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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.”
It started out with a politicial promise: We won't ever block more than this secret list of child pornography maintained by the "internet watch foundation". In the meantime there's a general porn filter (with weasel wording in the law turning "opt-in" and "opt-out" on their heads), the music industry got a couple blocks in, and so the book industry couldn't stay behind, now could they? More importantly: Who's next?
From TFS:
this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement
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. At the end of the day I could go and hunt down a pirate copy of the book I need, find a website that actually allows me to download it, avoid the viruses and so forth. Or I could just buy it easily from Amazon, and strip the DRM for backup purposes. You see the legitimate content has a massive advantage here: It's much easier to get and comes with the ability to sync notes etc. with the cloud (if you don't mind Amazon knowing your reading habits), while it's not too difficult to remove the DRM for a backup copy.
If I was a publisher I'd be far more worried that this incentivises me to read older, public domain books. Before I still had to go to the bookshop and buy them, and a publisher could probably get new books out at a competitive price if they wanted, whereas now I can just get them free from Guttenberg (or even Amazon themselves). And with many publishers trying to charge almost the same for a Kindle book as a print book I rarely buy new books for my Kindle, if I want to read one of them I buy the dead tree version instead. But often I just find some public domain reading material and the publishers loose my custom.
I have to say, I never hard of these sites either. :)
Thank The Publishers Association for the tip
Nah I'll still buy my stuff.. But I wonder how something like this can progress as far as to court without someone telling the execs how futile it is to block websites.
Why do you find it strange that ignorant politicians and greedy media moguls are ham-handed in their dispensation of "justice" in the protection of their revenue streams. I'm waiting with bated breath for Edger Rice Burroughs to "innovate" a new series of Ganymede novels wherein the plot goes: hero meets girl, hero loses girl to evil antagonist, hero chases antagonist and saves the girl and they (i.e. hero & girl, not hero & antagonst) kiss (and nothing else!) at the end. I hear Ernest Hemingway is recovering nicely from his suicide by using all that generous royalty income towards the latest medical technology to cure his malady and will be penning a sequel to "For Whom The Bell Tolls" just in time for Xmas gift giving. Let us all fervently hope Roger Zelazny will provide us with a new Amber novel and a astonishing collection of short stories. Would it be too much to ask for another six dimensional Lazurus Long novel from R.A.H.? I have a burning need to know if Mycroft and Athena ever "get it on" and Colin Campbell and Hazel Stone survived to write more "Scourge of the Spaceways" scripts .
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Don't you guys care at all?
First they started censoring child porn. This is totally acceptable, child porn is bad. Nobody dared to say anything.
Then they started censoring pirate sites. This was for the children also, I guess. People objecting these changes are mean pirates! Don't listen to them!
Then they started censoring youtube videos with "dubious" political agenda. When some people complained, it was "only an option to remove videos", blaah blaah blaah.
Now they are starting to censor books.
While there is still time, I suggest you read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by Georgy Orwell. That should give you a pretty good picture where this is going..
I know that this won't be popular here, but good on the Brits.
Make sure you don't visit AvaxHome, BookFi, Bookre, Ebookee, Freebookspot Freshwap or LibGen
Don't visit those sites. Just don't!