Is this site legitimate? I've read all sorts of good articles about it, and signed up for a monthly subscription. You can get all sorts of wonderful books there, but I'm unclear how copyright owners get paid or how Intellectual Property gets dealt with. Anyone know?

It is against their terms of service to post material for which you do not own the copyright. If you are downloading something from scribd that is copyrighted and was not posted by the author/copyright owner, you're breaking the law (and you should be reporting the posted material per the TOS).

EDIT: Here's a link to their plain-language Community Guidelines.

There's a lot of legit stuff on Scribd. There's also allegedly a lot of pirated stuff. They've been hit with a number of lawsuits from authors and more than a few takedown notices. I'd tread warily.
They do claim to filter aggressively for copyrighted material and a lot of the complaints I'm seeing date from before or shortly after they implemented the filtering system, so it may be less of a problem now.

I'm curious whose responsibility it is to determine what is authorized and what is not. In a store, a bfp is generally not liable to the owner of an item that was illegally obtained by the store. But IP is a funny area of the law. I would think that, since they're charging a premium for users, scribd should have to warrant that what is on their site is on it legitimately.

Mordae thanks for link. Looking at their TOU (not the "plain language" rules), it looks to me like the uploaded warrants that he/she has either the right or permission to upload. Nothing in there seems to place a requirement on the subscriber to hunt down the IP holder before downloading. Still seems kinda squishy tho.

Yeah, DMCA would still put you at risk if you downloaded, I think.

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