Dummies Rise Up!!

Book Publishers Have Won Lawsuit against File-Sharers

The first book publishing company which managed to win a lawsuit against several file-sharers turned out to be John Wiley and Sons. The court ruled that the two New York residents have to pay a $7000 penalty for pirating their copyrighted content.
Following the Recording Industry Association of America, which once tried to settle with pirates by filing lawsuits one after another, book publishing companies have also turned their heads to the legal system in a hope that legal precedent can help them stop book piracy.

John Wiley and Sons, the publishing company known for the “For Dummies” series, have recently sued a couple of New Yorkers for unauthorized sharing some of their books. The publisher was lucky – the court has decided to find them guilty as charged and fined them with $7.000 in damages.

However, the experts point out that the only thing that could be learned after RIAA’s reign of anti-piracy lawsuits is that pursuing people brings no results except upsetting the public, regardless of their status. Many times the portals like The Pirate Bay have been trying to find a middle-way between the file-sharers and content creators, and its partnership with Tim Ferriss, for instance, was quite successful. Tim Ferriss allowed the BitTorrent tracker to put a bundle of The 4-Hour Chef up for downloads, including behind-the-scenes videos and samples from the book. In result, he gathered over 1.4 million downloads and the attention of hundreds of millions file-sharers throughout the world. Moreover, The Pirate Bay also offered a complete download of his other bestseller titled The 4-Hour Workweek.

It is known that before partnering with BitTorrent, Tim Ferriss tried to contact Amazon, and this decision was criticized by many booksellers. As a result, the famous author focused on BitTorrent, taking into account that Bram Cohen’s company had proven to be successful with promoting young content creators, including writers and musicians.

Nevertheless, the truth is that it is next to impossible at the moment to quantify the amount of revenues this promotion brings to the content creator, but this doesn’t mean it’s a dead end.