A group of mainland writers has filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally distributing their books via applications available on its App Store and are demanding 6.5 million yuan (HK$7.90 million) in compensation for copyright violation.
The Writers' Rights Alliance, representing six authors, filed the case with the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People's Court at the end of last month, accusing Apple's App Store of profiting by allowing applications to go online with 23 books without permission from the copyright owners. The best-selling authors include novelist and popular blogger Han Han, Murong Xuecun, Kong Ergou, Xiaoqiao Laoshu and He Ma.
Alliance spokesman Bei Zhicheng was quoted by China National Radio's website as saying that Apple's App Store does not respect intellectual property rights.
'It doesn't stop those applications containing pirated books during the upload reviewing process and profits from 30 per cent of the turnover,' he said. 'Some best-selling books have been downloaded about one million times, which caused a loss of millions of yuan [for one author]. As there are dozens of mainstream authors, Apple has caused about one billion yuan of losses to authors, publishers and online and offline bookstores.'
Alliance employee Ding Yi was quoted as saying it was the first case involving a group of writers and it would file more lawsuits for more than 10 writers. 'If Apple is not sincere about tackling this issue, we will try to file more lawsuits,' Ding said.
The same group of authors successfully petitioned Baidu, China's largest internet search engine, to remove 2.8 million documents containing their material from Baidu Library in March. The alliance is representing 30 authors. One of them, Murong, accused Apple of 'stealing money from our pockets'.