[Jim Chapman]

We at Turnipsoft just received a nasty letter from LitRes.ru, demanding that we modify our Freda ebook reader app, to remove links to a competitor site, flibusta. Scanning the forums (here and elsewhere) I see they have past form at this - having pulled a similar nasty trick on Moon+ a few weeks back.

Their claim (whose merits I will be discussing with my legal advisors) is that flibusta provides illegal access to content that LitRes has rights over, and by making it possible for Freda users to use flibusta, Turnipsoft is somehow 'participating in illegal use of copyrighted content'.

I note that LitRes have their own app for Windows Phone - though it is not well rated (some reviewers complaining about poor functionality, and others down-rating them because of their habit of using spurious DMCA take-down notices to make life difficult for their competitors).

I'd be interested to hear the forum's views on all this. But I would make the point that the existing 'DMCA take-down notice' mechanism does create a very un-level playing field. Just by asserting that they have grounds for complaint, LitRes can cause Google (and quite possibly Microsoft) to remove apps from the app stores - and even if their claim is quite without merit, the damage is still done.