FIR against Directors of Flipkart, 6 book sellers

On Mar 25, 2021

Oswaal Books, a national publisher of educational books for CBSE and ICSE boards, has registered a First Information Report (FIR) against Flipkart and six book sellers for selling pirated books.

“We have got an FIR registered in Agra against six book sellers of Patna for committing fraud, and violating copyright and trademark laws and directors of Flipkart for not following procedure with due diligence and providing their online selling platform for the sellers and gaining unlawful profits from the sales of these pirated books,” said Oswaal Books in a statement on Monday.

Oswaal Books, which has been publishing books for 35 years now, said that for a few months they were getting complaints from students about the print quality of books that were bought from Flipkart.

“To check this, one of our employees — Bhagat Singh – ordered ‘SQP’ Class 10 Mathematics book from around 33 sellers on Flipkart. When the said books were received, we were stunned to see that six of the sellers from Patna were selling pirated copies on the platform,” said Oswaal Books in the statement.

“These books were exact replicas of original books but contained certain errors which they made while copying the content. These were fonts of Oswaal Books logo. They had printed ‘Follw’ instead of ‘Follow’ on the back cover. That’s how we could find out about the pirated books. This is harmful to students as the printing is blurred and paper is of bad quality. They are selling it at the same price as the original and making unethical money at the cost of children’s future,” the statement added.

“These book sellers not only are cheating children but also the government by not paying taxes and violating the Copyrights Act and Trademark Laws. Also, Flipkart has an obligation to check for the legitimacy of the seller, which Flipkart failed to do by giving permission to these sellers to use their shopping platform. As more sellers will lead to more transactions which will help Flipkart earn more, so they also didn’t care about it,” said Oswaal Books in the statement.