The publishers — Pearson Education, McGraw Hill, Macmillan Learning, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier — filed the lawsuit as a group against Shopify in Virginia federal court for copyright and trademark infringement. Shopify is based in Canada but its servers are in Ashburn, Virginia.
Shopify hosts an eCommerce marketplace that enables people to build a website, sell merchandise, accept online payments and ship and track orders.
“Shopify plays host, enabler and protector to a world of digital textbook pirates,” the publishers said in the lawsuit. The group is asking for statutory damages that could be as much as $550 million.
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The group of publishers pointed to Shopify’s role as a central intermediary in the sales process and said the company should regulate unauthorized sellers of textbooks and testing tools.
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“We have multiple teams that handle potential acceptable-use policy violations, including copyright and trademark infringement, and we don’t hesitate to action stores when found in violation. To date in 2021, over 90% of copyright and trademark reports were reviewed within one business day,” a Shopify spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
The publishers allege in the lawsuit that they had been asking Shopify to deal with websites selling unauthorized educational material for the past four years but got no satisfaction. Shopify also refused to turn over the names of the people behind the shady websites.
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Shopify’s acceptable-use policy prohibits merchants from selling merchandise, offering services, or posting materials if they need authorization, said the Shopify spokesperson. Shopify has taken action against merchants in the past for breaking the rules.
