During the past week users of the popular book downloading portal Library.nu started to notice that the site no longer carried links to files.
Today delivered another surprise when the site suddenly began redirecting to Google books.
Initially it was unclear what motivated the site’s owners to take these drastic actions, but a statement by a coalition of the world’s largest book publishers including Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons, seems to have cleared up the mystery.
The publishers obtained an injunction against Library.nu and the cyberlocker ifile.it from the regional court in Munich. They claimed that both sites were operating an unauthorized “internet library” that made available more than 400,000 high-quality e-books. In addition, the publishers said the sites made $11 million in revenue.
The court agreed with the publishers and the owners of the sites were served with an order to halt their infringing activities.
As a result, both sites have voluntarily pulled their services offline. Library.nu now redirects to Google books and ifile.it has put up a message stating “no upload servers currently available.”
However, this doesn’t mean that the picture painted by the book publishers is accurate. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of ifile.it who told us that they can barely cover the server costs with the revenue they make.
“The site only had premium accounts since November 2011. It was free since 2006 and still is free for those who want to use it for free,” the owner told us.
The legal team of the publishers estimated the revenue based on page impressions as well as estimated income from premium accounts, but this figure is laughable according to the ifile.it owner, which makes sense considering the site’s modest size.
The owner further said they always try cooperate with publishers and that the site is still fully operational for registered users.
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