Online Piracy

Online criminals target the publishing industry in a number of ways. The spectrum of offences range from websites offering infringing copies of works to download, through peer-to-peer file sharing of infringing copies, and password bootlegging, to the commercial sale of counterfeit copies of publications.

Scale of the problem

The sheer volume of online infringements has, until now, meant the workload required to take effective action was too great for the industry to support.

Time and technical resources

To serve a notice, a member must correctly identify the Internet Service Provider (ISP), draft an appropriate legal notice and determine the email address for service. This can take hours. The next member to discover an infringement hosted by the same ISP must repeat the discovery exercise. This is wasteful.

Communication

Members have no efficient and effective means of sharing data about infringing sites and, as an industry, we lack concrete evidence of the scale of the problem and the activities of the worst offenders.

Copyright Infringement Portal

The PA's Copyright Infringement Portal is a web based tool for serving infringement notices. 

The Copyright Infringement Portal is available to all PA members and user licences may be purchased by any publishing business.