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Comment by zandorg | Hacker News Reader

Irony 2.0...

Ken Follett (one of the complainants in the article) wrote a novella for the games Starglider and Starglider 2 in 1986. I asked him permission (in 2003) to put these novellas on my gaming novella site (a collection of gaming-related literature).

He said, sorry, I am re-publishing the Starglider 1/2 novellas in a compilation. So I left his novellas out.

Every novella on the website is there with permission.

Another person who said No was RPG legend (USA, not UK) Steve Jackson (for the Stonekeep book).

So if I can keep honest, how come Scribbers can't?

Note: I left out the URL for the novella site, because it has my full name in the URL.

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The difference is that you are choosing the documents to put on your site. Scribd does not choose the documents to put on their site, users upload them.

So if you ended up with pirated material on your site, you would be completely responsible. But that is not the case with Scribd. Anyone can submit material to Scribd, so people submit pirated material.

I believe that Scribd would qualify as a safe harbor under the DMCA. So all they really need to do is respond to requests to take down pirated material. Veoh was once sued for infringing copyright. The judge ended granting a summary judgement in favor of the defendant on the basis that Veoh was just providing user-submitted content and that Veoh did not even supervise the files that were uploaded. I am reading that as saying that if Veoh actively checked user uploads for pirated material, they might might have lost the court case or at least had their motion for summary judgement dismissed.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac....

That said, Scribd does have a problem with piracy.. One of my first introductions to Scribd was when I was searching for excepts from a book and found the full book on Scribd.

Scribd promised to be pro-active when attacked by the SFWA, which I thought at the time was exactly the wrong tack, for precisely this reason: once you've set up to monitor the system, you can't use safe harbor as a defense any more.

People take far too much comfort in the idea of safe harbor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...

It's not a blank check to create a site full of blatant infringement. You have to be very naive to think Scribd really does everything they could to prevent copyrighted content from being uploaded. The kindest assumption would be that they're incompetent, but that's probably not the case. They're just twiddling their thumbs about it because it's the main driver of traffic. Hopefully they've retained some good lawyers.

There's no irony at all.

You're respecting someone else's rights. You're doing the right thing.

The anonymous scribbers are not doing the right thing. Don't change who you are just b/c of them.

The irony was that I'd crossed swords with Ken Follet over the right thing, and now he's crossing swords with Scribd for the wrong thing!

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