I understood that, but don't accept the premise of the "digital" changes the world (in this context). Can you imagine a business selling bootleg (hard) copies of text books opening shop in a university town? What's so hard about making paper copies? Sell it at a bit over copying cost and you'd still be underselling the legitimate publisher by a huge margin. Where would the students buy their books?
The fact that the content is in "digital" even makes checking for notices of copyrights that much more trivial. We're all geeks here, so lets be honest:
"Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Liguori and Patricia Liguori. All rights reserved."
If you are taking a digital format and converting it to the scribd format, how trivial is it for you to write a function that greps for the "Copyright" and "all rights reserved" phrases in the text?
The Olive Oil business:
(A protection racket. Organized crime. etc.)
Your Scribd example is a bad one because that's an example of O'Reilly putting a sample of that book on Scribd to tempt people to buy the real thing.
Basically, I think she's going to have a really hard time proving any harm. She says her book was downloaded 100 times. Now prove that that equals 100 lost sales, or X lost sales for any value of X.
My assumption is that if my book was downloaded from Scribd 100 times that I've lost way less than 100 sales (if any) which at royalty rates on a book means I might have lost a couple of dollars. For that reason I wouldn't sue Scribd.
Comments
I understood that, but don't accept the premise of the "digital" changes the world (in this context). Can you imagine a business selling bootleg (hard) copies of text books opening shop in a university town? What's so hard about making paper copies? Sell it at a bit over copying cost and you'd still be underselling the legitimate publisher by a huge margin. Where would the students buy their books?
The fact that the content is in "digital" even makes checking for notices of copyrights that much more trivial. We're all geeks here, so lets be honest:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15490856/Java-Pocket-Guide-by-ORei...
"Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Liguori and Patricia Liguori. All rights reserved."
If you are taking a digital format and converting it to the scribd format, how trivial is it for you to write a function that greps for the "Copyright" and "all rights reserved" phrases in the text?
The Olive Oil business: (A protection racket. Organized crime. etc.)
I hope she gets her pound of flesh.
Your Scribd example is a bad one because that's an example of O'Reilly putting a sample of that book on Scribd to tempt people to buy the real thing.
Basically, I think she's going to have a really hard time proving any harm. She says her book was downloaded 100 times. Now prove that that equals 100 lost sales, or X lost sales for any value of X.
My assumption is that if my book was downloaded from Scribd 100 times that I've lost way less than 100 sales (if any) which at royalty rates on a book means I might have lost a couple of dollars. For that reason I wouldn't sue Scribd.