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High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block EBook Sites
An anonymous reader writes: The UK High Court has ordered British ISPs to block seven websites that help users find unauthorized copies of eBooks. Under the order, BT, Virgin, Sky, EE and TalkTalk must block AvaxHome, Bookfi, Bookre, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap and LibGen within the next ten days. “We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognizes the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by these infringing websites,” says Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of The Publishers Association. “A third of publisher revenues now come from digital sales but unfortunately this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement. Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.”
I'm willing to bet consumption, both legitimate and illegitimate, is up; so I wonder how much damage this "rise in piracy" is actually doing.
Quite a bit less than the whiny "we want to be last to market" bitches that keep suing their customers and otherwise treat them like crap. If you ignore the paid-for "studies" the effect is actually net positive. You have to remember that these are intangible "culture goods" that gain value with sharing.
That is, such goods make more money for the owners if more people have access to them. It's no secret that "airplay" is the be-all end-all for artists on radio and tv. Yet the focus of the big content cartel is on tightly controlling the material.
The late owner of Baen Books did the reverse, giving away for free a number of electronic books, calling it a license to print money.
IOW, if you ignore their own propaganda, the available sources, studies, and indications paint the sharing-decriers a bunch of doodie-heads.
If I was a publisher I'd be far more worried that this incentivises me to read older, public domain books.
Well, there's one reason why copyrights get extended every time the mouse threatens to become public domain. In fact, eg. google books considers re-issues of old, even centuries old, material to come with fresh copyright so things like the Illiad in a recent publication is considered protected under current terms as if it was published yesterday.
Yet at the same time over in Europe there's various countries that have country-wide rules propping up book prices to enable retention of large back-catalogues. So you pay more for every book including new ones because, you know, retaining old books in print is otherwise not profitable, or so the narrative goes. Make of that what you will.
Using outside DNS doesn't help if the carrier is blocking access to an IP address.
BTW another alternate DNS you can add to your list: Velocity Networks (Los Angeles): 206.126.128.2 - it's not as easy to remember as 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 for sure, but some people don't want to be bound to Google.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
https://piratebrowser.com/
Firefox with Tor pre-integrated and configured. Give the link to your friends.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Most ebooks don't come with DRM attached. The hysteria on display in the comments here is hilarious - scumbags are stealing the hard work of authors - many of whom are completely independent these days - for their own financial gain, and people are clutching their pearls that said scumbags got blocked. As much as I'm in favour of freedom of information I don't see why take-a-punt Pavel in Assbacketonia should be seeing a red cent for the hard work put in by hundreds of thousands of writers. There's no part of this ruling that will result in, or could be used to support, political or any form of suppression besides criminal.