Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Wattpad Pulled From Blackberry App Store

How are sites such as Wattpad and Scribd to be controlled? Today they continue to work within DMCA and some would say hide behind the act. Anybody can literally upload anything and only when an objection from the copyright owner is received does it get taken down. By then its been read several hundred times and copied by many. Tomorrow it turns up under another name and the process starts all over again.

Today we hear from several sources that the Wattpad application has been withdrawn from the RIM service. According to Wireless and Mobile news, ‘the app was pulled by RIM while they are investigating the usage of the app. We are working with the App World team and hope to restore availability soon.’

Whatever the reasoning behind the decision we believe that Apple, RIM and others should look at the document and book sharing apps they are approving and could demand procative action. Publishers should remove all support for sites such as Scribd and Wattpad. That would be a start and would certainly wake the owners of the services up. Afterall they would want to loose those potential marketplaces.

If we cast our memory back to Napster and Kazza there was a recognition it was infringing copyrighted music but it was hard to control and even the introduction of legal downloads didn’t really work. Do we want books to go the same route? Unlike musicians authors can’t go back to merchandising and live performancesdeter. The time to act is now, not tomorrow or maybe wait in hope for legislation.

We respect that there are many legitimate uses of these sites and new writers may wish to promote or give away their content in hope of being seen or read but if we can find files in a matter of a few clicks what is the extent of the problem and what chance has anyone of policing it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What's the difference between Wattpad and a library?