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I'm not particularly hitting Scribd. I can think of at least one other site that allows text file sharing that is rife with pirated copies of books. (No, I won't name it here.) But I've been reading news reports that Google/YouTube are looking at having to match uploaded content against an "audio fingerprint," which I think will be quite tricky -- whereas the text matching problem has been solved, and the content that needs to be matched is easily available in (or could easily be added to) Google Books. If I were a published author concerned with piracy (I don't think anyone is ripping my book on Chinese learning games, and if they are, heck, I don't make much money on it anyway), I'd buy the "Copysentry" service from Copyscape.com, make sure that Google had a full copy of my text, with my copyright registration, and proceed from there. I'd also be leaning on all file upload sites to require something like a Copyscape check before accepting a text upload. If the copyscape comes back positive, require registration with a verifiable address and an affirmation of right to post, or something.
And Cory Doctorow could then contact Copyscape and explain to them how he wants his works treated in terms of infringement. I think they'd be willing to have a category of content tagged as "known shareable" -- they could still flag the match, so no one else (e.g. a writing teacher receiving an assignment from a student) would mistake the work for someone else's, but no legal alarms would be set off.
It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a heck of a lot more than we have now. And not that hard to implement with the infrastructure and technology already available.
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