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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

What complicates things, and makes them worse, is that a large amount of the content is uploaded by people who are not the original authors/publishers, and don't actually have the rights.

As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.

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Just last week I found a research paper I published while at Cornell on Scribd -- no attribution at all, no permissions, etc. It's a paper that in normal circulation costs $50 to purchase (and has been purchased a few thousand times -- whether $50 is reasonable or not is a discussion for another thread, of course).

I considered letting my editor know about it to see if she wanted me to request it be taken down, but then I figured I'd rather more people see the paper anyway so left it alone.

The problem, of course, is that you should've been the one making the decision in the first place.

The article is probably in an academic journal and the author doesn't have rights to decide what to do with it.

(Scribd may be evil, but academic publishing is like a coven of necromancers)

I'd rather more people see the paper anyway so left it alone.

I would ask the uploader to add proper attribution though.

As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.

So basically it's YouTube, but for documents.

Yeah, but youtube doesn't charge you to watch the videos...

YouTube is still monetised by advertising... still making profit, though I guess its more upfront.

YouTube has ads on videos. It's the same as a TV station airing a pirated DVD and selling the ads

Youtube goes to a great deal of trouble to only have ads on verified content.

And Scribd doesn't charge you to read the documents. And for some of their videos, YouTube allows you to download them for a fee.

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

That doesn't give it any ethical high ground though...

Except people post whole books to Scribed, while on YouTube, you can't post a whole ripped DVD in one post.

This move to re-sell the archives is really surprising -- I can certainly tell you that Scribd doesn't make much money selling electronic documents (i.e., ebooks) right now.

The conversion rate there is b-a-d bad--my experience has been ~3 sales per 200+k reads. Other publishers have seen similar rates. They have an audience who is simply not willing to pay.

As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.

I agree completely.

The entire system appears designed to take advantage of the fact that users will upload just about anything, and the rights holders have to actively monitor the whole of the internet for each possible infraction to protect their rights.

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