67 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections In “Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth,” released in May 2011, Ian Hargreaves summarized his ndings: No one doubts that a great deal of copy- right piracy is taking place, but reliable data about scale and trends is surprisingly scarce. Estimates of the scale of illegal digital down- loads in the UK ranges between 13 percent and 65 percent in two studies published last year. A detailed survey of UK and international data nds that very little of it is supported by transparent research criteria. Meanwhile sales and pro tability levels in most creative busi- ness sectors appear to be holding up reason- ably well. We conclude that many creative businesses are experiencing turbulence from digital copyright infringement, but that at the level of the whole economy, measurable impacts are not as stark as is sometimes sug- gested. (bit.ly/wEbcDz, p. 10) As early as 2009, Brian O’Leary highlighted the need for more data to di erentiate clearly between the fact (or “instance”) of pirated content to be available on the Internet and its impact on publishing and readers, there- fore proposing a di erentiated model for the under- standing of piracy in a wider context of freely available content: The potential sales loss su ered by the most popular authors is more than o set by increased visibility (and presumably sales) a orded less well-known authors when their content is made available digitally. (“Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales: Tools of Change for Publishing Research Report,” 2009, p. 23). This model aims to replace the popular binary under- standing (“good vs. bad”) with a more nuanced approach, di erentiating between a “white market” in which content is created, marketed, and sold a “gray market” for the promotion of a title and author, carrying a risk of pirated content “but accompanied by a quanti - media—is not well de ned in any of the emerging markets. Germany, one of the leading content markets outside the English realm, was rattled throughout the rst half of 2012 by controversies related to copyright and to practices considered controversial with regard to current law on several levels. A seemingly technical niche debate about the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) did not become a front page topic until it was given up, at least in its current form, by both the German government and the European authorities. It split society into two sides, with Börsenverein lobbying for the agreement while a growing political majority considered it a threat to civil rights. And the very term “pirates” saw an about-face, as a new political party emerged in the next parliamentary elections with the name: the Pirate Party. Such oddities brought law professors to acknowl- edge that copyright had become a battleground in fundamental regards: “In legal terms, rights owners, and notably those belonging to the copyright industry, have many rights, while users have very few,” argued German law professor Karl-Nikolaus Peifer. “Yet users have in fact all practical possibilities to access the content [that they long for]” (quote from an interview with Peifer, “Das digitale Urheberrecht steht am Abgrund” [“Digital Copyright Is at the Brink”], brandeins, 12, 2011). Experts such as Peifer argue that law in its current form cannot resolve the resulting con ict. With regard to digital content available on the Internet, many recent studies suggest that piracy “is common” (SSRC, the American Assembly, Columbia University, bit.ly/wxhXlS). “Piracy is clearly ubiquitous in the developing world” (The Media Piracy Report: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, bit.ly/xUBrrK), yet only imprecise data on its scope and the e ective economic damage caused by piracy are available. In the case of ebooks, a detailed assessment is even more di cult, as the ebook market has a history of only a few years in the US and the UK and is only emerging in most European countries, so both data and methodologies for the analysis are currently limited.
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