The Swedish book publishers organization recently issued a report in which they revealed that 85% of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on The Pirate Bay. Not really shocking news, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he’s actually “a bit sad that it’s not 100%.”
Perhaps of more interest is the technique used by the publishers’ organization to gather their data. In the report they write that they had to code a specialized tool to scrape the Pirate Bay database for book titles, since there were no ready-made tools available.
Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. “The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents,” Sunde writes on his blog. Sunde further refers to the Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy, which the book publishers organization has violated.
In true MPAA style, Sunde is determined to fight for his intellectual property. “I called them up and asked them to present more information about the technical things, so we can send them an invoice if they don’t want to be dragged into court,” Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.
Meanwhile, the true reason behind the real book publishers’ study remains vague. As we’ve pointed out many times before, piracy can actually boost book sales. One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra copies because he pirated his own books. Coelho’s success later inspired the publisher and Leander Kahney – the author of the two books – to do the same, with several others following this example. Particularly for book authors, piracy seems to be a useful promotional tool, rather than a threat. For now, that is.
We can’t foresee what will happen if someone launches a Kindle ready pirate site. More on this later, for sure.
