Jammie Thomas lawyers file suit against Scribd
A legal complaint seeking class action status filed in Houston on Friday accuses social-publishing site Scribd of egregious copyright infringement.
Joe Sibley (left) and law partner Kiwi Camara.
(Credit: Camara & Sibley law firm)Scribd managers have "built a technology that's broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale and in the process have also built one of the largest readerships in the world," the attorneys representing the class wrote in the complaint. "The company shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors."
While this may sound like a generic copyright case, there's one interesting side note. The attorneys that filed the lawsuit are at the head of Camara & Sibley, the Houston-based firm defending Jammie Thomas-Rasset against copyright claims made by the music industry.
Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara have made names for themselves largely by representing Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman accused by the music industry of copyright violations. In June, a jury found her liable for willful copyright infringement and ordered her to pay $1.9 million in damages. Thomas-Rasset has asked for a new trial.
In an interview for a story published in July, Sibley said he and Camara could see themselves working for copyright owners, if they believed in the issue. He told me that they weren't locked into any legal dogma and would take cases based on their merits. It's not unusual for lawyers to argue both sides of copyright issues.
In their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the lawyers wrote that plaintiff Elaine Scott, a book author, found on Scribd in July an unauthorized copy of one of her titles, "Stocks and Bonds: Profits and Losses, A Quick Look at Financial Markets." They claim that the book had been downloaded more than 100 times from Scribd, which her attorneys called the "YouTube for documents."
Neither Scott nor Scribd representatives were immediately available for comment.
The class purports to represent "every author who owns a valid registered copyright in a work infringed by Scribd." Camara & Sibley said the number of infringing material on Scribd was known only to that company but predicted that the size of the class could be huge.
They did note that Scribd has said it would remove infringing documents when notified by a copyright owner, as is required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. San Francisco-based Scribd also has created an automated filtering system designed to prevent the publishing on its system of unauthorized works, once identified, from being uploaded again.
Camara & Sibley say very clearly what they think of Scribd's business model.
"Under the aegis of self-promoting misinterpretations of federal statutes," the lawyers wrote in their complaint, "the West Coast technology industry has produced a number of start-up firms premised on the notion that commercial copyright infringement is not illegal, unless and until the injured party discovers and complains of the infringing activity, and (the) infringer fails to respond to such complaints."
Camara & Sibley added to the complaint, "Apparently (the West Coast start-ups) believe any business may misappropriate and then publish intellectual property, as long as it ceases to use a stolen work when an author complains...Many millions of dollars have been invested in this business plan."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
I have had my publisher repeatedly go after these people to remove current copyrighted materials. Much of what is there is blatantly illegal.
While I think the lawyers involved are slime because of their seeming conflict of interest on this issue, I do hope Scribd burns and goes the way of Pirate Bay and Napster.
This sense of entitlement has to go. Combating corporate greed and arrogance is one thing, but I'm just an independent writer, and when vigilantes like Scribd take my stuff and give it away as if it were theirs to give away, it makes me angry.
Time for a new business model, mr independant. Maybe it's time to connect with your fans, and give them a reason to buy. It's no longer enough to just put your product out there and complain when no one buys. Free is becoming the new business model.
How can you compete with free? Ask the water bottle people. Ask those artists who give music away (Smashing Pumpkins is the latest example) and charge a premium for "special editions" or such as well as take donations.
Scribd didn't 'take' anything. If you really want to **** off your fans, go after the uploaders and sue them, not the company. And if you think shutting them, and the Pirate Bay down will have any effect what so ever (other than further alienating your fans) you really are stuck in the past. Napster got shutdown, and guess what... file sharing exploded. The Pirate Bay isn't going anywhere (other than perhaps it's domain name) and with several countries such as Spain saying downloading copyrighted material for personal use is not illegal, good luck changing anything.
Wake up, this is 2009. You no longer control the distribution of your product. The best thing to do now is keep the fans you still have left, and give them a reason to buy your product.
I think it's people like you, Sausage, who need to wake up to the reality that content creation is peril. If people can't even make enough to live on due to pirating of their work, they will produce less of it, and some will produce none of it. There's a reason why the USA has been such a large producer of creative ideas and content to the world over the last 100 years, and it's because we PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF THE ARTIST/INNOVATOR. Simple as that. Europe does as well.
So where can I find all that free server space and bandwidth they supposedly enjoy?
Ah, I see... you're a bit blinded by your anger at them.
Funny, but http://www.baen.com/library/ is still open for business last I checked. Read it a bit... you may just surprise yourself. ;)
Pretty much any artist that doesn't support suing his/her(their) fans (50 Cent is public about this).
I'm sure I could dig up more names, but there is a start of "large" groups who do this. They might not play the music you enjoy, but they are big players regardless.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090917/0431356225.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=505674
Quoted from above techdirt.com story on upcoming Smashing Pumpkins album:
"Sounds cool to me. Give away the music for free, connect with those fans, and then give them a reason to actually purchase something physical and scarce that's much cooler than just the music. Great to see another "big name" figuring all this out as well. And, before people say that the band can afford to do this because it's already huge and well known, most of the artists we discuss doing this sort of thing are small artists, who do it to establish themselves to get attention. Claiming that this only works for one type of artist is an increasingly naive statement. Smart musicians of all sizes are recognizing all of the opportunities that using the music as a free promotion presents."
http://www.baen.com/library/ is different from a collection of fan fiction, how? A bunch of unedited sci fi stories. Fun for some but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
Fortunately, it looks like the Department of Justice is going to stop the Google intellectual property robbery, but maybe Scribd should be next.
The mass distribution of content should be at the discretion of the creator.
Now they do have one limiting factor - only one person at a time can check out a given book, CD, or DVD. Or, ten people can check out ten copies of a given book, etc etc.
But then, the concept holds true - it's all free publicity. If I come across a book in the library that I really, really like, I'll likely purchase the book so that I can re-enjoy it at some future date. I also have a habit of buying other books by that same author, especially if the first book I came across was part of a series. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, too many other SciFi and Fantasy authors to mention... I've spent gallons of cash building up collections based on these authors' works. All of them began with a single book that was checked-out, borrowed, or bought second-hand. Rarely, if ever, do I bother paying full-price for a book written by someone I have not read yet. OTOH, brand new books or compilations as they come out? No problem - Powell's Books gets enough money out of me per annum that I'm almost embarrassed to say anything.
Now this is purely anecdotal, sure... but there's no real metric by which to measure success. OTOH, I sincerely doubt that, say, J.K. Rowling (to mention an author I don't read) didn't make her millions of dollars off of controlled advertising.
I am just curious as to if you have contacted Scribd and filed a DMCA complaint to have your work removed. It seems like you want to complain about it and "OMG DIE SCRIBD" but have done nothing to protect your works. If you even read the story, you will see that Scribd responds to DMCA requests and employs filtering to help prevent duplicate copies from being reuploaded again.
Two things I can suggest. First one is maybe it's time to give your fans a reason to buy your book. Just putting a website up doesn't cut it anymore. You need to offer people a reason to buy. Threat of legal action does not count. If you book is a PDF digital copy, do you offer your more serious fans a chance to get a signed paperback copy for a small fee? Maybe include a signed photograph? Something physical that they can't really obtain without paying for it to show you their support.
Second, as the RIAA et al have proven: suing your fans (and dead, or imcapable people) into bankruptcy or hoping for legal action against them doesn't win you more fans.
@Random_Walk: excellent point on the Library feature.
Free: The new business model.
I recall an argument regarding the radio and taping the songs. Here is a situation where the radio station paid the necessary fees to garner the right to play the song over the air. The listener could then have a recorder connected to the radio and tape the song they wanted to listen to all the time or create a compilation tape for use elsewhere.
In that scenario, according to a Sony rep, has violated copyright and is considered a 'thief' and should be required to pay a fine for the unauthorized distribution of the material.
This is a contentious subject, with both sides claiming they are right and often claiming victory for heir side for one ruling or another.
According to the RIAA, if I buy a CD of music and I subsequently rip it to play the songs on my iPod, not uploading them to a share site or even passing them out to a friend, only for my listening pleasure on my duly licensed and owned MP3 player, I am now in violation of the RIAA copyrights and am subject to fines. I am not making this up, it is a matter of record.
My problem is with the RIAA and the MPAA and the heavy handed storm trooper tactics. Why don't they provide us with a means to purchase only the songs we want to hear or the episodes we want to see, without having to buy an album full of other songs I don't like or care about or an entire season that I don't really want, merely to get to one of the episodes? How about an iTunes kind of business model where you can buy a show or song for a small price (.99 or so) or if you choose, you can then buy the entire album, but you don't have to buy the album first.
Just my take on this whole thing.
P.S. for the record, I do NOT upload copyrighted material to any sharing sites, nor do I download them unless I have paid for them.
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