On August 17, 2017, four higher education publishers, Cengage, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson Education, initiated five lawsuits against 40 alleged sellers of counterfeit textbooks, including two identified sellers: Yaroslav Stolyarchuk and Zichao Wang.

The case against Stolyarchuk was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California alleging the sale of counterfeit textbooks through seven identified online storefronts, including the defendant-operated website, www.booksliquidation.com.

The case against Wang was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York alleging sales to individual and commercial wholesale customers. The claim also alleges the likely sale of counterfeit textbooks “using at least one anonymous online seller account”.

The larger campaign to fight counterfeiting of textbooks, launched by the Educational Publishers Enforcement Group (EPEG), included additional actions aimed at over 300 identified sellers.

TAA continues its support and endorsement of these efforts to combat counterfeiting. For full details of TAA’s commitment to these efforts, read the TAA Council Resolution on Textbook Counterfeiting passed unanimously on June 27, 2017.

To learn more about the publishers’ effort to fight counterfeit textbooks, visit http://stopcounterfeitbooks.com.