Responding to a Times of London article that found unauthorized copies of books by J. K. Rowling and Ken Follett on the document sharing site Scribd, the company said the news story “was misleading and included factual errors that must be corrected.”
According to the Scribd statement, digital books are only a “small reason” why 55 million Scribd readers use the site–many readers use it for fan fiction, recipes, screenplays, or official documents, for instance. In addition, the statement gave a glimpse at the company’s monitoring system for catching pirated works.
Here’s more from the statement: “Our system compares every work uploaded to Scribd against the tens of thousands of documents in our copyright reference database, and if someone tries to upload one of those copyrighted works, our technology prevents them from doing so. Every time a document is removed for copyright violation, the file is entered into our system, and that work cannot be re-uploaded. As our reference database grows over time, our technology will become even smarter and faster.”