An international alliance of publishers including seven member companies of the Association of American Publishers, with support from AAP and other international trade associations, has identified and taken legal action against operators of one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world. The operators of two Ireland-based sites were served with court orders, following an identification and enforcement process taking more than seven months and spanned seven countries.
“While this action is a significant step in shutting down two major rogue websites stealing content from publishers and others, it also captures the enormous investment of time and cost required for rights-holders to protect their work,” said Tom Allen, President and CEO, AAP. “For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort. I can’t think of a more timely example of the need for additional tools to expedite such action.”
One site illegally acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted e-books and made them available for free, anonymous downloading on a site that disguised itself as a legitimate provider and alluded to serving as an authorized library for such content. The operators earned an estimated €8 million ($10,602,400) annually, mainly from actions by third parties: advertisers bought space on the site, donations were made to this internet library through online payment services and individuals purchased premium-level user accounts. The same operators ran an affiliated fileshare hosting service which facilitated the anonymous infringing uploads.
AAP member publishing companies that participated are Cengage Learning, Elsevier, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Oxford University Press and Pearson Education Inc. The additional global publishing participants were Cambridge University Press, Georg Thieme, Hogrefe, Macmillan, Pearson Education Ltd, Springer, Taylor & Francis, C.H. Beck and De Gruyter.
