Who do you think Scribd are? A government agency? They're a private-sector business. If they don't want to host your document for a good reason, a bad reason, a reason you don't agree with, a mistaken reason, a false reason, or no reason at all, then that's their decision (except for protected categories for the purpose of discrimination, which do not apply here.)

They’re not stopping you copying anything - they just don’t want to host documents they’re not sure of the status of in their automated system.

Host your own documents if you don't think they’re right.

These companies aren't violating the law, at best they are violating their own policies in regards to the content they host.

isn't the problem here that there is a punishment for not removing copyrighted material. so, anytime some bot says that there is X% chance that this is copyrighted, it's safer to just remove the material.

And these are private companies, not public institutions, they are not letting you upload stuff because of some common good, they do it because it's their business model, why should they let you upload something that has a 0.1% chance of being copyrighted by someone that could then demand money from them.

Curious to see Scribd mentioned. Last time I used anything on Scribd was a decade ago to embed some PDFs that should have been web pages really.

Then they made it all paywalled so that was that.

I think their business has 'mySpaced' and fundamentally does not go with how people consume content. Nobody wants a PDF these days.

So why are they mentioned now?

Well, the report is wrong!!! It is a scanned document. So it is not digital. They could have written it with HTML5 but they are stuck in the past, twenty years out of date. PDF was okay back then but not now. Scanned images in a PDF are not accessible. You can't search it.

People who like PDF because they used it for legal documents back in the day have their arguments about why to use PDF. But if this report came from a single URL and was a tenth the size in HTML then nobody would have problems determining if the page was genuine or a fake - it would be in the URL.

Nobody would need to disperse copies of it over the internets. Just the one URL would do.

Really I think that this Mueller chap and the whole freaking government needs to be sacked and prosecuted for not making their work accessible. It is important to democracy.

You'd have to show a harm.

It's about as bad as the mailman losing your letter. So what? If it was important, you would have insured/certified it.