Technically Legal

As we’ve mentioned before, Scribd is being sued for copyright infringement.

In addition to the traditional claims that they don’t qualify for protection from these kinds of suits under the DMCA, the plaintiff is claiming that Scribd’s filtering technology violates copyright.

Briefly, the filter works by making a copy of every file for which they receive a takedown notice. They then compare newly uploaded files with the database in their filter. If there is a match (presumably even a substantial, but not complete match) they won’t post the file.

But in April, this kind of use was endorsed by the 4th Circuit as Fair Use. In that case, students who submitted papers to TurnItIn had their papers copied and added to a plagiarism database. The court held that TurnItIn’s use was Fair Use under the copyright act because they transformed the paper from informative to useful in detecting plagiarism. This was despite the fact that the use was commercial, and used the entire original work. Another important factor was that there is not much of a market for licensing student papers for plagiarism databases.

Similarly, Scribd’s use was transformative, and there is currently no market for licensing copyrighted works for use in copyright infringement prevention databases.

For the record, Scribd denies copying the relevant files.

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