not a single organization offered to take me up on the proposition. Some said no, some said we’ll get back to you if we’re interested, and some didn’t answer at all.
Pirate Central is such a morally ambiguous site–heck, at first glance the site seems to encourage pirates–that it’s not surprising that any publisher would not be interested in throwing in with any effort of theirs to monitor piracy.
Publishers have also passed on such efforts by more legitimate researchers, so Richard isn’t being singled out here.
Neither MPAA nor Envisional have any kind of reputation for the accuracy of their work. In fact the MPAA has been exposed many times for the nonsense of their claims.
Envisional use secret software processes and provide no proof or evidence of the accuracy of their data. The credibility of their claims is non existent.
Torrent sites have for years implemented web site ‘tricks’ to make their popularity appear a lot higher than they are. They have done this to gain customers and advertising and also to create the illusion that everyone is downloading. So their motives are actually aligned with the MPAA in this.