An international alliance of publishers and publishers’ associations achieved an important success in the combat against Internet piracy recently. Despite significant technical and legal obstacles, the alliance was able to locate the alleged operators of both the sharehoster service www.ifile.it and the link library www.library.nu, and successfully served judicial cease-and-desist orders on both.
The two entities created and operated an ‘Internet library’ which made available illegally more than 400,000 high quality e-books for immediate, free and anonymous download. The operators generated an estimated turnover of EUR 8 million ($10,602,400) from advertising revenues, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, thereby ranking the sites among the top piracy websites in the world.
The close ties between a sharehoster service and a link library meant that the targeted entities were particularly harmful as all illegally uploaded copyright works were made immediately accessible to all Internet users. The international publishers were able to assert extensive claims against the service providers who had partially concealed their identities.
They were able to obtain a total of 17 interim injunctions from the Landgericht (regional court) of Munich I, and successfully served these in Ireland. In doing this, the participating publishers are seen to demonstrate their continued determination to not simply ignore copyright piracy, but to fight the large illegal platforms with all available legal measures.
The international alliance of publishers is coordinated by the German Publishers and
Booksellers Association (Börsenverein), the International Publishers Association and German law firm Lausen. The participating publishing houses are Cambridge University Press, Georg Thieme, Harper Collins, Hogrefe, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Cengage Learning, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education Ltd., Pearson Education Inc., Oxford University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis, C.H. Beck as well as Walter De Gruyter. The legal proceedings are also supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Dutch Publishers Association (NUV), the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) and the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
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