Strategic partnership provides Cognella titles with robust protection against piracy and phishing scams

San Diego, CA – May 18, 2020 – Cognella today announced a new partnership with Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) for Piracy Intelligence, a leading solution for combating the piracy of ebooks and digital documents. Under this new partnership, Cognella titles enjoy robust protection against piracy and phishing scams, ensuring learning materials are safe, secure, and legally distributed.

“Throughout 2019, the publishing industry saw an increase in both ebook piracy and sophisticated phishing scams,” said Cognella CEO Bassim Hamadeh. “In 2020, we’re facing greater challenges as a result of COVID-19. With everyone moving online and e-commerce rising, we’re seeing yet another increase in piracy and phishing schemes. We couldn’t be more pleased to have Digimarc on our side, working collaboratively with Cognella to ensure our titles are protected and students who purchase their materials online can do so safely and confidently.”

Cognella has been vetting and beta-testing potential piracy partners since early 2019 and formalized an agreement with Digimarc in 2020.

Digimarc conducts high-impact automatic searches on major search engines and targeted manual searches on websites to detect the illegal availability of any Cognella title. When suspicious links and unauthorized content are found on specific webpages, Digimarc sends a takedown notice to the site owner, demanding removal of the content immediately. The company also works with major search engines to remove infringing links from search engine result pages, reducing the discoverability of illegal content. If site owners don’t comply with takedown requests, Digimarc escalates takedowns to hosting service providers and content-distribution networks.

“As the ebook piracy ecosystem continues to evolve, our service evolves along with it,” said Digimarc Director of Customer Management Devon Weston. “By staying ahead of the pirates, we can anticipate and respond more quickly to threats to our customers’ business. We look to our customers for insight into their priorities in shaping our work, and we’re thrilled to be working with an innovator in the educational publishing space like Cognella in order to address this issue with them head on.”

To learn more about Digimarc, visit: http://cognella.com/partnerships

About Cognella®
Cognella® is redefining academic publishing by creating teacher-driven, student-centric higher education course materials in print and digital formats under three imprints: Cognella® Academic Publishing, Cognella® Custom, and Cognella® Active Learning. Cognella also publishes engaging nonfiction titles featuring modern perspectives as Cognella® Press. Learn more at www.cognella.com. 

About Digimarc Piracy Intelligence
Digimarc Piracy Intelligence is a leading solution for combating piracy of ebooks and digital documents by delivering deep insight into where, when, and how theft occurs. Partners receive instant access to a reporting portal that features relevant information about websites that illegally profit from pirated works as well as reports that are easy to customize and share. Comprehensive enforcement services reinforce partners’ rights and dramatically reduces the visibility of pirated content. Learn more at https://www.digimarc.com/products/digimarc-services/piracy-intelligence.

For media inquiries please contact:
Natalie Piccotti
Director of Marketing, Cognella, Inc.
858-552-1120 x532