Major educational book publishers have taken the case of Fenlita to court, demanding the domain registrar share the details of this pirate site.
Fenlita is a commercial site sharing the pirated version of almost any educational book and is popular among students. But since it’s an illegal practice, it has now come under the scrutiny of law and copyright holders.
Seeking More Details of the Pirate
After Sci-Hub and Z-Library, if there’s any other pirate site that freeloaders turn to is Fenlita, a popular eBook site mostly containing educational stuff. Though it contains pirated copies, Fenlita poses as a legitimate seller of the digital versions of its library and charges $20 for each copy!
Though this is unusual compared to the other pirate sites, people buy it anyway considering the cheap offering. Well, this popularity has now attracted the actual copyright holders of these books – which are mainly the major educational book publishers – Cengage, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson.
Last month, these publishers gathered in a court to seek the details of Fenlita’s website, to press charges against them. For this, they filed two complaints (1,2) requesting the court to direct Namecheap (Fenlita’s domain registrar) to share any details of Fenlita’s owners with them.
The action request was accompanied by a four-and-a-half pages list containing hundreds of URLs where infringing textbooks were being offered. The publishers have also asked Namecheap to disable the Fenlita domain for good. And for details asked; Namecheap has to share;
Identifying information for the person(s) responsible for the alleged infringing content listed in the attached Exhibit A, including but not limited to billing or administrative records that provide the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), account number(s), or any other contact information for such persons.
What happens after this is yet to be known. While domain registrars would happily share the asked details – so as not to tangle themselves with lawsuits – they’re often useless. Pirate site owners knew they’d be targeted one day, so will register with fake details to avoid being known.
