I thought I should point out the incisive blog post written by my one of my law professors, Andres Guadamuz, on the sketchy reasoning demonstrated by a company called Attributor, which produces anti-piracy products for the publishing industry. Attributor claim that file-sharing of books is costing American publishers $2.8bn per year.

Of course, there's an obvious bias in what Attributor are doing, as Andres points out:

I will resist the temptation to comment on the fact that one should not take seriously a report undertaken by a company that has a commercial interest on the result of said study making the case for their products.

They seem to be relying on the record industry's discredited "one unauthorised download equals one lost sale" epithet.

Attributor also seems to be to be a somewhat ironically-named company (in the Morrissette sense of irony), since what they do is less about attribution - recognising the author - than protecting economic rights.

Oh, and I LOVE the Hamburglar-type figure in the cartoon on their home page.

Really subtle, guys.

But seriously, their technology is kind of interesting. It seems, if the demo is an accurate indication, to enable the semi-automated sending of content takedown requests. The potential for large-scale takedown requests demonstrates the need in law for a requirement that content owners make some kind of binding declaration that their copyright claim is valid. Can you imagine how many bogus requests something like this could send out if that requirement weren't in place?

The bad news is that in Europe, we require no such guarantee. This is one area where the US DMCA isn't so bad. Oh well, a battle for another day.

I wonder whether any authors represented here would use something like Attributor if it were available to them?