Fresh off of last month’s victory against pirate web site Anna’s Archive, 13 publishers across all segments of the industry have allied to sue yet another pirate site, WeLib, for copyright infringement.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charges that the operators of WeLib “ copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive.”
The plaintiffs include the Big Five, Cengage, Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
“Defendants boast that they have reproduced ‘an endless collection of literature, research papers, and education materials,’ none of which they own or have licensed,” the complaint alleges.
According to its website and repeated in the lawsuit, WeLib hosts over 43 million books and 98 million papers, and its stolen collection of literary works has purportedly attracted over 80,000 active monthly users. According to the website, WeLib’s users have illegally accessed over 51 million books in the last month alone, or an average of over 1.7 million books per day.
Although the owners of WeLib claim to be a library of sorts, publishers say that they have created a mechanism to cash in on the pirated content.
According to the complaint, download speeds for free users are typically very slow, but in exchange for a “donation,” users receive “fast downloads” and avoid waitlists. The publishers argue that in reality, the “donations” are paid memberships, and given the volume of the pirated files WeLib encourages its users to download, buying this extra download speed is a practical necessity.
WeLib subscriptions start at $7 per month for “25 fast downloads per day” and “25 fast reads per day.” On the higher end, for $90 a month, WeLib offers “1,000 fast downloads per day” and “1,000 fast reads per day.”
“WeLib steals, distributes, and profits from millions of literary, educational, and scientific works from its cowardly locations on the internet, in the process injuring authors, publishers, and the public,” said AAP CEO and president Maria A. Pallante in a statement. “Today’s action is part of our ongoing and vigorous response to the mass theft of literary works, which has no place in the modern world and cannot be tolerated.”
