The core of Scribd’s model is the lowest form of leeching (YC W07) | Hacker News Reader

The core of Scribd’s model is the lowest form of leeching (YC W07)

kungfugrippe.com

25 pointsblasdel24 comments

Reasonable point, but terrible article. Even setting aside the profanity, it's hardly readable.

Indeed. Anyone with a brain would have written that rant as a PDF before submitting it to HN.

I probably would have written that as a PDF, printed it out, scanned it, printed that out, faxed it to myself, then use my digital camera to take a picture of that and paste the 5MB photo into a Microsoft Word file.

But that's just me.

WritersWeekly has a more cogent discussion on Scribd's business model:

"Secondly, there are a number of publishing businesses - sleeping with the enemy"

"The absence of "editorial intervention and approval" in combination with a highly flawed sign-up process"

http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/005717_11182...

And even then, Scridb is still holding on to the document, meaning it is still stored in their database, which posts yet another legal problem because they store copyrighted documents without explicit authorization by the document's owner.

Copyright constrains your right to copy, not to store or to receive. Only through distribution can you infringe copyright.

For physical items, that's true, but to receive data, you make copies of it. Does your file upload process buffer an upload in RAM before writing it to disk? Two copies. That's why EULAs can even exist, because to install your software, you have to make a copy of it from the original medium to your hard disk, and to run it, you have to make a copy of it from your hard disk to RAM. scribd is almost definitely violating copyright by holding on to documents. Especially if they have backups, caches, and multiple servers, which are even more copies.

Incidental copying like that has never been tested in court, and neither have EULAs for that matter (I'd bet my ass they're invalid). Everything gets buffered somewhere, even in analog processes, even in physical processes. Stop making infringing copies of my work in your brain!

Even if it was deemed within the purview of copyright, it's squarely within the realm of fair use -- they aren't violating copyright any more than a corporate mailroom that scans and duplicates incoming correspondence. They took it in in good faith, they aren't publishing it outside their own organization, and they aren't making copies to get more 'use' out of it, so it doesn't matter.

Summary of arguments: Scrib is bad because they "steal" content like youtube. They don't actually respect copyright and make you register to get content.

I don't see how this argument works when you see the success of youtube and how popular it is. If content partners would talk with scribd and they do a content recognition system both parties could reach more users and profit.

The 'content partners' are most of the time people what write papers for scientific research and things like that and they haven't a clue that scribd hosts their stuff until they google for it (and plenty of them never will). If I remember correctly they also will happily re-host a pdf after you've asked to remove it (in spite of claims to the contrary).

What's really needed is a service that does this while respecting the original writers copyright.

Maybe a flash (yuck, I can't believe I wrote that) app that you can embed in a page that will render the pdf while fetching it from the source with a fall-back cache in case of overload.

At least like that the original writer has some ideas of how popular his/her writing is and where it is cited.

edit: YouTube got big because it hosted stuff that was not available elsewhere on the net in an easy to consume format. Since pdf readers are available for just about every platform there is not much of an excuse to do it this way, after all the content is already available.

If scribd worked on a 'we'll host your pdf if you upload it first' that would be one thing but instead they lift them from other places on the web, usually the authors site.

http://docs.google.com/viewer is exactly what you're asking for, except for the shitty flash part. Add &embedded=true to the URL for a chromeless version to use in an <iframe>

So why doesn't news.yc switch to that instead of using scribd? Seems like the way to go.

The only time I found a use for scribd is when some math paper got wiped by accident and I found a cached copy of it on scribd.

Because pg is constitutionally incapable of not pushing the products of YC companies, no matter how incompetent they are.

Witness the link to the useless webmynd firefox plugin in the footer, and his absolute refusal to link to the amazing http://searchyc.com

It seems strange to intentionally cripple your community in order to promote your investments.

It's a clear case of a conflict of interest.

And searchyc.com publicly launched before webmynd did!

My iPhone has a PDF viewer, but not a flash player.

Absolutely no value in that post. NONE. I went looking for insight and was met with half a page of mediocre rant.

I had some trouble parsing the text and the language used.

There has to be a better way to make that point.

I had to look up yoink: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yoink

Shit, ass, bullshit, and anus, I've heard before.

Non-native speaker here, I had a few more that didn't make sense to me and that did not seem to be in any way helpful to the discussion.

Pretty juvenile.

I'm a native English speaker, and I still didn't think it communicated well.

Examples?

Examples a plenty, if you post any pdf on news.yc you'll find that the right hand portion now links to scribd, which will do its best to mutilate the pdf after copying it to their own servers.

It's basically an in-browser pdf reader based on structural copyright violation.

Their Flash PDF reader also doesn't work at all on any of the Linux boxes I use. It actually got majorly worse when they made it less shitty on other platforms -- it doesn't accept mouse clicks at all!

They sent me an email and we had a long conversation with after I slagged on their reader here before, but the general conclusion was that they didn't view the Flash app as their core competency -- they're a community site, damnit!

I use the brilliant http://docs.google.com/viewer and I have no idea why the hell Scribd doesn't clone it.

Interesting. it does work for me (ff 3.5.6, flash 10)

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