Andre Yoskowitz
17 Feb 2012 0:14
Global publishers Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, among others, have taken down the popular ebook file sharing sites library.nu and ifile.it.
The alliance of publishers say the two sites had "created an internet library" with over 400,000 unauthorized ebooks available for free.
Operators of the sites are said to have brought in over $10 million in advertising, subscriptions and donations
The other publishers who were part of the alliance that sent the successful cease-and-desist letters are Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter.
International Publishers Association (IPA), which helped coordinate the events, added (via TheBookSeller): "Today, the international book industry has shown that it continues to stand up against organised copyright crime. We will not tolerate freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward. This is an important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet."