A French court has ordered the piracy site Z Library to be taken down, Publishing Perspective reported. The court ruling comes in response to a case filed by the French Publishers Association, the Syndicat national de l’édition or SNE which alleged Z Library adopted unfair means to distribute e-books that infringed upon the copyright of the respective authors.
A dozen of the most prominent publishing houses in France helped SNE in the court proceedings. Those include Actes Sud, Albin Michel, Cairn, Editis, Hachette Livre, Humensis, Lefebvre-Sarrut, LexisNexis, Madrigall, Maison des Langues, Odile Jacob, and Presses de Science Po. As per the ruling of the Paris Judicial Court, the internet service providers will have to block access to 98 domain names in total along with any extensions to mirror sites that might be in existence.
“This had already made it possible to very significantly limit the possibilities of accessing Z-Library from France,” the SNE said. This had provided protection to “millions of books and copyrighted articles pirated by this site—all publishing sectors combined.”
SNE said they are actively exploring such court-backed ‘cessation action’ to prevent others from indulging in acts that puts the livelihood of the authors or the publishing industry at risk. The SNE said it “continues to deploy its strategy against pirate sites, regardless of their size, the complexity of their organization, or their desire to maintain, or even expand, their audience to the detriment of the development of a legal offer.”
“French publishing invests massively to allow broad public access to digital books,” the SNE writes. “Book piracy undermines the remuneration of creators: authors and publishers. It constitutes a threat to the entire book ecosystem, particularly booksellers, and harms cultural diversity.
“The fight against book piracy,” the SNE’s statement today says, “is more than ever a priority for publishers and the SNE in its mission to defend the interests of an entire profession.”
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