Authors Fight Back Against Piracy Websites: The Self-Publishing News Podcast with Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway covers the UK High Court’s decision to strengthen enforcement against piracy websites, Japan’s use of AI to combat manga piracy, and Spotify’s new partner program for podcasters. He also highlights authors recognized in the UK’s New Year’s Honours list and a new opportunity for contributors to the New Publishing Standard.

Listen to Self-Publishing News: Authors Fight Back Against Piracy Websites

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About the Host

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Read the Transcripts

Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to the first Self-Publishing News podcast that has actually been recorded in 2025. It's still a relatively slow time of year, but I will give you a little bit of what I've been up to.

I had the great pleasure of having a reflection on 2024 with my long time and excellent friend and colleague, Len Epp from LeanPub! Len runs the Frontmatter podcast, and he and I had a great time talking about all things self-publishing in 2024, and looking ahead to what might be coming in 2025, talking about some of the great things that ALLi have been doing as well.

As soon as that has been released, I will send Howard the link to put in the next podcast, but it's not been totally absent of news in the last week.

Here in the UK, for example, one of the great traditions of the new year is the New Year's Honours list. This is when people get given titles, very seemingly outmoded titles like OBE, MBE, which is the Order of the British Empire and Member of the British Empire. They also get knighted. So, they then become Sir or Dame, or Lord or Lady, titles bestowed upon them.

Three very distinguished authors appeared in this year's New Year's Honours list. Kazuo Ishiguro, obviously you will know as a multiple award-winning, in particular Booker Prize winning for, now let me remember, I think it was Remains of the Day, that he won the Booker Prize for.

Alan Hollinghurst, another Booker Prize winner with, The Line of Beauty, and the greatest of them all, one of our greatest living writers, Jacqueline Wilson, many of whose works have been immortalized on television and have been on television over Christmas. Of course, author of the Gruffalo and many other such timeless classics. Jacqueline Wilson has been made a dame; I believe a dame of the British Empire. So, there we go. There have been things happening.

There have also been some court related things. Obviously, it is not yet January 10th, as I record, so we have not yet had the TikTok hearing in the U.S.

We have had court cases in the U.K., so the High Court has upheld a case from the Publishers Association, a very long standing case about large piracy websites, a group of very large, very infamous websites that collate pirated and links to pirated material, the most controversial and high profile of which is Library Genesis, have been banned for some time. The High Court has upheld the ban, and what that means is that internet service providers will be required to keep these sites offline, but not only these sites, any new sites on the Hydra model, as it were. So, any sites that pop up and do similar nefarious things, but seek to gain publicity by making out that they have something to do with the original site.

So, you've got nefarious high-profile site banned, if other nefarious sites that claim to be somehow linked to that site in order to gain traction were to spring up, then there would, without any further legal action being taken, as soon as this is brought to the attention of internet service providers, they would be required to take them down.

So, that's what's been happening in the UK regarding piracy.

Interesting story coming, thanks to Mark Williams, from Japan, also about piracy, and that is in relation to manga and anime. Obviously, hugely popular and massive industry in Japan, but very much subject to piracy. I think the number that Mark cites on his post is a thousand or more piracy websites related to manga and anime, and the Japanese government have decided that they need to step up action on this, and so they've invested the equivalent of two million dollars to try and develop AI-based tools to do just that. To find, to evaluate, and then to enforce action against pirating websites that host nefarious activity related to anime and manga titles, as it is seen that this is costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Obviously, that would make 2 million seem like a drop in the ocean.

It's interesting that this does seem to be an instance of AI being used. It's not, obviously, generative AI, it's assistive AI, but this is the classic use case for such technology to do things that humans do, only to do it quicker, and possibly to do it more accurately.

Obviously, that will be a controversial topic as to what is more or less accurate than a human. It's a topic that is being wrestled with in the medical world as we speak and has been for some time.

Also, obviously authors are nervous about algorithms claiming to do such things more accurately than humans because we've all been bitten by Amazon with its blanket actions based on what algorithms tell it about, for example, allegedly fake reviews and the bycatch issue has been quite severe. Whether or not that will continue to be the case, I don't know, but it's an interesting development and an example of AI being used to do something helpful.

Talking of helpful for our final case, no, actually, before we go to that, I will segue off in another direction, which is to say that Mark Williams has opened up the New Publishing Standard, his fabulous newsletter/website/LinkedIn space that is dedicated to all things international for providing a truly global picture of the publishing world. He has decided in 2025 to open it up to anyone who has something of interest and importance to say to his audience.

Submissions for such a thing are welcome. He has many Audience members, lots of traction on LinkedIn. If you have something you think would be of use to or of interest to Mark's readers and you want to get something out there on the New Publishing Standard, do get in touch with Mark. You will find him obviously on LinkedIn and through the New Publishing Standard website.

Back to the other potential segue for our final story, and that is news from Spotify that their partner program, which was first announced last November, has now gone live in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada.

This is a program for podcasters. That's obviously lots of us. So, if you make your podcast available through Spotify for creators then you will be eligible to earn now, not just from ad revenue on your podcasts, but if you meet certain criteria, you are eligible for the partner program, which will give you a share of revenue from premium subscribers. Because obviously, you can only make ad revenue where the listeners and viewers are watching ads, and Spotify premium subscribers are paying so they don't have to watch ads.

So, this is a way for podcasters to make income, whether whoever's taking in their podcast is doing so with or without adverts. So, the eligibility criteria are, as I say, you have to have uploaded your podcast through Spotify for Creators. You need, within the last month, you need 2000 unique Spotify users and 10,000 streamed hours and you need to have 12 episodes.

You can though, if you have a smaller podcast than that on Spotify, so two episodes and if you have 100 listeners in 60 days, so many fewer listeners in twice as many days, you can still make your podcast available for special subscription and charge your users a subscriber fee to get special material that's not available everywhere.

I think I talked about this before. Spotify has this program where you can put out teaser podcasts, so you can have a certain amount of material public, and then a certain amount of material you can keep behind a paywall and get people to pay for.

Both of these very similar to a YouTube type model where you get to earn money in several different ways, and it's clear that Spotify has its eye on YouTube because YouTube, of course, has been taking quite a lot of the audio market in recent months and years, and this is clearly part of their move to try and retain their reputation, as Daniel Ek always puts it, the one-stop-shop for audio.

So, if you have a podcast and that is relevant to you, do go and check it out. In my column, I have a link to the various program details on Spotify.

With that, we will see what the news brings next week, and I wish you a very happy start to, and I hope, continuation of 2025. Happy writing to all of you.