By Herman Lai, posted Mar 21, 2012 at 9:38 AM, 445 views,

Chinese Writers File Lawsuit Against Apple Over Pirated Ebooks

It’s troublesome for Apple to settle its mighty business in China, as they had consistently encountered lawsuits from the Chinese company like Proview. Since January this year, a group of well-known Chinese writers contended the Cupertino firm assisting in the sale of illegally published e-books on the iBookstore. The latest news that we got here is the number of Chinese writers have increased from nine to twelve now and the compensation fee has also raised for more than half.

Physorg.com stated the representative of the writers said they’re seeking for 23 million (US$3.5 million) in compensation from Apple, which has been doubled from what we previously reported (11.91 million yuan). There’s also report emerged from Xinhua News, which noted the amount is expecting to be 50 million yuan ($7.7 million US) instead, however that’s not confirmed.

According to the lawyer representing the writers:

“It is encouragement in disguise, because they did not punish the developers. The developers could have been kicked out. But nothing happened to them.”

An Apple spokeswoman did not comment on the case, but said that the company responded to copyright infringement complaints “promptly and appropriately.”

Probably Apple isn’t the right one to sue against. Apple iBookstore is just like Youtube, a distribution channel that provides contents. However, Apple isn’t the law maker, they can’t make their own decision to pull down any contents as they think that deemed to be infringing. Also, it’s quite unlikely that the court to rule the writers win in this lawsuit, because that could influence a lot of Chinese tech companies that offered access to pirated content in China.

Source: Physorg.com