Data Capture News Articles from Pearl Scan Solutions
Online clamp down on illegal book scanning
Date: 01/07/2008
Numerous peer to peer sites online currently enable the ability of file sharing between users which has bred the downloading of unauthorised files for almost two decades now. The problem with illegal music downloads has already become apparent with the music industry taking a big hit financially from the loss of sales.
At the moment with University students having to spend money on text books every year this has resulted in the growing popularity of textbook piracy where full electronic versions of textbooks are available to download on file sharing sites. There are sites that use BitTorrent a popular download software application which are very popular for this type of download. One website known as Textbook torrents even promises more than 5,000 textbooks available for download in PDF format. This site encourages the scanning of textbooks to have them available online.
As a result of this boom in textbook downloading the association of American publishers in the US have hired a law firm to search the web for illegally available textbooks and thousands have already been discovered. Legal notices have been sent demanding their removal. Scans for piracy have been running since 2001 by the Piracy Working Group and the increase in titles available has still been gradual over time.
However so far it appears there will be no action taken against students who download these files or action against the web sites that offer these as the number of culprits are so large, instead the research and requests to remove files continues. The association hopes to reduce the amount of titles available online if they keep sweeping the sites.
Document Scanning is a popular resource today so it really is no surprise that after the piracy of the movie and music industry that books would follow in large popularity with students around the world.
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