68 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections claim of the German collecting society GEMA’s claim on the installation of automated lters to prevent access to illegal content on platforms such as YouTube, as such practices would breach the freedom of information as well as individual privacy rights of users. Source: Die Zeit, February 2, 2012). One challenge speci c to the book industry is that the broader debate on copyright as well as on infringe- ments is predominantly driven by the movie and the music industry, thereby sidelining speci cities of books and reading. In many statistical overviews, ebooks are treated as a niche domain of the overall picture, without the acknowledgment of more structural speci cs. For instance, due to the very small le sizes of ebooks in comparison to audio MP3 les or digital video, peer-to- peer download sites play an insigni cant role in the distribution of illegal ebook o erings on the other hand, measurement of the number of downloaded items must be done di erently, as the consumption of an ebook is much more time-consuming than that of a piece of music. Also, as has been seen in the case of Arabic books, highly popular legal distribution services such as iTunes do not include ebooks in many of the local languages of emerging markets, so available local book content is very restricted versus legal o erings of local music or movies. Coordinated E orts for Tracking and Takedown Campaigns Large publishing groups have successfully launched coordinated actions to shut down major piracy sites carrying books for which they owned the rights. For instance, in February 2012, two share-hosting services, www.i le.it and www.library.nu, which o ered a library of 400,000 ebooks for free illegal downloads, were shut down in a novel approach coordinated by both the International Publishers Association (IPA) and Börsenverein together with a group of publishers includ- ing many of the leading houses in the speci cally a ected segment of scienti c and professional publish- ing: Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Pearson ably better result” and an (illegal) “back channel,” “in which content is traded and consumed without fair compensation for its authors or publishers (resulting in lost revenue)” (O’Leary, 2009, p. 25). The claim that the occurrence of piracy is not auto- matically synonymous with pirated content being a “substitute for purchase” has also been discussed widely with regard to other digital content, notably music, and these arguments are sometimes relevant to the current debate on ebooks and piracy (see, for instance, The Lefsetzletter). Regrettably, the limited available research on ebooks and piracy in continental Europe—notably Germany and France—so far focuses primarily on the simpler model of a black-and-white juxtaposition of legal and illegal downloads without fostering a more complex analysis of driving forces and the resulting e ects for the emerging ebook environment, so this study can only summarize this initial research and the related critical debate. Overall Developments in 2012 While several pieces of international legislation relevant for piracy have been abandoned (the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA, in the US, and the Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA, de facto at the European level), a wave of studies and practical initiatives have hit the media over the past 12 months or so, with little consensus on the parameters, drivers, or the concrete goals of these activities. The issue was at the top of agenda for industry orga- nizations across the US, Europe, and the rest of the world (see the AAP at PW, March 15, 2012). New legislation has been introduced at national levels in a number of coun- tries, including Spain (under the acronym of SINDE, for a law on the “durable economy, aiming at reforming copy- right Spanish law altogether” Livres Hebdo, March 1, 2012). At the same time, courts at the European level limited the direct responsibility and liability of provider platforms for hosting illegal content on their servers. (In concrete detail, the European Court ruled against the