Umm... WHAT? Sorry to burst your conceit bubble there, Sparky, but... "Many eyes make bugs shallow" does not apply to Safari, because Safari is not open source software.
Webkit (the open source rendering engine that Safari uses) is not vulnerable. Chrome and Chromium (also built on Webkit) are also not vulnerable. Webkit is fine, at least in regards to this vulnerability.
Safari (the closed-source browser built on Webkit) is vulnerable.
This is a closed-source software bug that has been reported to the vendor.
I don't disagree that all software has bugs. That's going to be true. But this is an example of the opposite.
I've also heard that lobster was once fed to prisoners in Florida. Back then, it was the equivalent of eating rats and pigeons.
I don't know about Florida, but in Maine lobsters were so plentiful that they were originally harvested as fertilizer, then fed primarily to prisoners and indentured servants as a very cheap protein.
Now people drop $20 (or more!) to have one cooked and served with drawn butter and a couple sides. Go figure.
But, honestly, I can very much see that happening in Florida. I've had Florida lobster before, and if you ever knowingly served that stuff to a human being you should be charged with a violation of the Geneva Convention.;)
Maps are free? Where, pray tell, do you acquire these free maps? I always thought those numbers with the dollar sign (Euro other symbol in the places that talk all funny-like) on the little stickers on them represented the purchase price of the map. I suspect trying to consider one "free" might lead to some rather unfortunate consequences. Especially in the places that talk all funny-like.
On the other hand, since my employer gives me a Blackberry and makes me carry it around 24/7 as a condition of employment, and it needs a data plan to be useful to my employer, for all intents and purposes my use of my Blackberry for maps is, actually, free. If I refrained from using it, it wouldn't save my employer any money. Perhaps not "free", but there's no incremental cost.
In my wife's case, we bought her a Nokia 5800 which comes with rights to Ovi Maps. For the purchase price of $250, we got voice navigation on practically every street on planet Earth, no data plan required - just download the maps before you go.
Oh, and an unlocked cell phone, too. So she always has it with her. Which means the maps are always handy - we don't need to buy extra copies for both of our cars.
Note: Just checked the Nokia site and picked the N95 at random, and it said that Ovi Maps was not available for that model. So, unfortunately, it looks like they didn't expand the free Ovi Maps + Nav to ALL of their phones, just some of them.
Instead of surfing the Web at random, I sometimes find myself surfing Google Earth or Google Maps at random. I've found a significant number of minor mapping errors on maps of areas I know well.
I've submitted all of them to Google, and found that all of them are generally fixed within about a month of submission, give or take. And I've gotten some pleasantly-worded form letters thanking me for the fixes. Google is very interested in error reports and has a pretty active group of people fixing them.
I also have added a good number of roads and error fixes in my local area to Open Street Maps ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/ ) and I find that additions and fixes to those maps get published even more quickly. I have nothing that can use OSM at the moment, but I like what they are trying to do, so I try to make sure both Google and OSM have good data.
They could, but if they already have a smartphone, why bother paying for a paper map?
I carry a cheap paper national-level atlas and a DeLorme Gazetteer for my home state in my car all the time, just in case I need a map to get somewhere.
But when I actually need directions, I find it easier to just pull out my Blackberry. It's right there, it can direct me to the most efficient route (while avoiding construction and traffic if available), and it's paid for because I have to carry it for work. As long as I have at least GPRS data signal, it gets the job done. My wife's Nokia with Ovi Maps doesn't even require a data signal - the maps are stored on the phone.
Why would I need to stop at a gas station or convenience store to buy a sufficiently-detailed local paper map for $5+ that I'll have to try and shuffle around and identify streets while I drive? I'll use it once, then it'll become part of my piles of door-pocket clutter or get recycled.
I can still read and navigate by a paper map, but it's less distracting and less stressful in a strange area to have a map that shows where I am, and what turn I need to take next, and how far away that turn is.
My wife has the Nokia 5800, and the included Ovi Maps has maps and voice navigation, all free for life. I was under the (maybe false?) impression that Nokia had opened Ovi Maps up to the entire series. You might want to check that... you may well have a very pleasant Ovi Maps upgrade waiting for you in the Ovi Store.
The box for our phone claimed that navigation was a pay-for service with a 2-week trial, but as soon as I installed Ovi Maps the installer informed me that Nokia had made it free for life, which was a very recent policy change for them, and sure enough a couple of months later it still works fine.
We don't have a data plan for her phone (we use WiFi for data on the phone), but Ovi Maps allows you to download the maps to phone memory or an SD chip. It came with an 8GB SD chip so loading about 6 states into it made no measurable difference in free memory, and she doesn't have to care whether she gets cell signal at all to navigate.
It did take a couple of hours to load all the maps I wanted into the phone (it's not a fast process by any means, even over the USB connection). But, heck, just set up the states you want and let 'er rip! But I suppose I could see why a reviewer who is going to spend 1/2 hour with the phone might not want to invest 15 minutes of that into setting it up. There's a difference between an investment in time for long-term use and just wanting to get a quick impression so you can pound out a review and get paid.
Without the data plan it does lack traffic and construction updates, so it's not useful for traffic avoidance, obviously. And the interface "leaves a little to be desired", and that's being nice. Failure to integrate the phone's built-in address book, for example, is an incredibly stupid oversight in my opinion. But it gets the job done, and the "surfer dude" voice is just a riot. Yeah, it's the little things that stand out.
But, hell, it's working voice navigation and locally-stored maps. As a bonus feature that we didn't even expect. We bought it because of the 5mpix camera and a few of the other nifty features, and the fact that it was unlocked smartphone so my wife could use WiFi for data and not have to shell out to AT&T for a cell data plan we really didn't want or need.
Not too shabby for an unlocked phone that cost $250.
It hasn't been a perfect device (the camera stopped working mysteriously, but a firmware reload fixed that right up, and we've had a few other minor problems here and there - nothing serious or anything that impedes its function as a telephone). But for the price and the fact that it's unlocked, I'd say it's decent value for the money.
But integrating this with Clippy would be awesome!
It looks like you're writing a death threat! I can help you with that. Would you like me to: >>> Track down the street address of the bastard you're going to kill and display it on Bing? >>> Recommend ways to kill the bastard and vendors who might carry the supplies you need nearby? >>> Tone down the note so the bastard doesn't see it coming? >>> Find a therapist nearby so you can develop a sentence-reducing sense of remorse after the killing?
Optional Paid Services: >>> For a one-time fee of $12,000, I can appear on your victim's screen continuously, alter the contents of their documents and emails to look embarrassing, and generally act like MS-Office does, only more extreme, until your intended victim loses the will to live and commits suicide. Charge will appear on your credit card bill as "hookers and blow" so the police will be misled into charging you with a far lesser crime if they ever trace it to you, which is pretty much impossible anyway. Hook me up with some really good acid-free vellum (you know how us paperclips like nice paper!) and we can discuss a discount, but it's gotta be the good stuff, not the crappy vellum you buy at Staples.
Is there a way to just play farmville about 5-10 minutes a day to max out your daily allotment like in we rule?
I'm confused. You are looking for a way to spend less time playing Farmville? Umm, don't play it? In a year, no one is going to care that you let your digital crops die and that your digital cow didn't get milked.
Especially the developer.
Once the app developer has you join the game, he's got what he wants - a copy of your Facebook profile and friends list, and the right to put messages on your wall in your name from the app so they can use you to hook your friends "help ceraphis find his lost sheep!".
If you're really into the game you might convince a few friends to join, and that's a nice bonus, but he's already got what he wanted the instant you clicked "Allow this app" to find out what the "lost sheep" thing was all about.
I've never actually played a Facebook game, but I've had friends try to draw me in by demonstrating the games at length. So I know the mechanics of a few popular ones.
Facebook games have, from what I've seen, three goals: 1. Keep you in the game regularly by setting events up so you have to visit frequently. 2. Send messages in your name to all of your friends to "join me in this fun game that's the awesomest thing ever!!!!!". 3. Hopefully occasionally sucker someone into spending real money to level up or gain new powers.
Facebook game developers, on the other hand, have only one goal. Access to your Facebook account so they can see information about you and all your friends. The actual mechanics of gameplay are almost irrelevant, as long as it's compelling enough to draw you in and maybe use your account to convince your friends to help with your lost sheep or by giving you a pink balloon or a warm huggie or whatever.
The upshot of this article is that the bar can be lowered significantly and still manage to sucker people in. Who needs a whole Farmville when you can just scan in a bad picture of a cow and have people click it every 6 hours, and get the exact same data on them that way?
Personally, I'd do a blue circle that sighs every time you click on it. Then, if you convince enough friends to join, your circle slowly turns from blue to red. I bet I'd get full account profile data on a million people within a month.
Yeah, but it's not like the President is the only member of the Executive branch or anything.
McKinnon doesn't rise to the level of threat to the US that the President needs to get directly involved. McKinnon hasn't done any material harm to US security, and does not represent an ongoing threat.
Nor does McKinnon's threat to US security rise to the level where we should interfere with other negotiations with a foreign government over it.
He did break both US and British law, and deserves punishment under at least one if not both. If the Brits agree to extradition through the normal negotiation process, great. We'll bring him over and charge him under US law.
If not, the Brits will prosecute him for a crime under their own laws and he'll face punishment there. If he was an important enough criminal, we'd increase the priority of his extradition in our negotiations. Obviously, he isn't.
Obama will, by the way, fail to get involved in many perfectly legitimate criminal cases this year, and that's as it should be. I don't expect him to hand-deliver my parking tickets either.
Can you explain how Scribd knowingly made a copy of her work and profited from that copy?
Scribd's users knowingly made copies of her work. Once Scribd was made aware of the infringement, they reacted properly and appropriately to the DMCA notice and implemented a filter to prevent further distribution of the work. So they did not knowingly make the copies that they profited from. Case one for the defendant, DMCA "Safe Harbor" protects them from prosecution since they acted swiftly and appropriately in response to a perfectly valid and reasonable DMCA notice.
Scribd themselves knowingly made one copy of the work, to put it in their filter. No profit was made from that copy, and that copy was made for the sole purpose of benefiting the author. Scribd made no profit from that work, it simply allowed them to protect the author's interests extremely effectively.
If you bought the copy you were using in your filter, then you did the right thing.
Why should Scribd have to buy a copy to put it in a filter? They haven't infringed the work. They are preventing others from doing so.
The copy they retain will not be distributed. It will be used to prevent further distribution. It exists to help the author, not hurt them.
The logical extension of your line of reasoning is that any author can increase their sales by simply accusing every document-sharing site on the planet of distributing a copy of their work.
Since the site logically needs a copy of the work in order to know whether the stuff they have on the site might be infringing, the site would then have to buy a copy to compare it.
Eventually, once the publishing houses get wind of this, if you want to host a document-sharing site, you'd have to negotiate rights to every known written work from every author and publishing house on the planet.
If you scanned it, or kept one of the illegal uploads as a template, then you hurt the people who didn't get paid for the copy.
How do you hurt them, exactly? By retaining a copy that exists only for the purpose of protecting the original work?
I'm really struggling with the logic behind that.
The copy Scribd retained was not used to distribute the work (if it was, I'd be right alongside you with the pitchfork and tar in hand).
Instead, it was used to help the author by preventing further distribution of their works.
Personally, I think the author should be responsible for finding infringements and provide the hashes that should be blocked, but that makes the system unworkable for the author since the infringers could simply insert a few characters at the beginning or the end and change the hash.
So this is a reasonable compromise that benefits the author significantly by providing their work adaptive protection against infringement.
I think Scribd actually not only did the right thing, but went above and beyond in protecting the actual written work, rather than stopping one specific infringing version (a block that could be easily worked around by making very slight alterations to the text).
But the only way to be absolutely sure you are catching all of the violations is to store enough of the work itself that your filter can recognize it when it sees it.
A hash would work, for a specific version of the copyrighted work. However, I could add one sentence to the beginning of the document and the hash would then be different and the filter check would fail.
The only way to be sure is to somehow store enough information about the actual text to recognize that specific text each time you see it. I suppose you could hash every other paragraph and look for matches to the paragraphs, and for the written word that would probably work OK.
But Scribd obviously thought, and the author's lawyers have reluctantly accepted, that storing the original document to have something to compare to is a reasonable method of filtering.
Remember, Scribd is not accused of distributing the copy they retained in their filter. They retained it for the purpose of preventing distribution. And it seems to me that, by doing so, they came up with an extremely effective filter that gave the original work far more protection than is required under the DMCA.
If anything, Scribd should be commended for going above and beyond the letter of the law in order to protect copyrighted works.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... WHAT? Sorry to burst your conceit bubble there, Sparky, but... "Many eyes make bugs shallow" does not apply to Safari, because Safari is not open source software.
Webkit (the open source rendering engine that Safari uses) is not vulnerable. Chrome and Chromium (also built on Webkit) are also not vulnerable. Webkit is fine, at least in regards to this vulnerability.
Safari (the closed-source browser built on Webkit) is vulnerable.
This is a closed-source software bug that has been reported to the vendor.
I don't disagree that all software has bugs. That's going to be true. But this is an example of the opposite.
I've also heard that lobster was once fed to prisoners in Florida. Back then, it was the equivalent of eating rats and pigeons.
I don't know about Florida, but in Maine lobsters were so plentiful that they were originally harvested as fertilizer, then fed primarily to prisoners and indentured servants as a very cheap protein.
Now people drop $20 (or more!) to have one cooked and served with drawn butter and a couple sides. Go figure.
But, honestly, I can very much see that happening in Florida. I've had Florida lobster before, and if you ever knowingly served that stuff to a human being you should be charged with a violation of the Geneva Convention. ;)
Mmmmmm.. Yeast excretions. Make mine still in production, please. Bleu is OK, but if you've got something really ripe, make it a double.
I like to hear the little yeasts scream as I eat them.
Tongue-in-cheek
Hey hey hey! This is about beer! No one said nothing about tongues! Sicko! ;)
Or at least re-doing the acronym.
First it was "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals"
Next came "People Eating Tasty Animals"
Now it's "Preserved Ethanol Tankard Animals"
So if you drink too much of this do you need to have a few cups of that coffee that can only be extracted after it's been crapped out by monkeys?
Maps are free? Where, pray tell, do you acquire these free maps? I always thought those numbers with the dollar sign (Euro other symbol in the places that talk all funny-like) on the little stickers on them represented the purchase price of the map. I suspect trying to consider one "free" might lead to some rather unfortunate consequences. Especially in the places that talk all funny-like.
On the other hand, since my employer gives me a Blackberry and makes me carry it around 24/7 as a condition of employment, and it needs a data plan to be useful to my employer, for all intents and purposes my use of my Blackberry for maps is, actually, free. If I refrained from using it, it wouldn't save my employer any money. Perhaps not "free", but there's no incremental cost.
In my wife's case, we bought her a Nokia 5800 which comes with rights to Ovi Maps. For the purchase price of $250, we got voice navigation on practically every street on planet Earth, no data plan required - just download the maps before you go.
Oh, and an unlocked cell phone, too. So she always has it with her. Which means the maps are always handy - we don't need to buy extra copies for both of our cars.
Note: Just checked the Nokia site and picked the N95 at random, and it said that Ovi Maps was not available for that model. So, unfortunately, it looks like they didn't expand the free Ovi Maps + Nav to ALL of their phones, just some of them.
Instead of surfing the Web at random, I sometimes find myself surfing Google Earth or Google Maps at random. I've found a significant number of minor mapping errors on maps of areas I know well.
I've submitted all of them to Google, and found that all of them are generally fixed within about a month of submission, give or take. And I've gotten some pleasantly-worded form letters thanking me for the fixes. Google is very interested in error reports and has a pretty active group of people fixing them.
I also have added a good number of roads and error fixes in my local area to Open Street Maps ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/ ) and I find that additions and fixes to those maps get published even more quickly. I have nothing that can use OSM at the moment, but I like what they are trying to do, so I try to make sure both Google and OSM have good data.
They could, but if they already have a smartphone, why bother paying for a paper map?
I carry a cheap paper national-level atlas and a DeLorme Gazetteer for my home state in my car all the time, just in case I need a map to get somewhere.
But when I actually need directions, I find it easier to just pull out my Blackberry. It's right there, it can direct me to the most efficient route (while avoiding construction and traffic if available), and it's paid for because I have to carry it for work. As long as I have at least GPRS data signal, it gets the job done. My wife's Nokia with Ovi Maps doesn't even require a data signal - the maps are stored on the phone.
Why would I need to stop at a gas station or convenience store to buy a sufficiently-detailed local paper map for $5+ that I'll have to try and shuffle around and identify streets while I drive? I'll use it once, then it'll become part of my piles of door-pocket clutter or get recycled.
I can still read and navigate by a paper map, but it's less distracting and less stressful in a strange area to have a map that shows where I am, and what turn I need to take next, and how far away that turn is.
My wife has the Nokia 5800, and the included Ovi Maps has maps and voice navigation, all free for life. I was under the (maybe false?) impression that Nokia had opened Ovi Maps up to the entire series. You might want to check that... you may well have a very pleasant Ovi Maps upgrade waiting for you in the Ovi Store.
The box for our phone claimed that navigation was a pay-for service with a 2-week trial, but as soon as I installed Ovi Maps the installer informed me that Nokia had made it free for life, which was a very recent policy change for them, and sure enough a couple of months later it still works fine.
We don't have a data plan for her phone (we use WiFi for data on the phone), but Ovi Maps allows you to download the maps to phone memory or an SD chip. It came with an 8GB SD chip so loading about 6 states into it made no measurable difference in free memory, and she doesn't have to care whether she gets cell signal at all to navigate.
It did take a couple of hours to load all the maps I wanted into the phone (it's not a fast process by any means, even over the USB connection). But, heck, just set up the states you want and let 'er rip! But I suppose I could see why a reviewer who is going to spend 1/2 hour with the phone might not want to invest 15 minutes of that into setting it up. There's a difference between an investment in time for long-term use and just wanting to get a quick impression so you can pound out a review and get paid.
Without the data plan it does lack traffic and construction updates, so it's not useful for traffic avoidance, obviously. And the interface "leaves a little to be desired", and that's being nice. Failure to integrate the phone's built-in address book, for example, is an incredibly stupid oversight in my opinion. But it gets the job done, and the "surfer dude" voice is just a riot. Yeah, it's the little things that stand out.
But, hell, it's working voice navigation and locally-stored maps. As a bonus feature that we didn't even expect. We bought it because of the 5mpix camera and a few of the other nifty features, and the fact that it was unlocked smartphone so my wife could use WiFi for data and not have to shell out to AT&T for a cell data plan we really didn't want or need.
Not too shabby for an unlocked phone that cost $250.
It hasn't been a perfect device (the camera stopped working mysteriously, but a firmware reload fixed that right up, and we've had a few other minor problems here and there - nothing serious or anything that impedes its function as a telephone). But for the price and the fact that it's unlocked, I'd say it's decent value for the money.
But integrating this with Clippy would be awesome!
It looks like you're writing a death threat! I can help you with that. Would you like me to:
>>> Track down the street address of the bastard you're going to kill and display it on Bing?
>>> Recommend ways to kill the bastard and vendors who might carry the supplies you need nearby?
>>> Tone down the note so the bastard doesn't see it coming?
>>> Find a therapist nearby so you can develop a sentence-reducing sense of remorse after the killing?
Optional Paid Services:
>>> For a one-time fee of $12,000, I can appear on your victim's screen continuously, alter the contents of their documents and emails to look embarrassing, and generally act like MS-Office does, only more extreme, until your intended victim loses the will to live and commits suicide. Charge will appear on your credit card bill as "hookers and blow" so the police will be misled into charging you with a far lesser crime if they ever trace it to you, which is pretty much impossible anyway. Hook me up with some really good acid-free vellum (you know how us paperclips like nice paper!) and we can discuss a discount, but it's gotta be the good stuff, not the crappy vellum you buy at Staples.
That's true since a couple of ToS changes ago, and until the ToS changes again in 3.... 2....
More clicks = more adverts.
The reward for providing enough stuff that people want to click on is that you get "Karma: Excellent" and you can turn off the ads.
Then you get promoted from part of the audience to part of the free entertainment.
Dance, Monkeedude, dance.
I tried clicking on it. Nothing happened! Should I be sending you money first?
Except your porn addiction is over in minutes, nay, SECONDS, whereas facebook consumes multiple hours of peoples days.
I find the reverse to be true. One of us is doing it wrong.
Or they could have used a horse, and made the satire complete and self-referential when the web page died.
Is there a way to just play farmville about 5-10 minutes a day to max out your daily allotment like in we rule?
I'm confused. You are looking for a way to spend less time playing Farmville? Umm, don't play it? In a year, no one is going to care that you let your digital crops die and that your digital cow didn't get milked.
Especially the developer.
Once the app developer has you join the game, he's got what he wants - a copy of your Facebook profile and friends list, and the right to put messages on your wall in your name from the app so they can use you to hook your friends "help ceraphis find his lost sheep!".
If you're really into the game you might convince a few friends to join, and that's a nice bonus, but he's already got what he wanted the instant you clicked "Allow this app" to find out what the "lost sheep" thing was all about.
F*ck [...] everyone I went to school with
Doesn't sound like a lonely game to me. Risky, yeah, but certainly not lonely.
Unless, of course, you were homeschooled, in which case it's just sick.
Personally I'd be at least choosy about, if nothing else, gender. But that's me.
I've never actually played a Facebook game, but I've had friends try to draw me in by demonstrating the games at length. So I know the mechanics of a few popular ones.
Facebook games have, from what I've seen, three goals:
1. Keep you in the game regularly by setting events up so you have to visit frequently.
2. Send messages in your name to all of your friends to "join me in this fun game that's the awesomest thing ever!!!!!".
3. Hopefully occasionally sucker someone into spending real money to level up or gain new powers.
Facebook game developers, on the other hand, have only one goal. Access to your Facebook account so they can see information about you and all your friends. The actual mechanics of gameplay are almost irrelevant, as long as it's compelling enough to draw you in and maybe use your account to convince your friends to help with your lost sheep or by giving you a pink balloon or a warm huggie or whatever.
The upshot of this article is that the bar can be lowered significantly and still manage to sucker people in. Who needs a whole Farmville when you can just scan in a bad picture of a cow and have people click it every 6 hours, and get the exact same data on them that way?
Personally, I'd do a blue circle that sighs every time you click on it. Then, if you convince enough friends to join, your circle slowly turns from blue to red. I bet I'd get full account profile data on a million people within a month.
Only if the click brings me to Omaha Steaks. ;)
Not that I'd buy steak priced that high over mail-order, but you get the idea.
Yeah, but it's not like the President is the only member of the Executive branch or anything.
McKinnon doesn't rise to the level of threat to the US that the President needs to get directly involved. McKinnon hasn't done any material harm to US security, and does not represent an ongoing threat.
Nor does McKinnon's threat to US security rise to the level where we should interfere with other negotiations with a foreign government over it.
He did break both US and British law, and deserves punishment under at least one if not both. If the Brits agree to extradition through the normal negotiation process, great. We'll bring him over and charge him under US law.
If not, the Brits will prosecute him for a crime under their own laws and he'll face punishment there. If he was an important enough criminal, we'd increase the priority of his extradition in our negotiations. Obviously, he isn't.
Obama will, by the way, fail to get involved in many perfectly legitimate criminal cases this year, and that's as it should be. I don't expect him to hand-deliver my parking tickets either.
Can you explain how Scribd knowingly made a copy of her work and profited from that copy?
Scribd's users knowingly made copies of her work. Once Scribd was made aware of the infringement, they reacted properly and appropriately to the DMCA notice and implemented a filter to prevent further distribution of the work. So they did not knowingly make the copies that they profited from. Case one for the defendant, DMCA "Safe Harbor" protects them from prosecution since they acted swiftly and appropriately in response to a perfectly valid and reasonable DMCA notice.
Scribd themselves knowingly made one copy of the work, to put it in their filter. No profit was made from that copy, and that copy was made for the sole purpose of benefiting the author. Scribd made no profit from that work, it simply allowed them to protect the author's interests extremely effectively.
If you bought the copy you were using in your filter, then you did the right thing.
Why should Scribd have to buy a copy to put it in a filter? They haven't infringed the work. They are preventing others from doing so.
The copy they retain will not be distributed. It will be used to prevent further distribution. It exists to help the author, not hurt them.
The logical extension of your line of reasoning is that any author can increase their sales by simply accusing every document-sharing site on the planet of distributing a copy of their work.
Since the site logically needs a copy of the work in order to know whether the stuff they have on the site might be infringing, the site would then have to buy a copy to compare it.
Eventually, once the publishing houses get wind of this, if you want to host a document-sharing site, you'd have to negotiate rights to every known written work from every author and publishing house on the planet.
If you scanned it, or kept one of the illegal uploads as a template, then you hurt the people who didn't get paid for the copy.
How do you hurt them, exactly? By retaining a copy that exists only for the purpose of protecting the original work?
I'm really struggling with the logic behind that.
The copy Scribd retained was not used to distribute the work (if it was, I'd be right alongside you with the pitchfork and tar in hand).
Instead, it was used to help the author by preventing further distribution of their works.
Personally, I think the author should be responsible for finding infringements and provide the hashes that should be blocked, but that makes the system unworkable for the author since the infringers could simply insert a few characters at the beginning or the end and change the hash.
So this is a reasonable compromise that benefits the author significantly by providing their work adaptive protection against infringement.
I think Scribd actually not only did the right thing, but went above and beyond in protecting the actual written work, rather than stopping one specific infringing version (a block that could be easily worked around by making very slight alterations to the text).
Theoretically? Probably.
But the only way to be absolutely sure you are catching all of the violations is to store enough of the work itself that your filter can recognize it when it sees it.
A hash would work, for a specific version of the copyrighted work. However, I could add one sentence to the beginning of the document and the hash would then be different and the filter check would fail.
The only way to be sure is to somehow store enough information about the actual text to recognize that specific text each time you see it. I suppose you could hash every other paragraph and look for matches to the paragraphs, and for the written word that would probably work OK.
But Scribd obviously thought, and the author's lawyers have reluctantly accepted, that storing the original document to have something to compare to is a reasonable method of filtering.
Remember, Scribd is not accused of distributing the copy they retained in their filter. They retained it for the purpose of preventing distribution. And it seems to me that, by doing so, they came up with an extremely effective filter that gave the original work far more protection than is required under the DMCA.
If anything, Scribd should be commended for going above and beyond the letter of the law in order to protect copyrighted works.