The City of London Police have already taken down numerous websites that offered music, films and TV shows without rights holders’ permission. Now the anti-piracy outfit seems to be targeting their first ebook-related domain, OnRead. The website is currently under police investigation, though it claims to be operating legally.
The City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has already managed to shut down dozens of domains and several websites, as well as arrest individuals all over the country. Now the websites offering pirated ebooks also became the part of the Unit’s strategy.
Last week, the visitors to the ebook site OnRead.com faced the ominous Unit’s “seized” notice, saying that the website was being investigated for online copyright infringement. Most likely, the ebook website was operating without licenses recognized by British publishers, but an archive of the domain shows that the website’s owners tried to claim that their service had operated legally. They referred to… the license of the Russian Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems. The latter is a Russian collective rights management organization which became known worldwide 8 years ago, when notorious music downloading service, AllofMP3, also insisted that it operated legally under the same organization’s remit to collect and distribute statutory royalty payments according to the Russian law. However, the next year AllofMP3 closed down for good.
The industry experts also point out that while the legal claims made by the ebook site are fuzzy and by now years out of date, the site also warned users they had no right to download any files if that act violated the law of their country.
Apparently, both the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and the Publishers Association understood that OnRead was not in compliance with British law. In result, OnRead’s domain is now in police hands.
By the way, 9 years ago ZML.com, a website which offered various movies to American customers, also tried to claim protection of the Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems. Now that domain is under the control of ICE and Homeland Security – it was seized in the very first move within the Operation in Our Sites campaign.
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