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Amazon, Penguin Random House and authors including Lee Child and John Grisham have been awarded $7.8m (£5.8m) in damages, after suing pirate e-book sites in Ukraine.
They were awarded the damages after a court ruled that 52 copyrighted works were made available at heavily discounted prices, without paying the authors or publishers royalties for the sales. The e-books were sold through sites aggregated under Kiss Library, according to a court order by senior district judge Marsha J Pechman.
Alongside Child and Grisham, the full list of plaintiffs featured Sylvia Day, C J Lyons, Doug Preston, Jim Rasenberger, T J Stiles, R L Stine, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Nicholas Weinstock, and Stuart Woods, in addition to PRH and Amazon Content Services, who first launched the lawsuit in 2020.
The lawsuit, which was filed at the District Court of Washington in Seattle, aimed to close down the sites and claim damages from Ukrainian nationals Artem Besshapochny and Rodion Vynnychenko. The defendants did not appear in court and the order noted they had "used a series of ruses to hide their identities and avoid both detection and accountability".
"Plaintiffs have suffered economic losses through lost royalties and claim to have suffered non-economic damages in the form of lost customers, damaged goodwill, and disruption of distribution licenses," the order stated. The damages awarded were the maximum possible requested.
Pechman said: “Defendants advertised and distributed the copyrighted works at issue to Washington consumers in violation of the Copyright Act, duping consumers and interfering with the author plaintiffs’ licensing relationship with plaintiff Amazon who suffered a loss of sales in Washington.”
The judge added: “Given the extent of the piracy scheme, defendants’ efforts to fight or participate in this lawsuit, and the seriousness of the misconduct, the court finds that the requested damages are reasonable.”
A permanent injunction has also been issued against Kiss Library, Vynnychenko, Besshapochny, their agents and parties acting in conjunction with them.
“Whether authors earn $500 or $5m a year from the sales of their books, book piracy deprives them of their right to be compensated for their creative work. That’s why we felt it necessary to file suit against Kiss to send a message to piracy sites on behalf of the Authors Guild’s 12,000 members—when you steal from one of us, you steal from us all,” said Preston, a bestselling thriller novelist who also serves as president of the Authors Guild. “We will not stand idly by and allow criminals to profit from the illegal sale of our books in which we invest so much of our time, talents and emotional capital—robbing writers of their works not only steals money from authors and their families; it takes away a piece of the author’s inner self.”
“The judge’s order sends a clear message that piracy will not be tolerated and bad actors will be held accountable,” said Mikyla Bruder, head of Amazon Publishing. “We are grateful to the Authors Guild and Penguin Random House for their collaboration in bringing Kiss Library to justice and protecting authors’ rights.”
Anke Steinecke, Penguin Random House’s chief legal officer, added.“The award of the maximum amount of statutory damages shows that the court recognized the serious impact of piracy on the entire publishing ecosystem. We hope this verdict serves as a wake-up call to all websites and search engines that regularly fail to enforce DMCA takedown notices. We will continue to work with our authors, the Authors Guild, and other publishers to send the message that ebook piracy should not and will not be tolerated anywhere or under any circumstances."