In the second of our series of interviews with speakers at our Lagos Regional Seminar (held in May), we speak to Ama Dadson, founder of AkooBooks, Ghana’s first publisher and digital distributor of African audiobooks.

On 7 July, member companies of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a motion for summary judgment in the copyright infringement lawsuit against Internet Archive (“IA”), first filed on 1 June, 2020, in a New York District Court. 

Online piracy is a massive challenge for all economies which depend on their creative industries, hurting publishers' and authors' income, employees' jobs and governments' tax revenues.

On 14 May the French Publishers Association (SNE) welcomed the judgement of the 15th Chamber of Appeal of the Nanterre Judicial Court, in their case against the now closed website Team Alexandriz. The Court convicted 9 of the 12 defendants for infringement, retaining the aggravating circumstance of being an organized group.

As previously reported to the IPA community, publishers and authors are closely watching a major law suit in the United States, in which member companies of the Association of American Publishers sued the Internet Archive (IA) for intentional and systematic copyright infringement. 

Publishers and collecting societies are successfully sueing online file-hosting services where copyrighted materials are illegally downloaded.

On 11 August, the IPA, along with other international rightsholder organisations, filed what is known as an ‘Amicus Brief’ in New York in support of four US publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Wiley) in the case Hachette et al vs Internet Archive. This is a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive that began in June 2020.

German investigators have succeeded in shutting down a Tonga-based website that was illegally selling thousands of downloadable books and journals – the majority of them in German – at rock-bottom prices.

The International Publishers Association (IPA) welcomes a ruling by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against websites that illicitly offer millions of research papers and books that are protected by copyright.

More Information

UNESCO Anti-piracy pages

Macmillan

UK Publishers Association

WIPO Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy

Syndicat National de l’Edition

On 11 May, the Nigerian Copyright Council in collaboration with Nigerian Customs Service and Nigeria Police seized two containers arriving at Tincan Port, Lagos, filled with 80,822 copies of pirated books with a market value of over N80 Million (159 000€, 198,000 USD).

On Wednesday 16 November, in federal court in Brooklyn, USA, an indictment and a complaint were unsealed charging Russian nationals Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering for operating Z-Library, an online e-book piracy website.

In September 2022, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released statements in response to Fight for the Future’s ‘In Solidarity with Libraries’ letter falsely claiming that the lawsuit against Internet Archive’s open library harms public libraries.