My recent blog entry on piracy of my books has raised a lot of interested, given the hits and the 23 comments posted. There are many interesting points in the comments, some of which I fully agree with, but there is a specific point of my post that was not clear enough (my fault, of course).

I fully understand that whatever you produce in a digital form, gets a widespread distribution, whether you like it or not. Even if some people will get my book in this form, few of them will reade it, and even fewer would have paid even a couple of dollars for them. As far as loyal readers buy, and buy the printed version, that's OK for me.

What really bother me, as I tell in the title of this new blog post, is that people illegal ditributing the PDF of my book make money on it. The PDF on emule, means a free distribution. Period. The PDF of rapidshare, means people will pay a rapidshare account to downlaod it faster. Rapidshare makes moeny because of my book and similar millions of copyrighted files they let people distribute. They even pay / reward people with most downloaded content, effectively paying the pirates: What a great business model!

Second example, blogs full of illegal downlaods of ebooks and software programs are full of adsense links. They can get even pretty high rank on search engines. The blogs are even hosted by google (asking to remove content from blogpost, claiming copyright infringment is a very complicated procedure...). Of course, they won't make a lot of money, but hosting thousand of ebooks they certainly get some pretty good traffic.

This example is people selling on ebay the PDF of my books for a dollar or two. This was more popular a couple of years back, I have to say, but still active. After you've paid for the book or its downlaod (like via rapidshare), you might feel you own it, more than you are stealing it. Or, you are paying someone to steal the file or program for you.

There are probably many other examples, but these are practical examples involving myself. Illegally distributing protected files can demage an author, but up to a given point. I won't ask for compensation for soemone doing that, would just ask him or her to stop. But someone making a profit from distributing stolen goods, that really upsetting me. I'd be ready to sue a company like rapidshare... because I'm pretty sure they understand what their business is based upon!