Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; Is The Contract Cast Members Sign To Be On Survivor Covered By Copyright? CBS Thinks So...:
"Eric Goldman points us to the news that CBS sent a DMCA takedown to Scribd after the reality TV site RealityBlurred.com uploaded a copy of the contract castmembers sign before being able to go on the show Survivor, as well as a copy of the "rulebook" they receive. CBS apparently claimed that both of these were covered by copyright. Thankfully, RealityBlurred filed a counternotice, claiming fair use due to its use for reporting and commentary -- leading to a scary two week period where CBS would have to sue if it wanted to keep the document offline. However, the two weeks passed and CBS did not respond to notification from Scribd, meaning that the Survivor Contract and the Survivor Rulebook are back online."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100901/15345210865.shtml
Showing posts with label Scribd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scribd. Show all posts
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Who's afraid of digital book piracy?; (London) Guardian, 2/18/10
Alastair Harper, (London) Guardian; Who's afraid of digital book piracy?:
With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?:
"For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths – which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.
The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.
A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series – a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.
More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use – it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.
The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files – a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".
Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.
The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming – like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.
But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.
But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.
More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/18/digital-book-piracy-copyright
With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?:
"For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths – which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.
The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.
A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series – a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.
More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use – it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.
The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files – a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".
Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.
The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming – like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.
But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.
But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.
More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/18/digital-book-piracy-copyright
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Authors throw the book at pirates; Sydney Morning Herald, 6/8/09
Sydney Morning Herald; Authors throw the book at pirates:
"FEEL like reading Australian author Colleen McCullough's Thorn Birds, but don't want to pay for a copy?
Then just hop onto a site like Wattpad.com and the book is available free as an electronic download. While this might be a bonus for readers, it is a disaster for authors, who get no royalties from the downloads.
Like the music industry, which has fought and partly won the battle over free music downloads from sites like Kazaa and Limewire, the publishing industry is about to face a similar struggle with piracy as electronic books become a reality.
The copies of McCullough's works were the most flagrant breaches of copyright the Herald found on sites set up to allow file sharing. But other Australian authors' work are also available.
David Malouf's 1985 work Five Stories from the Antipodes is available in Russian from Scribd. And for a month, John Birmingham's science fiction work Weapons of Choice, the first in the Axis of Time trilogy, was available from the Suvudu Free Library.
Birmingham's agent in the US, Russell Galen, at Scovil Chickak Galen, said he believed the free download had been authorised by the publisher as a marketing tool for his new novel Without Warning, recently released in hard cover.
But for many authors, the morphing of these sites from file sharing sites into fully digital bookshops/libraries is just one more issue they must confront in the rapidly evolving world of digital books...
Amazon's approach to the e-book market is very much "a walled garden" similar to the early days of the Apple iTunes store. Amazon controls books available for purchase from its electronic bookstore. It only publishes books for which publishers give permission, it sets the price and they can only be downloaded to a Kindle or on an iPhone using Kindle software.
Google has announced it would begin selling electronic versions of new books online later this year, in a direct challenge to Amazon.
Google sent shockwaves through the industry in 2005 when it announced plans to scan millions of books through its Google Book search service. This allows people to browse and search millions of texts in libraries around the world.
Google has limited full downloads to books out of copyright, and only snippets are available from copyrighted books, but it has led to a brawl over who has the right to digitise a book: the author? The traditional publisher? Or anyone?
After all, books are available in libraries. Why not in a digital library? On the other hand shouldn't the author have control over digital publication of his or her work, because once it is on the internet it can be copied at the click of a mouse? Last October Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers who filed a class action alleging copyright infringement over the Google Book project, in effect acknowledging that authors had copyright.
Under the settlement Google agreed to establish an independent "Book Rights Registry" which will provide revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books. Publishers and authors are now in the process of opting in or out of the Google settlement.
The executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, Jeremy Fisher, said the Google settlement was an important acknowledgement that authors owned the copyright. But there is still seething resentment about the way Google has gone about digitising copyright material without permission.
Ms Capel, McCullough's agent, said she had not yet opted in on behalf of her clients because it is a bit like "paying a burglar to get your stuff back"...
The Australian Society of Authors provides advice for writers on how to seek redress if their works are digitised without authorisation. In the US there are take-down laws that can be activated and similarly in Australia, Mr Fisher said.
"Other countries though are more problematic. We have had success in having unauthorised works taken down, but it takes time."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/books/authors-throw-the-book-at-pirates/2009/06/07/1244313033953.html
"FEEL like reading Australian author Colleen McCullough's Thorn Birds, but don't want to pay for a copy?
Then just hop onto a site like Wattpad.com and the book is available free as an electronic download. While this might be a bonus for readers, it is a disaster for authors, who get no royalties from the downloads.
Like the music industry, which has fought and partly won the battle over free music downloads from sites like Kazaa and Limewire, the publishing industry is about to face a similar struggle with piracy as electronic books become a reality.
The copies of McCullough's works were the most flagrant breaches of copyright the Herald found on sites set up to allow file sharing. But other Australian authors' work are also available.
David Malouf's 1985 work Five Stories from the Antipodes is available in Russian from Scribd. And for a month, John Birmingham's science fiction work Weapons of Choice, the first in the Axis of Time trilogy, was available from the Suvudu Free Library.
Birmingham's agent in the US, Russell Galen, at Scovil Chickak Galen, said he believed the free download had been authorised by the publisher as a marketing tool for his new novel Without Warning, recently released in hard cover.
But for many authors, the morphing of these sites from file sharing sites into fully digital bookshops/libraries is just one more issue they must confront in the rapidly evolving world of digital books...
Amazon's approach to the e-book market is very much "a walled garden" similar to the early days of the Apple iTunes store. Amazon controls books available for purchase from its electronic bookstore. It only publishes books for which publishers give permission, it sets the price and they can only be downloaded to a Kindle or on an iPhone using Kindle software.
Google has announced it would begin selling electronic versions of new books online later this year, in a direct challenge to Amazon.
Google sent shockwaves through the industry in 2005 when it announced plans to scan millions of books through its Google Book search service. This allows people to browse and search millions of texts in libraries around the world.
Google has limited full downloads to books out of copyright, and only snippets are available from copyrighted books, but it has led to a brawl over who has the right to digitise a book: the author? The traditional publisher? Or anyone?
After all, books are available in libraries. Why not in a digital library? On the other hand shouldn't the author have control over digital publication of his or her work, because once it is on the internet it can be copied at the click of a mouse? Last October Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers who filed a class action alleging copyright infringement over the Google Book project, in effect acknowledging that authors had copyright.
Under the settlement Google agreed to establish an independent "Book Rights Registry" which will provide revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books. Publishers and authors are now in the process of opting in or out of the Google settlement.
The executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, Jeremy Fisher, said the Google settlement was an important acknowledgement that authors owned the copyright. But there is still seething resentment about the way Google has gone about digitising copyright material without permission.
Ms Capel, McCullough's agent, said she had not yet opted in on behalf of her clients because it is a bit like "paying a burglar to get your stuff back"...
The Australian Society of Authors provides advice for writers on how to seek redress if their works are digitised without authorisation. In the US there are take-down laws that can be activated and similarly in Australia, Mr Fisher said.
"Other countries though are more problematic. We have had success in having unauthorised works taken down, but it takes time."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/books/authors-throw-the-book-at-pirates/2009/06/07/1244313033953.html
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Simon & Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com; New York Times, 6/12/09
Brad Stone via New York Times: Simon & Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com:
"In another sign that book publishers are looking to embrace alternatives to Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book store, Simon & Schuster has agreed to sell digital copies of its books on Scribd.com, a popular document-sharing Web site.
Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS, plans to announce Friday that it will make digital editions of about 5,000 titles available for purchase on the site, including books from best-selling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark. It will also add thousands of other titles to Scribd’s search engine, allowing readers to sample 10 percent of the content of the books on the site and providing links to buy the print editions.
“We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible,” said Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster."...
The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework and recipes. About 60 million users a month read documents on the site, embed them in blogs and share links to texts over social networks and e-mail messages.
Scribd has been criticized by publishers in the past for allowing users to upload pirated copies of their works. In an effort to combat the practice, Scribd will use the digital files of Simon & Schuster’s books to find and remove unauthorized copies from its site."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/technology/internet/12books.html?_r=1&sq=scribd&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1244909378-hifOeZiF+9Odinrgj8r/Xw
"In another sign that book publishers are looking to embrace alternatives to Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book store, Simon & Schuster has agreed to sell digital copies of its books on Scribd.com, a popular document-sharing Web site.
Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS, plans to announce Friday that it will make digital editions of about 5,000 titles available for purchase on the site, including books from best-selling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark. It will also add thousands of other titles to Scribd’s search engine, allowing readers to sample 10 percent of the content of the books on the site and providing links to buy the print editions.
“We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible,” said Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster."...
The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework and recipes. About 60 million users a month read documents on the site, embed them in blogs and share links to texts over social networks and e-mail messages.
Scribd has been criticized by publishers in the past for allowing users to upload pirated copies of their works. In an effort to combat the practice, Scribd will use the digital files of Simon & Schuster’s books to find and remove unauthorized copies from its site."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/technology/internet/12books.html?_r=1&sq=scribd&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1244909378-hifOeZiF+9Odinrgj8r/Xw
Monday, May 18, 2009
Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies; The New York Times, 5/18/09
Brad Stone via The New York Times; Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies:
"The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.
In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied...
Trying to address the piracy problem, Scribd is building a database of copyrighted works and using it to filter its system. If a publisher participates in the Scribd store, its books will be added to that database, the company said."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/technology/start-ups/18download.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=scribd&st=cse
"The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.
In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied...
Trying to address the piracy problem, Scribd is building a database of copyrighted works and using it to filter its system. If a publisher participates in the Scribd store, its books will be added to that database, the company said."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/technology/start-ups/18download.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=scribd&st=cse
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