Publishers John Wiley & Sons, Inc., McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education, Inc. and Cengage Learning, Inc. have announced a favorable ruling and damages award in a copyright infringement case against two online booksellers - Jun Liao and Zhengshu Gu. The publishers' lawsuit alleged that Liao and Gu engaged in the illegal importation, promotion and sale within the US of foreign edition textbooks manufactured by the publishers for distribution only in certain overseas territories.
The summary judgment in favour of the publishers includes an award of over $125,000 in statutory damages and permanently enjoins the defendants from further infringing the publishers' copyrights. This lawsuit demonstrates the publishers' ongoing commitment to combatting illegal importation of restricted foreign editions, which unlawful importation infringes the publishers' copyrights and trademarks, cheats authors of their due compensation for their efforts, and stifles creativity and innovation.
In a similar move, in April 2008, publishers Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and SAGE Publications, supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), filed a lawsuit in the Atlanta federal court to stop widespread copyright infringement at Georgia State University (GSU). The publishers charged GSU officials for violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings published by the plaintiffs and several other publishers without authorisation.
