why doesn't anyone go after scribd?

[El Mahdi]

Yeah, not to get into politics, but there's a pretty good read on this on Wikipedia. The court case was actually split with one political group on the side of the defendents and another political group on the side of the prosecution. Basically the equivalent of the Republican and Democratic parties vocally choosing sides in a copyright case. There's quite a large political side to the story of the lawsuit.

 

[Umbran]

Umbran, it's a bit more serious than that:

Other parts of it may be more serious, yes. I was simply eliminating a point that was insubstantial - the issue of social association.

This is like a judge in an anti-smoking case sitting on the board of United Tobacco. It's a clear conflict of interest.

Is it? Do you know if and/or how much the judge got paid? Unless I missed it, the article didn't say.

As I understand it, in a legal sense, "bias" and "conflict of interest" do not equate to "has a known opinion on one side of the issue". Conflict of interest is about having some reason not based in the law for choosing one side over another.

So, if the judge got paid to advocate for one side, that's a conflict of interest. If he got no remuneration, is a member because he feels strongly about the law on the matter, it is not much like being on the board of United Tobacco.

And, to be honest, I find it rather implausible that a competent defense lawyer in such a case, and the press, didn't know the judge's association ahead of time. We hear about it only after they lose, but hear immediately afterwards? Interesting...

 

[Bumbles]

Very little side to the Pirate Bay story though...

I mean really, what is that site primarily used for if not the acquisition of copyrighted materials? Sure, there's some content that's available on there which is legally fine to transmit, but it's not the majority.

So what is Pirate Bay doing?

Duh. Clearly profiting off the behavior, with a general disregard for anybody else. I heard the same about scribd back a few years ago when there was a row about the SFWA sending a DMCA notice that got several other works removed...of course, almost all of that ruckus completed ignored the fact that the works which were improperly removed was far far exceeded by the number of actual infringements, and that it was scibd that was generally being dickish over it. Yet it was the SFWA people who took the heat, because scibd managed to get ahead on the PR campaign.

Oh well, Pirate Bay may manage to hide behind some technicality in the law for a while, or otherwise skate for a bit, but sooner or later it'll catch up with them.

 

[El Mahdi]

Yeah, I guess anyone would have to admit, that with a name like Pirate Bay, it's probably a pretty safe bet as to what their purpose is.

 

[Bumbles]

There name doesn't help them, that's for sure. I tend not to worry too much about it, I'm not even sure if it's been a legal issue when their conduct is what's the real problem.

 

[starwed]

The Pirate Bay is different than scribd because they (joyfully, proudly) ignore take-down letters.

Assuming that scribd takes down offending material when notified they're in the clear (at least by US law.) Just as media companies don't sue youtube, despite the massive amounts of copyrighted material available there.

Now, given that PDFs are textual content it would be pretty easy for scribd to implement filtering against a database of copyrighted material, and I suppose publishing companies could put pressure on them to start doing so.