John Wiley & Sons have sued 28 BitTorrent users in New York Federal Court for pirating their popular “For Dummies” ebook series. This is one of the first times a well known publisher is attacking end-users directly.
Suing users for pirating content is nothing new, the music and video industry have been doing it for years. Popular pirate torrent site Torrent Freak recently obtained a copy of the complaint the company filed against the users. The lawsuit against the 28 individuals happened quite recently, October 18th to 19th, and all of them reside in New York. This is a crucial that the defendants are living in the same state as those suing them, because previous cases have been thrown out of court because they lived outside the court’s jurisdiction.
“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.”
The complaint calls out a few specific books including “AutoCAD 2011 for Dummies,” “Day Trading for Dummies”, “Calculus Essential for Dummies”, “Word Press For Dummies”, and “Photoshop CS 5 All-In-One For Dummies.”
Many book publishers are watching this case very closely to see how it pans out.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
