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Apple still selling pirated ebooks in Japan?

There’s a story going around today about an open letter to Apple  from 4 Japanese publishing industry trade groups.  According to the complaint (translated by Google), they are upset by the quantity of pirated material in the Japanese iBookstore as well as the difficulty in getting Apple to remove the pirated content.

I almost missed this story. When I first came across it in the WSJ, I thought it was just a rehash of the iBookstore piracy story from a few weeks ago. I didn’t understand why everyone was reporting on it; it was old news. I was wrong. It’s a month later and we have 4 publishing trade groups that are so annoyed with Apple that they released an open letter. Yikes. How bad must the piracy problem in the iBookstore be that they did this in public?

Is apple trying to let the iBookstore die by benign neglect? I thought they usually functioned better than this.

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Comments


fjtorres December 14, 2010 um 7:12 pm

Why the surprise?
Apple values their IP…
…and nobody else’s…
Just ask Cisco and the Beatles among hundreds of others.


igorsk December 14, 2010 um 9:10 pm

I think their main complaint is about some programs that offer reading manga for free (usually from a scanlation aggregate site). E.g. check Manga Rock – they openly advertise "free manga" in the app description. I am really surprised Apple lets such apps in the store.


Pirated app shows up in the Mac Store and Apple doesn’t care | The Digital Reader February 3, 2011 um 10:41 am

[…] aside the Apple bashing, this is not the first time we’ve heard of Apple selling pirated content. I’m surprised that Apple have continued to fix the problem. They clearly have a flaw in […]


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