Hmm thanks for the heads up Wiccan.
I've had a look through the site and read the various forms of the Terms of Service, Terms of Use, and Store terms, and copyright policies place on the site for general users to read.
According to what I've read I believe that the site is acting more as a digital warehousing site, similar to Napster way back when before the music copyright laws came in to regulate the illegal upload and downloading/sharing of copyrighted material aka digitized music files.
Scribd supplies the 'story' content for download after acceptance of payment. It is as Wiccan and Danyealle-sama have stated.
The content is isn't generated by Scribd but is supposedly generated by their users, uploaded onto Scribd's servers, and provided for download on a user-pays basis. It's very similar to the concept of an e-commerce site like I-Tunes where you only get to download the music file after putting through a legitimate payment by the various methods that they accept, probably direct debit, credit card, or paypal, most likely.
Scribd even admits in their Store terms of Use policy that 80% of the fee charged for the right to access and download the 'story' content, dependent on the purchase price, will be delivered to the person or user of the account that originally posted the story.
Scribd from what I have read and deduced isn't selling the content itself or supplying it, they're selling the right to access and download, and would take a 20% to 25% cut out of every dollar that the user that posted the content for download makes, which is according to their Store Terms of Use about $0.25 cents in every dollar (probably depends on the currency, although I believe the site is based in the USA, so we're probably talking US dollars here).
And yes, I can confirm via reading the
Store of Use policy supplied by Scribd that they and the person that posted and is providing access to the story content will profit if other uses are willing to pay for the right to download and access that content.
Saying that in the Scribd Terms of Use and Copyright policies, they expressly expect that the poster of any user-generated content on the site is not in breach of various laws, regulations, and such like copyright of another entity, when they post content.
If fanfiction has been posted there, without permission of the original author's and it's in it's raw form with depictions of Sesshy and Kags in as the main characters, the original poster and Scribd by default will be in breach of copyright.
It's very likely that if the breach is reported that Scribd would cancel the poster's account, and perhaps reverse any and all monetary transactions that took place if that content was downloaded and paid for. The 'purchasers' would likely be notified privately of the breach too, and refunded accordingly, although that would depend on their management policies for issues like this (which probably have already happened in the past anyhow). Scribd would in essence have unfairly profited from a user's attempt to deceive general users, so they'd likely do their best to minimize liability.
Thanks for the heads up Wiccan and Danyealle-sama.
I find Scribd's conduct alarming, although I sincerely hope that this issue can be resolved for any and all author's affected.
~ Pyre
It's plagiarism. Most legitimate sites out there will down the fic and ban the user for it. It's not your fic to post so it's not your choice to post it.
