Scribd To Work With Authors, Making Sure Its Free E-Books Are Legal

Earlier this month, I told you about the Science Fiction Writers of America‘s bumbling attack on an online text repository over a slew of alleged copyright violations, many of which turned out to be perfectly legitimate cases of online publishing, while others involved books over which SFWA had no authority to pursue the subject. The company caught in SFWA’s crosshairs, Scribd, has decided to face the fundamental issues underlying that unfortunate incident head-on, and today it will announce a new initiative intended to combat the problem of unauthorized electronic editions of copyrighted materials.

The new policy will see Scribd working to establish the right of content owners to grant permission for their work to be included in the repository, so the company can then block others from uploading the content illegally. (This is a marked departure from the way many other sites handle such situations, which is to accept all content, then wait to see if anybody notices their work has been wrongfully reproduced and files a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice forcing its removal.) It’ll be interesting to see how effective that solution is over time; as companies like Scribd offering low-entry platforms for electronic publishing become more reliable, and less inclined to piracy, their competition with the big houses over backlist titles that have dropped out of print, but might now be attractive properties with which to build, say, a print-on-demand portfolio, might be worth watching.

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