Legal

Pearson Education filed a lawsuit yesterday against Chegg, claiming copyright infringement. The complaint claims that the website Chegg Study sells answers to end-of-chapter questions from 9,000 textbooks, including Pearson’s, “using precisely the same unit, chapter, and topic orders and naming conventions for the questions employed in the textbooks.” Subscribers to Chegg Services, which includes Chegg Study, grew 67 percent to 6.6 million last year, and the company reported $644 million in net sales in 2020, up from $410 million in 2019, according to SEC filings. The complaint states, “Textbook questions are intended to be part of the learning progression. Educators […]

As Amazon’s algorithms allow COVID-19 misinformation to top search results, Rep. Adam Schiff of California and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have written to the company about its “misinformation policies and what the company is doing to stop its systems from recommending books and other products linked to falsehoods about the pandemic and vaccines,” NPR reports. Warren’s letter specifically notes a book by Joseph Mercola, “a Florida physician who has long promoted debunked claims about vaccines,” which is listed as an Amazon bestseller and is consistently one of the top search results (published by Chelsea Green). NPD Bookscan reports sales […]

The first version of a tortured lawsuit against the five largest trade publishers and Amazon, alleging that the publishers conspired to have Amazon extract tough terms from them, failed quickly and was withdrawn and “amended.” It rested primarily on allegations of abusive most favored nations clauses. So Amazon produced redacted contracts to demonstrate that the “MFN conspiracy theory was utterly baseless. Separate and apart from its mischaracterization of the purpose and effect of MFN provisions, the simple fact is that none of Amazon’s and the Publisher Defendants’ wholesale purchase agreements for print books contains any of the price or non-price […]

In a joint letter to Judge John Koeltl, both parties in the trade publishers’ copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive asked for a revised schedule extending the discovery deadlines for the second time, postponing everything by another three months. Fact discovery was due to have been completed by September 24. The parties report “extensive progress on discovery…. But looking ahead, it has become clear that more time is required to process the voluminous documentary evidence produced in this case. It inevitably takes a lot of time to review and synthesize such large volumes of documents and more time is […]

Yfat Reiss Gendell’s attorney has asked the court to find Peter McGuigan in contempt for not paying her legal defense fees, as ordered in August. She asks for immediate payment of the reduced amount McGuigan’s attorney asked the court to impose — close to $60,000 — along with daily fines and costs. In the accompanying documents, Gendell shows that the $32,000 in fees to another law firm that McGuigan has challenged relates to an earlier dispute — presenting the bill, from a year ago, “for services rendered to Foundry in connection with Foundry’s ‘wind down.'” Epstein Becker provided legal services […]

Since the dispute between former Foundry partners Yfat Reiss Gendell and Peter McGuigan first surfaced, the most far-ranging impact has been on authors, experiencing delayed payments and stalled sub-rights activity. On Wednesday, McGuigan filed notice of an instant motion asking the court to order Gendell to approve outstanding payments due to authors at a hearing already scheduled for September 21. McGuigan also asks the court to order going forward that Gendell “review and object for a material reason, or approve all future payments posted on the bank website, within three (3) calendar days thereafter, without exception.” Accounts from Foundry bookkeeper […]