SINBAD

“Librius launches SINBAD, the first Belgian anti-piracy webcrawler for books In July 2011 Librius, the collecting society of the Flemish book publishers, launched SINBAD (‘Searching the Internet for Non-authorized Books And Displays’), an anti-piracy webcrawler for books. SINBAD feeds title metadata from the Boek.be books-in-print database ‘Boekenbank’ (www.boekenbank.be) into HYDRA, the BAF (Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation) anti-piracy webcrawler initially developed for music, games and movies. SINBAD uses a comprehensive and self-feeding scanning list of well-known direct download- and P2P websites and newsgroups. In so doing, SINBAD is able to scan the entire internet for illegal book content of Librius’ members and subsequently to take down infringing links. The first test results were very surprising indeed: more than 29,000 illegal links to Flemish book content were found and removed (roughly 19,000 for A-books and 10,000 for comic books). Bearing in mind that BAF took down 12,000 illegal links to Belgian music, games and audiovisual content in 2010, the results go to show that the phenomenon of book piracy is not to be underestimated, even in small language markets. SINBAD is only one part of the integrated Boek.be/Librius anti-piracy approach though, which is also aimed at endorsing the development of high-quality legal content and the protection thereof (e.g. www.e-boek.org) and at changing the focus from end-consumers to hosts, uploaders and ISP’s’.
Many thanks in advance. Best,
Kurt Vriendelijke groet,
Kurt Van Damme
Librius (collecting society of the Flemish book publishers)

managing director