Publishers win landmark case against ebook pirates

British publishers have won their first ever blocking order against pirate ebook sites, as the battle over online copyright spreads beyond music and film.

A ruling by the High Court in London means that internet service providers, such as BT, Virgin Media and Sky, have 10 days to block access to the sites, which are hosted in Russia and the US.

The book industry has been less affected by piracy than music labels, thanks partly to the early development of a legal market in ebooks by Amazon. But piracy has nonetheless become a “huge issue” that is “particularly problematic in some genres, such as student textbooks”, researchers at Enders Analysis wrote last year.

Seven sites are subject to the High Court’s order, which is based on the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

“Between them the sites purport to hold around 10,000,000 ebook titles and have been making substantial sums of money, primarily through referral fees and advertising,” said the Publishers Association, which represents publishers including Penguin Random House, part-owned by Pearson, parent company of the Financial Times. “None of this money has been going back to either the publisher or the author(s) of the works.”

One of the websites, Ebookee, offers titles from academic textbooks to the complete series of Harry Potter novels.

Another, Russia-based LibGen, distributes millions of scientific papers via torrents and accepts bitcoin donations.

The other named sites are AvaxHome, Freebookspot, Freshwap, Bookfi and Bookre.

AvaxHome’s owners were ordered to pay $37.5m by a US court in April, in a default judgment following a suit by academic publisher Elsevier. But that money is unlikely to be paid, given the site is hosted in Russia. The UK Publishers Association said it did not expect to seek financial damages from the seven infringing sites.

Publishers’ previous recourse has been to ask Google to remove infringing sites from its search results. Up to 1.75m URLs from these seven sites alone have been subject to such requests.

Internet service providers increasingly act as the pressure point for copyright-holders and politicians, looking to clamp down on illegal and adult material. British ISPs have been subject to court orders to block file-sharing website Pirate Bay in 2012, and music and film download sites in 2013, but also political pressure to limit access to pornography and child abuse images.

Publishers’ focus on piracy comes as the rapid growth of ebooks slows. Sales of digital books rose 11 per cent last year in the UK, down from 19 per cent the year before. Among consumer ebooks — such as bestselling fiction — growth was just 5 per cent in 2014.