A federal judge in the Southern District of New York has issued a preliminary injunction blocking some 231 websites from selling or sharing pirate copies of resources from a range of educational publishers.
First filed on October 9, the action was begun by a group of major education publishers known as the Educational Publishers Enforcement Group (EPEG) which includes Pearson, Cengage, Elsevier, Macmillan Learning, and McGraw Hill.
The trademark and copyright infringement suit alleges that the operators of these 231 websites were selling "illegal, unlicensed copies of test banks and instructor solutions manuals," resources sold only to teachers and not made publicly available or available to students by the the plaintiff publishers. "The unauthorized sale of these materials not only violates the publishers' intellectual property rights, but undermines academic integrity and pedagogy," reads an EPG release, announcing the injunction.
The preliminary injunction will remain in force through the course of the litigation. In addition to requiring "the immediate shutdown of the infringing activity on the websites," it also bars internet services from supporting the illegal websites.
This is the fourth injunction obtained against pirate services obtained by the EPEG in the last year.
