But Koh used Scribd to set a download price of $2.99 on her dissertation. She has an absolute right to offer her work for sale under the license she chose. But there's a problem. Asking for money converts the Scribd offering to "Commercial Content", and thus invokes a bunch of provisions of the "Scribd Paid Access End User License Agreement", which users must agree to in order to purchase a download. This agreement states quite clearly
- You may not sell, distribute, or display any Scribd Commercial Content other than for personal use;
- You may not share, lend, or rent copies of Scribd Commercial Content;
- You may not disable or circumvent DRM supplied with Scribd Commercial Content;
- You may not make copies of all or any portion of any Scribd Commercial Content;
These conditions are in clear conflict with the specified Creative Commons License, and negate its intent. I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to exercise my Creative Commons rights to a work I purchased from Scribd, Scribd could find a lawyer to sue me for doing so.
All things considered, I think that use of Scribd in this circumstance is an attack on the integrity of the Creative Commons license. It does not reflect well on Prof. Koh, though she's clearly trying to do the right thing; more academics should be thinking about these issues. If she really wants to apply a Creative Commons license, she should be aware that anyone should be able to take their copy and make it available for download on a non-commercial site such as Internet Archive.
It's a shame that legal ambiguities and technicalities are preventing Creative Commons licenses from being as useful as they might be. Maybe we can get Scribd to clarify the EULA to accommodate situations like this.
Update August 2: Here's the response from Scribd.
Update August 2: Here's the response from Scribd.
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Jason (Support Desk)So my answer to "is the CC license negated?" changes to "No, it's just muddied a bit". |
Hmm, I am not sure Scribd has the right to override author's (copyright holder's) licensing terms. It depends on T&C author agrees when publishing in paid section.
ReplyDeleteCould be true, but from the user point of view there's no visibility of whether Scribd has the right to impose the conditions it imposes.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI contacted Scribd with your question. They responded that there is no conflict. So the answer to the question in your title is "No." Maybe you'll update your post to reflect this information? (In the first version of my comment I linked to a screenshot of my email exchange with Scribd, but the comments here don't seem to allow links.)
ReplyDeleteGeorge,
DeleteI contacted Scribd as well. This is the entirety of their response:
Jul 29 05:36 pm (PDT)
Hi, Eric:
Thank you for your feedback! I will forward it on to our legal team for further consideration.
Best regards,
[name]
Scribd, Inc.
I have yet to hear from the Scribd legal team. It's good to hear that you found someone at Scribd who seems to think there's no problem, that we should all just ignore Scribd's EULA since nobody reads it anyway. I'll certainly update the post with any info I get back from Scribd.