At both Tools of Change and the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, I am presenting an overview of our research into the impact of piracy on paid content sales. Although they are not identical, the two presentations overlap a fair amount, so if you sat in on the TOC session, you can probably choose an alternate session at the Publishing Business event.
The presentations reference a number of useful posts and sites, including:
A few basics about seeds, leeches and the Bittorrent protocol (at the level of piracy 101)
TorrentFreak covers “how to create a .torrent file“
Nielsen, the primary source for point-of-sale (POS) data used to measure the impact of piracy on paid sales
A basic overview of the characteristics and types of DRM (broader than just books)
A range of points of view on piracy-related topics, hosted at boingboing.net
Chris Walters at Booksprung, outlining root causes of consumer piracy
Kirk Biglione at Medialoper, which writes regularly about DRM, piracy and the evolving technology platforms serving the content industries
Attributor’s January 2010 study estimating the impact of piracy on book sales
A seven-point plan from Macmillan to combat/stop piracy
And most recently, Richard Curtis’s excerpted interview with a pirate
[Provided in the spirit of my algebra 2 class, where we were always expected to show our work …]