Ebooks & piracy . . .

You gotta fight the latter if you want the former to survive.

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In a presentation at the Digital Book World Conference in New York today, [Professor Michael D.} Smith argued against three myths that he said permeate the discussion on illegal downloading. The first is that piracy doesn’t harm sales, which he said is not true. “Piracy harms sales,” he said, claiming that while 3 studies have been published suggesting that piracy doesn’t hurt sales, 25 others have shown that piracy is bad for sales. ”There are options to use legitimate distribution channels to convince people who have stolen your content to buy it,” he added. 

The final myth that Smith aimed to bust is that, “Anti-piracy regulation won’t work.” According to Smith, law enforcement around illegal downloading is not a game of whac-a-mole. “You can use laws to make pirated content less attractive,” he said. Citing the global Megaupload shutdown, Smith claimed that the shutdown helped lead to an increase in legal digital content consumption. “The shutdown of Megaupload caused a statistically significant increase in digital sales,” he said, comparing numbers between countries with high Megaupload usage to countries with low Megaupload usage.

Story.