Fresh from losing a battle against the music industry causing Jammie Thomas-Rasset to be liable for paying $1.9 million in copyright infringement, lawyers Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara has decided to sue Scribd. Scribd has “built a technology that’s broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale and in the process have also built one of the largest readerships in the world,” according to the two attorneys. “The company shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors.”
It is interesting to note that in Camara and Sibley’s last trial, they were defending a client from copyright infringement and now they are pursuing after a company that violates copyright. Camara and Sibley were interviewed back in July about whether they would ever defend copyright and they said yes assuming that they believe in the issue. The lawsuit was filed by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Plaintiff Elaine Scott said that she found an unauthorized copy of her book “Stocks and Bonds: Profits and Losses, A Quick Look at Financial Markets” on the website. Scribd prides themselves as being the “YouTube for documents.”
Scribd said that they remove content when required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Scribd has built an automated filtering system that prevents unauthorized materials from being published too. “The West Coast technology industry has produced a number of start-up firms premised on the notion that commercial copyright infringement is not illegal, unless and until the injured party discovers and complains of the infringing activity, and (the) infringer fails to respond to such complaints,” states the complaint written by the lawyers.
Scribd, also known as the “YouTube of documents” that spun out of Y-Combinator is developing an e-commerce platform. Scribd is doing this out of response to the irritation that some publishers have in discovering that their books have leaked in e-book format on Scribd.
Anyone can upload a PDF of Word document with almost no limits to Scribd. You could have a 500 page book in Word document form and Scribd would still accept it as an upload. Given the popularity of the Kindle and seeing that people are willing to pay for e-books, the e-commerce model makes sense to the company.
In this case the publishers will determine what prices they want to set for their e-books and let them keep 80% of what is earned. The prices would even range from $1 for a simple novel to $5,000 for an in-depth market research report according to paidContent.
Scribd would introduce a store and will maintain a copyright database of protected works to ensure that no further leaks or pirated works hit the service.
The primary difference between the Kindle and Scribd’s new model is the novelty. The Kindle is the epitome of physical books becoming obsolete. Download a full PDF on your computer does not seem to have as much appeal as the Kindle. But that is just my opinion. What is yours? Leave a comment.
Scribd is a document sharing website that has about 50 million monthly users and has about 50,000 documents uploaded daily. The company was rolled out of Y-Combinator and eventually raised funding from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and The Kinsley Hills Group. It was recently announced that Scribd signed an agreement with major publishing companies to host free e-books.
Through Scribd, users can upload PDFs, DOCs, and other text files. Scribd then presents the document in a web Flash format.
Scribd signed agreements with Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Workman Publishing Co. The terms of the agreement was undisclosed. Scribd will provide a variety of book material at no cost. This includes excerpts from books and even full books. Full novels without much of an audience will be the ones made free.
