Search engine accused of aiding infringement by promoting pirate sites, ignoring complaints

BY EILEEN McDERMOTT

All Eye on Washington stories initially appeared at IPWatchdog.com.

Several major educational publishing companies—including Macmillan, Elsevier and McGraw Hill—sued Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, trademark infringement and violations of New York’s General Business Law.

In the action filed June 5, the companies claim Google’s search engine is facilitating infringement by promoting pirate sites that sell heavily discounted versions of educational textbooks.

According to the complaint, the publishers have been sending Google notices of infringement for years, but Google’s response has been “a circus of failures.” Rather than removing the ads for the infringing works, Google “has continued to do business with known pirates,” said the complaint, and “even threatened to stop reviewing all of the Publishers’ notices for up to six months simply because the Publishers appropriately re-submitted notices for infringing works that Google previously failed to act upon.”

Google has not publicly responded to the claims.

The complaint included several examples of searches that resulted in ads for infringing works, such as McGraw Hill’s textbook “Anatomy and Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function.” A Google search for the book turned up paid ads that were almost entirely ads for infringing copies of the book.

The alleged pirate sellers include companies with names such as “madebook,” “LivyLuxe,” “Athena Line Store,” “Biz Ninjas,” “Cheapbok” and “Nardab,” “all of which have been included in the publishers’ notices of infringement to Google,” said the complaint.

Hypocritical IP promoters?

The companies further accused Google of being hypocritical in its purportedly pro-IP stance, including via various statements that claim it promptly blocks content from appearing when it is found to be in violation of copyright and that it verifies advertiser identities.

“By claiming to subject ads to a review for infringing material, lending its seeming seal of approval to the ads, Google makes its users even more likely to purchase the infringing works they find through Google,” the complaint said.

Google also restricts ads for legitimate e-books, thus making the textbook market “upside down,” the complaint said. The search engine’s practices are said to also harm consumers, who are often buying inferior products with lower resolution, that are incompatible with certain devices and contain non-working links.

The complaint claims the publishers have been sending Google notices since June 2021, leading to numbers in the hundreds, and that they have been “directed to the agent Google has designated to receive infringement notices.” But in three examples, the publishers sent:

“44 separate notices over a 14-month period identifying a Pirate Site at matchlistcity.shop (and at least 174 unique Infringing Shopping Ads promoting that seller’s Infringing Works and linking to the Pirate Site);

“57 separate notices over a 15-month period identifying a Pirate Site at nardab.com (and at least 485 unique Infringing Shopping Ads promoting that seller’s Infringing Works and linking to the Pirate Site); 

and

“At least 56 separate notices over an 15-month period identifying a Pirate Site at testbank23.com (and at least 2596 unique Infringing Shopping Ads promoting that seller’s Infringing Works and linking to the Pirate Site), and yet “Google continued to provide its services to assist and support the pirate[s’] infringement,” the complaint said.

The publishers also attempted to sue the alleged pirates in district court and Google was aware of the injunctions issued in those cases, but “with each case it became clearer that the problem needed to be addressed by Google,” said the complaint.