Shopify was sued last year by a number of educational publishers who accused them of ignoring repeat notices that its users sell pirated digital versions of their textbooks and eBooks. The lawsuit said Shopify’s “blind eye” to piracy allows for copyright and trademark infringement on a “massive scale.”  The publishers asked the court for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed copyright and $2 million for each counterfeited trademark, and listed more than 3,400 copyrights that were allegedly violated.

Shopify claimed that the publishers sued them directly because they could not convince the US government to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects internet hosts like Shopify from court claims if they take reasonable measures to address user infringement.

It looks like Shopify did not want to fight things in court and decided to settle with Macmillan Learning, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education and asked the court to dismiss the case with prejudice, which means it cannot be refiled at a later date. The publishers and a spokesperson for Shopify both said the case had been resolved “amicably” and that the terms of the settlement were confidential.

The post Shopify settles with publishers for textbook and ebook piracy lawsuit first appeared on Good e-Reader.