The facebook fizzle; more on scribd and DMCA

View 725 Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The reverberations of the Facebook IPO continue. Now there’s to be an investigation because the bubble didn’t get larger.

I don’t know what financial analysts do, and after this I understand it even less. I’m an old operations research man. When we projected performance for a new airplane or rocket, we did so based on existing systems, and on visible calculations.

Facebook was offered at a price of 40 times expected earnings. As I have said earlier, Apple and Google were around 10 times earnings. If there was supposed to be a reason why Facebook would grow four times as fast as Apple or Google, I never heard it.

Now there are rumors of inside information about the expected earnings – and some people thought that Facebook was being offered at only 30 times expected earnings, others that earnings were going to be lower and — and who cares? There never was a reason other than hype and razzle-dazzle to make anyone think Facebook was worth even 20 times earnings, or if there is I have never heard it.

The Facebook thing was a pure speculation. People were betting that other people would be more stupid than they were. The results were predictable and predicted. And now the government is going to investigate? But of course the government never wastes an opportunity to get its nose into another tent.

They are saying now that Facebook has found a stable level at 32. I am no financial analyst – I still don’t know what financial analysts to – but I see no reason why Facebook is more likely to take off than Apple or Google, or why anything more than 20 times earnings can be justified. But that’s just me. Keep remembering, I’m an old OR man, not a financial analyst.

The scribd affair continues. Scribd is a profitable company which advertises itself thusly:

“Scribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing site”. It is basically a place where anyone can post nearly anything, and people can not only read, but download those posts. They include books and short stories.

This policy gets scribd a lot of traffic. Much of that traffic is perfectly legitimate. Some may be questionable – here is an example I found this morning — http://www.scribd.com/chichocha/d/38435859-1969-Harlan-Ellison-The-Beast-That-Shouted-Love-at-the-Heart-of-the-World-09-10-23 which may be legitimate, but there’s a distinct possibility that Harlan didn’t authorize that.

Here is another I found this morning: http://www.scribd.com/doc/91550228/Lucifer-s-Hammer. It’s not a very good copy – if you want to read the book on a computer or tablet you’d be far better off getting the free Kindle reading app for whatever device you read books on and buying the Amazon copy – but it seems to be complete. There’s no question about it being authorized. It’s definitely not. I suppose my agent will send in an order when she can – she does have other things to do – and eventually it will go away. I make no doubt that it will appear again presently, and we will have to go through all this again.

There are others. A few years ago they had the entire oeuvre of the late Poul Anderson, the late Jack Chalker, and a number of others (as well as just about everything Niven, I, and the two of us together ever wrote). I wrote about that incident at the time, and there was a brief internet storm about it. Eventually that died away.

I recently got reports from a reader that a number of my works and Niven’s works were available for free download from scribd. Rather than get involved I informed our agent to let her handle it.She found that not only were there Niven and Pournelle copyrighted works available for download on scribd, but many from other clients. She sent polite letters to scribd. They replied.

Her experiences were not encouraging. Scribd is perfectly willing to remove any copyrighted material provided that an authorized agent for the copyright holder sends a valid DMCA takedown order, asserting under penalty of perjury that she is the authorized agent for the work, that it is copyrighted, and that it ought to be removed. I am told that scribd is fairly prompt about doing that – but it wants an exact URL for the offending material, and a notification of each and every instance of the unauthorized publication to be removed. If there are multiple unauthorized publications each must be specified.

Without that, scribd will do nothing. And there are dozens of copyrighted documents available for download from scribd. Dozens we know of; I suspect hundreds to thousands.

This in effect declares that scribd posters have the benefit of the doubt: it is assumed that they have permission to post whatever they put up. Authors have the right to “opt out” each time their copyright is violated. Each time. Every time. You cannot, for example, tell scribd that no one is authorized to publish “Higher Education” by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, and all instances of it should come down and no new ones accepted. That, apparently, is too much work for scribd; if the authors (well, in this case one author and one widow) don’t want their works posted on scribd, that’s fine with scribd, and scribd will cooperate in removing them: just send a valid DMCA takedown order for each instance of the violation of the copyright. And keep watching the site, because it’s not scribd’s job to see that no one posts it again tomorrow.

When Google decided to scan everything in a number of libraries, and post electronic copies of the works, they gave authors a chance to “opt out” – that is, you could go to Google, get a list of all of your copyrighted works, and tell Google to stop it. The Authors Guild with others sued Google to get them to stop all this, and Google settled with an agreement to make it even easier for authors to opt out, and also to pay a nominal fee – about $60 for each work scanned without authorization – for the insult. I thought that a reasonable settlement, but many did not, Google was denounced as evil, and a judge has thrown out the settlement. The going insistence is on “opt in”, meaning that Google can’t scan a work without the copyright owner’s permission, which effectively ends the purpose of the whole exercise which was to preserve works still in copyright but whose copyright owners can’t be found. These are what is called orphan works, and it is a problem for anthologists. But the general consensus was that authors should not be required to opt out – Google had to get them to opt in.

Note that scribd is given a free pass on this. Not only are they not paying any fee for the insult of their having published copyrighted works – and they are, surely, the publisher of those works posted on scribd are they not? – but authors must opt out, not opt in – and must do so each time someone decides to upload an author’s work. I am not sure why scribd is allowed to do this while Google is not.

The last time we went through this with scribd, the value of eBook rights wasn’t yet determined. Now it’s clear: they’re valuable, and backlists have become important sources of income to authors.

Our agent is painstakingly accumulating a list of URL’s to works by her clients that are up on scribd. It takes a good bit of work on her part, but it will be done, and DMCA takedown orders will be sent on each one. It’s work she didn’t expect to do, but it’s part of the modern world of digital publishing. DMCA sucks dead bunnies.

One question is, shouldn’t Amazon be concerned here? It’s true that the main victim’s here are authors and their estates, but Amazon makes a profit on eBooks too. So does Barnes and Noble. And Apple. Perhaps they should pay some attention to this matter?

From Leslie Fish’s Robbin’ the Poor

What can we do, where can we go?
It takes much coin to learn how to know
Folks with cash can scratch where they itch,
So it’s not that easy robbin’ the rich
And there’s more profit, too, in robbin’ the poor

To be done with scribd, I found this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/23403387/The-Burning-City-by-Larry-Niven . It has a bunch of stuff, then a word file of The Burning City, It’s an early copy, as far as I can tell from one of our drafts. It has significant differences from the published version. The formatting is abominable. If anyone wants to read The Burning City – and if you haven’t you should, it’s a good novel that Niven and I wrote not too long after the Los Angeles riots – it’s available as a Kindle Book on Amazon, and that would be the way to go. I don’t consider this scribd thing much of a threat to our BURNING CITY income (which is small, a couple of dozen copies a month, but it is steady, too). What I do object to is having a badly formatted copy of our book up there – someone might take a look, and decided not to buy the book because it reads badly. Sigh.

I don’t know what ought to be done about scribd, but I do wish they’d be more cooperative with agents and author associations.

And you’ll like The Burning City.