Belgian webcrawler takes down links to illegal copies of books and comics

Last summer, Librius, rights management for the Flemish book industry, developed an anti-piracy webcrawler. The crawler named SINBAD detected up to 29 thousand links to illegal copies of ebooks and comics by Belgian publishers and, according to Librius, took them offline.

Out of 29 thousand ‘infringing’ links, 19 thousand referred to Belgian fiction and nonfiction books. Although the crawler searched for Belgian content, it also found translations of international bestsellers. Moreover, 10 thousand links referred to comic books. The comic Spike & Suzy (Suske & Wiske) was the most linked comic book.

Librius’ figures show SINBAD’s success. While the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (BAF) ‘only’ removed 12 thousand links to Flemish films and series throughout the whole of 2010, SINBAD ‘took down’ 29 thousand links in the summer of 2011.

A webcrawler is software that browses through the internet in a methodical and automated manner. SINBAD specializes in locating links to illegal copies of Belgian books and comics. The software can currently search through 25 thousand web pages a day.

Read the rapport of Librius here.

References: eReaders, Librius/SINBAD.

By: Karen Groen