Yeah, SFWA screwed up by being far too casual in making its list and invoking the DMCA.
So a few documents were taken down that shouldn't have been.
But where's the outrage at Scribd for having published
thousands of pirated books to begin with?
Scribd's been around nine or ten months now, and until last week, it pretended it didn't have to care that its users were uploading vast quantities of copyrighted documents without permission from their owners.
For example, Scribd user mondobeyondo uploaded a thousand or more copyrighted documents all by himself. Many of these were individually brought to Scribd's attention, but until they got the first DMCA notice, they just left them all in place.
Oh, you may say Scribd has no obligation to do anything until it gets DMCA notices. Not true. The DMCA requires that service providers such as Scribd take appropriate actions whenever they become aware of pirated content.
See my blog (here) for more details.
After I posted that blog entry, and people such as Jerry Pournelle provided other specific references to obvious pirate activity on Scribd, Scribd responded by doing what it should have done months ago-- it enforced its terms of service and took down the content.
Everything uploaded by user mondobeyondo, for example, was taken offline. This included some perfectly legal material-- but Scribd had no choice. They knew that half or more of what the guy uploaded was illegal. They couldn't legally leave it there or lose their DMCA Safe Harbor protections. It wasn't practical for Scribd to verify the copyright status of every individual upload. So it all had to come down.
Scribd was just enforcing its terms of service, which says that users who repeatedly upload copyrighted material without permission will be terminated. It could have done this months ago-- most of mondobeyondo's documents dated back to May or June-- but hey, better late than never.
Now, do you suppose Cory Doctorow is going to get all huffy about how Scribd is evil? I doubt it. Doctorow doesn't believe in the concept of copyright at all, although he's willing to use it when it suits his political purposes.
I suspect Scribd is going to be a lot more careful in the future. Scribd is getting legal counsel from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is probably giving them pretty good advice about its duties under the DMCA and other laws. That's all anyone expects-- that Scribd should obey the law, which includes respecting intellectual property.
You people who've been flinging mud at SFWA should be ashamed of yourselves. There's no question SFWA screwed up, but their offense was pretty trivial compared with the rampant lawlessness at Scribd that SFWA was trying to deal with.
Where do you think all these books you like come from? The cobbler's elves, working at night while you sleep? Books come from authors, the vast majority of whom are writing because they need the money. Take away this opportunity for writers to make money and they will
stop writing. Supply and demand isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Get used to it.
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