The new pirate in town?

[fischermx]

We all remember how Youtube took off based on lots and lots of copyrighted material, then sold for millions, and then now they do remove the copyrighted videos.

I've just stumble with Scribd, which is a site supposedly to share documents.
And I've found lots and lots of copyrighted material there.
Still, its popularity still growing.

Is this the new way of create a succesfull website?
Be pirate now, legal later ?

[StoutFiles]

YouTube got away with it because Google owned it once the legal problems took off, and Google is big enough to get away with certain things.

Scribd will eventually hit the legal wall.

[ergophobe]

I've seen lots of spammer types recommend Scribd, so once again a good idea is having issues.

It may or may not hit a legal wall. I look at the efforts EZineArticles and Squidoo have made lately to clean up. It wasn't so much the legal wall (for EZineArticles the bigger issue was people writing one article and "spinning" it into 10-20 articles). The big issue was that they were getting perceived as low quality spammer sites and that was going to kill them long term.

I think Scribd will be forced to clean things up for similar reasons if the lawyers don't stop them first.