Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
Is Scribd too cribbed? | 180307
Scribd has been described as 'Youtube for documents'. Users upload text documents to the site in pretty much any format - then visitors can view them in a nifty embedded flash viewer on the webpage. The intention is that it opens up all of those documents you have lurking on your hard drive to a global audience of potentially interested readers. Even better if someone wants a printed, bound hard copy of content by using a tie up with Print(fu) - with Scribd and the uploader taking a cut of the revenue generated.
So far, so neat. But what happens if someone disobeys the rules, and uploads content that they don't own the copyright to? Well, for the item to be removed Scribd require "A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
To put it bluntly, Scribd will allow for uploaders to potentially make money from copyrighted material that they have no rights over unless the copyright owner takes the time and trouble to continually check the site for infringement. We're no IP experts, but we think it safe to say that our tame IP lawyer would have kittens if we tried something like this - the $300k Scribd got in seed funding won't last too long if (when) someone takes issue with this. If publishers are up in arms about Google enabling segments of texts to be read online they are going to totally lose it with Scribd.
We imagine that the rationale behind this approach is that it is too hard to actively police the uploaded materials - and that a wiki-type group monitoring approach is open to abuse. This might make practical sense, but it won't stand up in a court of law. Surely using the precautionary principle and allowing the flagging of dubious material would make better sense? Thoughtplay finds it hard to believe that Tom Morrow owns the copyright to both Asterix and Dilbert - or that it really should take a letter from the trustees of the estate of Bertrand Russell to get Mega Therion to take down A History of Western Philosophy.
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