In their ongoing effort to fight piracy of its content, the country's largest educational publishers have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop pirate e-book sites from illegally selling their e-books.
According to the lawsuit filed in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the pirate sites are selling unlicensed e-books using Google ads which they place in response to searches for the publishers' legitimate content. While the lawsuit proceeds, the publishers, through the Educational Publishers Enforcement Group which brought the action, were granted a temporary restraining order that calls for the immediate shut down of the illegal activity on these sites, as well as the cessation of the services that support the sites.
"These pirate websites are engaged in blatantly illegal activity that causes great harm to all those who earn a living from legitimate textbook sales,” said Matthew Oppenheim, lead counsel for the EPEG in a statement.” Publishers are committed to protecting their investment in scholarship, academic instruction and learning."
The EPEG consists of Cengage, Elsevier, Macmillan Learning, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson. The group has filed previous lawsuits against pirates and counterfeiters of its materials and won a $34 million judgment against textbook counterfeiters in April 2018.
