Online Publishing: The Trouble with Scribd
Scribd is great for generating unexpected traffic for your documents. Things you may havehad written up and tucked away on your computer for years can suddenly come to life byfolks actually reading and downloading and commenting on your files.That's nice.Unfortunately, once things get that nice, they will hardly ever stay that nice.Imagine you were in charge of a website that generates traffic (in the tens of millions by their claims) for documents of tons of people. You would maybe not feel like the god of theInternet (we've established who that is), but probably at least like his vice president.Such a burden to carry on his shoulders, or rather, on his neck is the fate of Jason Bentley, theexecutioner of Scribd on behalf of all those squealers over violated copyrights on the Internet.If you have any documents on Scribd that enjoy readership, you're bound to receive anotification from Jason at some point in time which kindly informs you that your documenthas been removed from Scribd due to copyright violations. Not that there is necessarily anything to that claim.You might receive that note even if the document in question consisted exclusively of wordsyou just made up with your 3-year old daughter and reinvented the alphabet to write them.Jason couldn't care less.The good thing is, he can press the "undo" button once you explain to him that the documentwas actually yours. ALL yours.But after the umpteenth time, the fun of this sort of conversation loses its spark.So, if your time is precious to you, you might want to consider alternatives.Especially, since Scribd is MESSY, and they want to make if ever harder for users to locatetheir own documents in order to make things more "social."I mean, you're ANTI-social if all you want to do is just post a document, right?Right, Jason. Or Trip. Your majesties... Whoever.Alternatives are scarce and have their flaws, too.Issuu doesn't seem to be nearly as fussy as Scribd, but they also don't generate traffic.You can embed a music file into your document (interesting for musician-writers... hehe), butthe view of the document is even more messy than it is on Scribd. Advantage: you candownload your doc in the original format (Scribd doesn't feature RTF in their downloadmenu).
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I know how you feel! I don't even know why mine was taken down! I wrote it alllll by myself, and they claimed it was copyright even after I told them. it's ridiculous.
I'm having this exact problem just because someone reuploaded my document so I asked them to take it down for copyright. They are now saying that MY document is too similar to the one taken down and removing it! Of course it's similar, IT WAS REUPLOADED >:( I used to like Scribd...
yeah, i completely agree.
It's a total bummer in my opinion, not being able to know for a fact whether a document is still going to be there the next day or not, just because of those Copyright paranoids, who would, if they could, charge us all taxes for breathing air because they farted into it, or for using the same alphabet they do...
Well, maybe if we get enough comments like these, dear Jason will finally stop considering these legitimate complaints too hilarious to be bothered with them. But alas, thus far we're only 3 in "tens of millions...."
so, is ur story not getting re-posted? :(
There's so much that's so hilariously wrong about this I don't know where to begin. :-)