A group of five educational publishers sued Shopify Inc., claiming the e-commerce company is liable for the unauthorized school textbooks, test packs and solutions manuals sold by websites using Shopify’s online tools.

The group, which includes Pearson Education Inc. and McGraw Hill LLC, filed for copyright and trademark infringement in Virginia federal court on Wednesday.

“Shopify...

A group of five educational publishers sued Shopify Inc., claiming the e-commerce company is liable for the unauthorized school textbooks, test packs and solutions manuals sold by websites using Shopify’s online tools.

The group, which includes Pearson Education Inc. and McGraw Hill LLC, filed for copyright and trademark infringement in Virginia federal court on Wednesday.

“Shopify plays host, enabler and protector to a world of digital textbook pirates,” the publishers said in their suit. They claim statutory damages for copyright and trademark infringement that could be as high as $550 million.

Shopify declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit, but said it takes actions against web stores that violate its policies. The company sells subscription services that enable people to put up websites, accept online payments, and ship and track orders to customers.

The group of publishers, which also includes Macmillan Learning, Cengage Learning Inc., and Elsevier Inc., says the company is a key intermediary in the sales process and should be responsible for policing retailers who sell their textbooks and testing tools without authorization.

Though Shopify is based in Canada, the group is suing the company in Virginia because the company has servers located in Ashburn, Va.

The publishers said in their suit that they have been asking Shopify since 2017 to take down the sites selling the unauthorized items, but the e-commerce company has continued to sell services to copyright infringers and has refused to identify the owners of alleged pirate websites.

Shopify has an acceptable-use policy that prohibits retailers from selling goods or services, or posting materials, if they don’t have rights to do so, said a spokeswoman.

“We have multiple teams that handle potential acceptable-use policy violations, including copyright and trademark infringement, and we don’t hesitate to action stores when found in violation. To date in 2021, over 90% of copyright and trademark reports were reviewed within one business day,” said the spokeswoman.

Shopify has punished users in the past for breaching its policies. In January, the company shut down online stores run by the Trump Organization and former President Donald Trump’s election campaign, for promoting or supporting organizations of people that promote violence, a stance that violated the company’s policy, Shopify said at the time.

The suit is the latest example of people seeking to hold Internet platforms and broadband providers liable for the actions of their users. In January, two teenagers sued Twitter for refusing to take down pornographic clips that featured them. That case is now pending before the United States Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit.

In 2019, a jury in Virginia found Cox Communications liable for $1 billion in damages for not disconnecting subscribers who were pirating music from major record companies. The verdict has since been upheld in federal court.

Write to Vipal Monga at vipal.monga@wsj.com