Takedown Notices May Slightly Boost Sales of Content
August 13, 2024
It looks like take-down notices might help sales of legitimate books. A little bit. TorrentFreak shares the findings from a study by the University of Warsaw, Poland, in, “Taking Pirated Copies Offline Can Benefit Book Sales, Research Finds.” Writer Ernesto Van der Sar explains:
“This year alone, Google has processed hundreds of millions of takedown requests on behalf of publishers, at a frequency we have never seen before. The same publishers also target the pirate sites and their hosting providers directly, hoping to achieve results. Thus far, little is known about the effectiveness of these measures. In theory, takedowns are supposed to lead to limited availability of pirate sources and a subsequent increase in legitimate sales. But does it really work that way? To find out more, researchers from the University of Warsaw, Poland, set up a field experiment. They reached out to several major publishers and partnered with an anti-piracy outfit, to test whether takedown efforts have a measurable effect on legitimate book sales.”
See the write-up for the team’s methodology. There is a caveat: The study included only print books, because Poland’s e-book market is too small to be statistically reliable. This is an important detail, since digital e-books are a more direct swap for pirated copies found online. Even so, the researchers found takedown notices produced a slight bump in print-book sales. Research assistants confirmed they could find fewer pirated copies, and the ones they did find were harder to unearth. The write-up notes more research is needed before any conclusions can be drawn.
How hard will publishers tug at this thread? By this logic, if one closes libraries that will help book sales, too. Eliminating review copies may cause some sales. Why not publish books and keep them secret until Amazon provides a link? So many money-grubbing possibilities, and all it would cost is an educated public.
Cynthia Murrell, August 13, 2024
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