Is this legal?

there are copies of an airline ticket transaction and boarding pass, a list of bank transactions, several copyrighted service manuals and a bunch of other stuff that was not intended for public consumption.
Wow, this is VERY worrying.
No matter who´s data it is, it is absolutely personal and does NOT belong in a site which in principle shares technical books, guess some various subjects textbooks and plain Literature (Novels, etc.).
IP infringment is bad enough, but publicly sharing personal data and info is GROSS.
In a way they are worse than The Pirate Bay, and similar sites.
 
Your airline tickets and stuff, or someone else?

Not mine, someone in India for travel within India. The bank transaction statement is also in Indian Rupees. It looked like lots of money until I looked up the exchange rate.

The name on the bank statement is close to the uploaders user name, so maybe he is using this site for his own notebook, but the airline ticket is for a different name.

He also appears to have uploaded copies of a couple books on calligraphy, service manuals for wood shop equipment and a PDF copy of "499 Best Email Subject Lines to Boost Your Email Open Rates" to learn how to SPAM better.

A quick look around the site reveals (probably pirated) books, technical publications, patents and stuff screen scraped from several DIY web sites.

I will not even sign up for the free trial, so I couldn't see beyond half of the first page of any upload. You can zoom out far enough to see all of the first page, but even on a 44 inch 4K TV screen, the detail is pretty bad.
 
Some time back, Scribd's business plan was you would upload documents you had in trade for documents they had from other users. I did once upload a stray doc to see another. This incentivizes massive doc-collection.

Some of this is quite startling. A person of my name sued his bank in the 1970s. The situation goes downhill, with fraudulent lending and charges of discrimination. Looks like bad acts on both sides. This would all be forgotten now... except somebody uploaded it to Scribd for eternity. (I can't object, it is not me. And it is public records so nobody can object.)
 
I just got a notification from a human (maybe) at Scribd that the two instances of copyright violation that I reported have been removed from their site.

I'm sure that there are more, but I'll never find them with out an account, so it still sucks. Several pages of diyAudio forum posts show up when you search for "Tubelab" but I can't see more than the first two posts without signing up. I don't know if posting screen grabs from this forum are legal or not, but plenty of them exist on that site.

Having a pretty common name makes it easy to get lost in the crowd, but also has its disadvantages. Sometimes it's hard to convince someone that you are not the person they are looking for.

About 40 years ago I lived in a large 1500+ unit apartment complex. I started getting strange people knocking at my door, then leaving or even running away when I answered. I came to find out that a person with the same name lived in the building next to me. He was a dealer in illicit substances. Several months later two cops show up at my door with a warrant for my arrest. Multiple arguments refused to convince them that I wasn't the guy they wanted, until I got them to show me the actual warrant papers, which did indicate that the man they wanted was black. They had an address, but got my apartment number from the office. I told them to look in the next building.

Around the same time frame I started getting phone calls at work, on an unlisted number belonging to Motorola, telling me that they were going to repossess my Oldsmobile Cutlass if I didn't make the necessary payments. Arguing that I never owned a Cutlass, did not stop the calls. I had to answer the phone since it was the number that the production lines used to call me for equipment support. Many tricks like transferring their call to the "dial a devotional" or local dirty movie parlor's recorded message proved to get them even madder. Finally I told them to go get the Cutlass...if they could find it...then I gave them the address to the local police station. They eventually gave up.

I am forever getting calls from debt collectors trying to trick me into admitting that I owe them something, often for things I have never done, or in places I have never been. The laws for debt collecting are clear, but many do not obey them. The collection agency must tell you who the original debt was owed to, when, and for how much money. If they don't, do NOT say anything, except to threaten them with legal action. If you ever give them a hint that the the debt could possibly be yours, they may have the right to sue you for it.

In the late 70's a stupid bank mixed up me and another person with the same name. Many of my paychecks wound up in his account. Want instant attention in a bank? Go into the branch near a large elderly population on the day the Social Security checks come out, make a lot of noise ending with "I can't believe that this bank could misplace several thousand dollars of MY money. The down payment check for my new house just BOUNCED and I might lose the house. Do I need to call my lawyer?" It was all fixed in about an hour.

The State of Florida has the "sunshine law." Anything that involves an entity of the State IS public record. That includes state employees and all courts. It is amazing what you can find once you figure out how to exploit their search engine. I found out the salary of both of my brothers with only their full legal name. Yes, even pension records are, or were, public record. So were VIN numbers. See a funny looking car, Google the VIN, yes, it's an unmarked cop car owned by the county sheriff's department. It was driven by a long haired guy. I guessed he was a vice cop in the narcotics division. Turns out I was right. Some of that stuff has been suppressed, but much of it's still findable if you dig deep enough.
 
About 20+ years back, I sensed something shady about Scribd, and with that in my head, I never used that site, I just avoided anything to do with it.

As for Mr TubeLab's experiences with debt collectors and banks, I've also had my share of golddiggers try to milk me - for things that I didn't have anything to do with.
I was a POA for someone who eventually died - and at death, by law, I was no longer POA, or responsible for the dead person's so-called debts.

SCAMMERS..
That's all they are.
Thanks to the lovely internet, we now have these annoying things in our lives, and you have to have sense enough to show them who's boss.
 
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If anyone feels the need to have a deeper look at Scribd without supplying their everyday email for the free trial: there are several anonymous and secure email service providers that make for good adjunct email addresses. Protonmail and Tutanota are two of the better ones. I've had a Protonmail account for years that I use whenever some random site wants an email address. It has saved me a lot of hassle.


Tubelab, I'd be happy to dig around on Scribd on your behalf if you'd like.
 
Copyright law is very complex. It also tends to be full of vague undefined phrases like "fair use", which provide huge incomes for copyright lawyers. Copyright laws are also different for each country. And the internet adds added complications, because there is the copyright law in your country and the copyright law in the country where a site's server may reside. Fighting copyright in a court is very expensive, and is often many, many times greater than the losses due to the copyright violation, which gives many copyright violators some security in their skullduggery.

Knun, good to see you have been able to get your documents removed from scribd. I suggest that you edit your documents, with explicit comments regarding your copyright and what can be done with your documents when downloaded, eg. the info is for non-commercial use, and for commercial use contact the author for terms (ie, payment), that the documents cannot be made available for download at other sites, however, a link to download the article from your site can be posted (and provide the link that can be copied for this use), that none of the information can be copied and used/that any referencing must cite the document (and provide a citation that can be used), that any document downloads from sites that charge a fee is a violation of your free-use terms, and the downloader should contact the download site and request a refund and notify them that the document download breeches copyright and/or request that you be notified of such sites, etc. (and you might list the sites that illegally host your material, as a name-and-shame).

There are probably sites with information on free-use, particularly with regard to software, that may give ideas on what to include and how to write it. Remember, it's your document and your copyright on it, so you can put whatever terms of use you like. If they don't agree to your terms of use, tell them not to download.
 
if copyright belongs to a worldwide treaty, application can differ within local laws. Two statements are universal : keep trace of anteriority of publication and advertise your copyright with name, date and symbol.
You adventure is a good reminder for all.