Scribd: we're not copyright-busters

Tammy H Nam
Opinion - Digital Tuesday, 5th May 2009

Critics who allege that Scribd enables book piracy are misguided, argues Tammy H Nam, Vice President, Content and Marketing at the social publishing site There has been a lot of discussion about Scribd in the press recently, particularly around the issue of copyright. Some of this discussion has been spot on, but a lot has been based on a misunderstanding of the facts and of Scribd. I'd like to take this opportunity to set the record straight about why the company was founded, where the site is headed and how we re working with copyright holders to get there. In 2006, leading Stanford University neurosurgeon Dr John Adler wanted to publish his research paper and make it available to anyone who was interested. He couldn t find a simple way to do this and described his frustrations to his son, Trip Adler, then a senior at Harvard University. Trip and his classmate Jared Friedman and co-founder Tikhon Bernstam launched Scribd in 2007 with the aim of making it easy for everyday people to publish and share their original works, in their original formats, where anyone could discover them.


Since then, the Scribd community has contributed a huge library of content everything from spreadsheets to short stories, games, recipes and resumes to the website, where more than 60 million readers now come each month to hang out and discover new ideas through the written word. Today, Scribd is the world's largest social publishing site for sharing original writings and documents. With reading on the rise for the first time in 25 years (according to a National Endowment for the Arts study), and much of that growth occurring online, Scribd really is becoming (and wants to become more of) a resource and opportunity for the publishing industry.
Writers such as Peter V Brett, Douglas Clegg, David Hewson and Lynn Viehl quickly took notice of Scribd's global reach and search engine indexing; early on, they published novel excerpts, chapters and even entire books on Scribd, creating a direct path for their readers to discover and enjoy their works on Scribd and then seek out additional works at the library, bookstore or e-commerce sites.
After posting her 2001 novel The Surgeon, New York Times best-selling writer Tess Gerritsen noticed increased traffic to her website, with more than 25,000 new (and young) readers accessing her book on Scribd within just a few weeks. The experience convinced Gerritsen that Scribd was a valuable tool to augment traditional publishing.
Several months ago, publishers followed suit and started uploading books and excerpts to generate buzz for new authors and to introduce existing bestsellers to Scribd's young, new and very large audience. Through the experience, publishers realized that Scribd cares about the rights of copyright holders and works to help protect those rights on our site and now, even across the Internet and saw for themselves the tremendous benefit in having their works either in full or partial form on Scribd.
First, let me make it absolutely clear that Scribd does not want unauthorized works on our site. Unfortunately, as with any user-generated site, providing readers with a means of sharing content inevitably will result in a tiny fraction of people abusing the privilege. Any time we are made aware of an unauthorized document on Scribd, we work quickly to remove it.

To proactively address this issue, we created the Scribd Copyright Management System, which is a technology and set of best practices designed to prevent the upload of unauthorized work onto Scribd. It is the best if not the only system of its kind and goes beyond requirements set forth in US and UK law. Here's how it works: any time we receive a DMCA-compliant takedown notice, we quickly remove the unauthorized work from Scribd and add the document's unique digital fingerprint to our copyright database. Every document uploaded to Scribd is compared to the copyright database. If someone tries to upload a document that our system identifies as one of the tens of thousands of works in our database, the document is automatically removed from Scribd.
In addition to quickly responding to DMCA takedown requests and adding those works to the database, we also offer authors and publishers the option to proactively add the text of their works to Scribd's copyright database to help prevent future uploads. We also include a prominent warning message and mandatory check box every time someone uploads a document; this helps to ensure that people comply with Scribd's terms of use every time they upload a document.
While the system is not yet perfect, our content filter has improved even in the last few weeks, and we continue to build features and best practices that will give authors and publishers more choice and control over how their works appear, if at all, on Scribd. We are also working to help other websites that are interested in preventing uploads of unauthorized uploads through education and by giving away our technology.
We re thrilled to have publishers big and small uploading their works to Scribd. But it is still original content that drives traffic to our site, attracting the massive audience that publishers and authors want to reach. The majority of content on our site is non-professional content, ranging from a grandmother's 80-year-old pierogi recipe to a teacher's how-to guide for using Twitter in the classroom.
This breakdown is reflective of what we set out to accomplish with Scribd to aggregate a wealth of fun, smart, useful and original works that, prior to the 'social media age,' would not have had an outlet or means to be found and shared. We re a small start-up, but please know that we re doing the best we can to address your needs and concerns as quickly as we can. In the meantime, we welcome your participation.

Literary agent Peter Cox's 'Seven questions for Scribd' may be read .

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