Scribd Creates The Qualified Publisher Program - Oh Yea, This Will Work!

Online document sharing provider Scribd has announced today the launch of their new copyright protection system known as the "Qualified Publisher Program (QPP)." The idea is a good one but the execution is a fail. You might remember Scribd from our earlier post wondering if they were a porn document network.

Here's how the system works. If you are a content publisher (let's say a book publisher), you can upload your documents into the QPP and set them as copyrighted. This will prevent anyone from uploading the document into Scribd as the Scribd hamsters will scan the document and if it's a match, you get nothing. It appears that documents uploaded into the QPP will also make their way onto Scribd as they note, "Publishers who join Scribd's QPP can manage their own distribution groups and integrate threaded discussions alongside their documents, resulting in instant feedback from readers." I don't like that - I should be able to set the flag to not show on Scribd but protect my document in any case.

The issue with this and why I said its a fail is that with the millions of publishers worldwide, how many are really going to both know about Scribd and take the time to upload their documents. Furthermore, how well will the matching technology work?

It's a great marketing play by Scribd as it makes them appear like good citizens but I doubt the effectiveness in this regard.

Scribd has also released stats showing more than 10 million monthly unique visitors -- I assume this is to the documents and not to the site. I wonder which documents are the most popular? They also claim to be larger than Wikipedia in the count of written words -- 4 billion Scribd to 3 billion Wikipedia.