Item — HN Reader

Some questions:

* Who submitted this to scribd?

* Do they own the copyright?

* Do they have the right to submit it to scribd?

* Have they acted ethically?

* Have they acted legally?

Added in edit: These are, to me, legitimate and serious questions. Some time ago I posted a link here on HN to a PDF and it got automatically slurped to scribd. I didn't submit it to scribd, I don't hold the copyright, and now I find that the traffic that might have gone to the original site has been usurped by scribd.

I find that distasteful.

Pragmatically, anything you post to the web is now fair game for being duplicated elsewhere, your work being taken, possibly having ads put all over it, and generally ripped off. That's just the way it is, I know, but I find it odd that a company that seems purely to make money by ripping off other people's work is supported by HN.

But that's all I'll say. Most likely I'm in a minority in wondering about the ethics.

3 comments

The first hit on Google is a link to the paper on the lead author's website, so I think your issues are non-issues.

IIRC, scribd claims the right to (re)publish uploaded material, and will automatically put submitted material behind a paywall. It's also theoretically possible for the submitted material to rank above the author's home page, which is not necessarily desirable (if only because updates won't be available).

In short, this is not as innocuous as you think.

The Google-juice argument is slightly convincing, but any right to republish the document remains with the original copyright holders, no matter what Scribd claims. (Consider YouTube in a similar position.)

Consider e.g. the people holding copyright on popular movies uploaded to YouTube. Their rights are still protected, but filing all those takedown requests is a major pain.

(Which is not to say that I agree with all of their attempts at "fixing" this.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

http://www.scribd.com/kdaðason