Book publishers want to get in line with the motion picture industry

Nov 1, 2011 12:39 GMT  ·  By

A major book publisher, John Wiley and Sons, filed a law suit in New York against 27 torrent users who allegedly illegally shared copies of the 'For Dummies' books.

According to TorrentFreak, the 27 accused internauts are suspected of sharing the books on October 18 and 19, 2011.

It seems as the members of the media industry, Wiley is unhappy with the fact that they lose a lot of money because of online piracy and they want to set an example.

“Defendants are contributing to a problem that threatens the profitability of Wiley. Although Wiley cannot determine at this time the precise amount of revenue that it has lost as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing of its copyrighted works though BitTorrent software, the amount of revenue that is lost is enormous,” reads the complaint.

“For example, BitTorrent users on a single site, demonoid.me, have downloaded one of the works that is the subject of this suit, ‘Photoshop CS 5 All-In-One FOR DUMMIES,’ more than 74,000 times since June 6, 2010.”

The Does are now accused of trademark and copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting and since they all seem to be located in the State of New York, they should have no problem defending themselves against the charges they are faced with.

Since this it the first case of its kind, it might open up ideas in the minds of other publishers who can later follow the example set by Wiley.

It is clear that these sort of cases will be brought to our attention in the upcoming period and maybe their outcomes will help make some sort of clear policies that would regulate these matters once and for all.

So far, the pirates are down a few points but because in most cases they get out with a small fine, these procedures don't actually discourage copyright infringement acts.