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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I get outraged over deliberate piracy. I don't get outraged when a site hosts material it doesn't know was pirated.
Was Scribd aware that a lot of material it hosted was pirated, and did nothing about it because the material made the site more attractive?
If so, I'm outraged. But I don't know that's the case, and neither do you.
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Yes, I do, because I've seen some of the traffic that flowed from SFWA to Scribd, and I sent some good pointers myself-- and published them on my blog. Scribd seems to have progressed to the point of accepting that certain users are pirates and wiping out their entire collections of uploads, but it's still turning a blind eye toward individual acts of book piracy.
Go to Scribd today and search for "science fiction" or "tolkien" and you'll see what I mean. The pirated books from these searches have been brought to Scribd's attention, yet they still remain.
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I concur. But riddle me this: Scribd should not host material that violates copyright. How does Scribd tell?
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To me, it's more important to note that Scribd allows bulk uploading from unregistered users, does not require even an email address for registration, and does not always respond to clear evidence of large-scale piracy.
I'm glad they're cleaning up their act-- at the moment it looks like there are merely hundreds of pirated documents out of the tens or hundreds of thousands on their site, whereas there were thousands or tens of thousands before-- but they're still running the kind of site that facilitates copyright infringement. When they fix that, I'll be satisfied, even if individual violations get through. I agree, no site can really stop that.
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No one disputes SFWA's right to ask that infringing copy be taken down. What is being complained about is the remarkably stupid manner in which they did so. Their method of generating the list they used in their DMCA order was apparently to search for anything that contained the words "asimov" or "silverberg". The majority of content affected was not infringing.
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This is entirely wrong. Doctorow himself posted the list that was retroactively turned into a poorly-considered DMCA notice. Andrew Burt told me, and the SFWA board, that he DID attempt to review all of those documents individually, and in fact there were many more documents on the original version of the list; what went to Scribd was (he says) pared down substantially. He admits he made several mistakes and should have been more careful. You may reasonably assume he WILL be more careful, if and when he resumes sending such notices.
There are at least four, possibly as many as ten non-infringing works on that list. There are about FOUR HUNDRED infringing works on the list. All of those are gone now, and as far as I know, all the legitimate documents are back online.
Generally I think we're in agreement here, but there are a lot of facts about the situation that just haven't gotten wide-enough distribution.
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