Publisher of BitTorrent for Dummies Suing BitTorrent Users for Illegally Sharing For Dummies Books

Posted on November 1, 2011

anessa LengiesIn an effort to stop video piracy, movie studios have been suing people for copyright infringement for uploading movies using BitTorrent software. Now book publishers are joining the fray. TorrentFreak reports that John Wiley & Sons has filed a federal copyright lawsuit against 27 BitTorrent users who shared copies of its For Dummies books without permission. The book publisher is demanding compensation from the users, who have not yet been identified. Wiley has the users' IP addresses, however.

The most pirated For Dummies books are Photoshop CS 5 All-In-One For Dummies (downloaded more than 74,000 times since June 6, 2010), AutoCAD 2011 for Dummies, Day Trading for Dummies, Calculus Essential for Dummies and Word Press For Dummies. TorrentFreak notes that--interestingly enough--the very popular book BitTorrent for Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Kris Krug is not mentioned in the lawsuit.

That's not a joke, by the way. Wiley really does publish a book called BitTorrent for Dummies that explains how to share copyrighted files without permission. Talk about sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

You can see a copy of the lawsuit (in pdf format) here.