Scott vs. Scribd, Inc
docs.justia.com
docs.justia.com
But this lawsuit seems bogus to me. When my book was up on Scribd they quickly removed it once the publisher complained and it's now gone.
It annoys me greatly when I see people can read my book for free somewhere because I don't get paid. But I ask myself exactly how many of those people would actually have bought the book or the PDF in the first place. I'm guessing that I really don't lose much money from this sort of infringement.
I'm very happy that there are ways to limit it, but the genie is out of the bottle for digital content and the answer is not suing Scribd.
In the lawsuit the plaintiff complains about this process and goes on to claim that Scribd keeping a copy of her book so that they can automatically detect future infringing uploads is itself copyright infringement.
I'm very happy that Scribd has a copy of my book somewhere in their system to automatically detect people uploading it when they shouldn't. The last thing I'd want is for them to remove it and then not know how to stop people uploading it again.
In fact, I'd be willing to sign a copyright assignment form allowing them to hold the text for this specific purpose.
There's something to be said for not having to chase after people to keep them from ripping you off, though.
> I'm very happy that there are ways to limit it, but the genie is out of the bottle for digital content and the answer is not suing Scribd.
I agree with that. Which makes it something of a vexing question.
Agreed. But The Geek Atlas was ripped off within hours of it becoming available as a PDF and it appeared in a variety of seedy places on the net which would have been near impossible to actually shutdown.
The only real solution is to target the major providers because they'll be the major conduit for bad copies. That's why it was important to go after Scribd quickly.
What can be done is have publishers work with people like Scribd to preemptively upload ways of identifying copyrighted works so that individual authors don't have to police the Internet.
I agree with that. Which makes it something of a vexing question.
I'm not sure it's even a question. People are going to rip off my book and I cannot prevent all infringement. I have to do two things:
1. Concentrate on other streams of revenue around the book (this is vital anyway since I'm not going to make a fortune with it even if there was no infringement at all).
2. Make sure that major infringements are dealt with quickly.
Of course, I hope you'll go out and buy it, or the e-version, or read it on Safari, but there will be some people who decide to download it from some bad site. Now, I wonder what percentage of those people actually read it.
BTW, I'd be happier to buy a copy myself if there were more sites in Italy. Between da Vinci, Galileo and so on and so forth (and don't forget the Greeks in Sicily or the Romans) there are quite a few interesting places to visit!
Do you object to public libraries?
But even without that I don't have an objection to libraries because they do not copy my book, they simply lend it.
If that is the case, then the "genie" has been out of the bottle to do a variety of criminal activities for the duration of this last recorded leg of human civilization.
Isn't the whole point of having an enforced civil order to whack the hand that reaches for the bottle?
The plaintiff's points were quite clear and reasonable.
"In fact, I'd be willing to sign a copyright assignment form allowing them to hold the text for this specific purpose."
Sounds like 'the olive oil' business model.
http://www.superchefblog.com/images/marlonbrando_godfather.p...
What I meant was that since digital content is trivially copyable and since DRM is circumventable we have to learn to live in a world where anything that can be digital is likely to be copied.
Sounds like 'the olive oil' business model.
I'll have to ask you to explain that since I have not seen The Godfather.
The fact that the content is in "digital" even makes checking for notices of copyrights that much more trivial. We're all geeks here, so lets be honest:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15490856/Java-Pocket-Guide-by-ORei...
"Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Liguori and Patricia Liguori. All rights reserved."
If you are taking a digital format and converting it to the scribd format, how trivial is it for you to write a function that greps for the "Copyright" and "all rights reserved" phrases in the text?
The Olive Oil business: (A protection racket. Organized crime. etc.)
I hope she gets her pound of flesh.
Basically, I think she's going to have a really hard time proving any harm. She says her book was downloaded 100 times. Now prove that that equals 100 lost sales, or X lost sales for any value of X.
My assumption is that if my book was downloaded from Scribd 100 times that I've lost way less than 100 sales (if any) which at royalty rates on a book means I might have lost a couple of dollars. For that reason I wouldn't sue Scribd.
In other words, Scribd's document-hosting is sort of a honeypot, designed to attract both legit and infringing uploads, as well as complaints from publishers regarding infringing uploads. Collecting all of this, they have both a document hosting site and a database of stuff publishers have claimed as copyrighted.
You couldn't very well call up every publisher and say "hey, send me a PDF of everything you have a copyright on so I can start a business doing automatic copyright-checking." But if you have a popular document hosting site, you can rely on the publishers to incrementally develop that database for you. And your business goals line up very well with your DMCA legal requirements.
This would be a very clever hack. I doubt Scribd chose to pursue it intentionally, but either way, an "Is this blob of text copyrighted by someone else?" API would be a very valuable service.
- Scribd is a publisher, not a service provider, and therefore should not be granted the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.
- Scribd knows that they publish copyrighted material.
- Scribd profits from publishing the copyright material.
- When a content creator requests that content be removed, Scribd retains a copy of that material for use in later identifying copyrighted material, without the permission of the content creator.
- Additionally, Scribd allows authors to upload their works to the copyright protection system in order to be recognized when uploaded by a user, but Scribd requires the content creator waive their right to sue Scribd before they may do so.
- Case law originating on the west coast is popularly interpreted as granting companies like Scribd safe harbor provisions.
The book that resulted in the case, "Stocks and Bonds, Profits and Losses", is a children's book written in 1984 (published 1985) which is now out of print.
Are you saying that before the DMCA, Scribd's standard operating practice would have been more illegal or more legal?
Every legal opinion I've ever read thinks scribd, youtube, etc can only exist due to this law.
Basically it's an infringement case, stating that removing stuff when asked isn't good enough.