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<\/a><\/p>\nThe reverberations of the Facebook IPO continue. Now there\u2019s to be an investigation because the bubble didn\u2019t get larger.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what financial analysts do, and after this I understand it even less. I\u2019m an old operations research man. When we projected performance for a new airplane or rocket, we did so based on existing systems, and on visible calculations.<\/p>\n
Facebook was offered at a price of 40 times expected earnings. As I have said earlier, Apple and Google were around 10 times earnings. If there was supposed to be a reason why Facebook would grow four times as fast as Apple or Google, I never heard it. <\/p>\n
Now there are rumors of inside information about the expected earnings \u2013 and some people thought that Facebook was being offered at only 30 times expected earnings, others that earnings were going to be lower and — and who cares? There never was a reason other than hype and razzle-dazzle to make anyone think Facebook was worth even 20 times earnings, or if there is I have never heard it.<\/p>\n
The Facebook thing was a pure speculation. People were betting that other people would be more stupid than they were. The results were predictable and predicted. And now the government is going to investigate? But of course the government never wastes an opportunity to get its nose into another tent.<\/p>\n
They are saying now that Facebook has found a stable level at 32. I am no financial analyst \u2013 I still don\u2019t know what financial analysts to \u2013 but I see no reason why Facebook is more likely to take off than Apple or Google, or why anything more than 20 times earnings can be justified. But that\u2019s just me. Keep remembering, I\u2019m an old OR man, not a financial analyst.<\/p>\n
The scribd affair continues. Scribd is a profitable company which advertises itself thusly:<\/p>\n \u201cScribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing site\u201d. It is basically a place where anyone can post nearly anything, and people can not only read, but download those posts. They include books and short stories. <\/p>\n This policy gets scribd a lot of traffic. Much of that traffic is perfectly legitimate. Some may be questionable \u2013 here is an example I found this morning — http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/chichocha\/d\/38435859-1969-Harlan-Ellison-The-Beast-That-Shouted-Love-at-the-Heart-of-the-World-09-10-23<\/a> which may be legitimate, but there\u2019s a distinct possibility that Harlan didn\u2019t authorize that.<\/p>\n Here is another I found this morning: http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/91550228\/Lucifer-s-Hammer<\/a>. It\u2019s not a very good copy \u2013 if you want to read the book on a computer or tablet you\u2019d be far better off getting the free Kindle reading app for whatever device you read books on and buying the Amazon copy \u2013 but it seems to be complete. There\u2019s no question about it being authorized. It\u2019s definitely not. I suppose my agent will send in an order when she can \u2013 she does have other things to do \u2013 and eventually it will go away. I make no doubt that it will appear again presently, and we will have to go through all this again.<\/p>\n There are others. A few years ago they had the entire oeuvre of the late Poul Anderson, the late Jack Chalker, and a number of others (as well as just about everything Niven, I, and the two of us together ever wrote). I wrote about that incident at the time<\/a>, and there was a brief internet storm about it. Eventually that died away.<\/p>\n I recently got reports from a reader that a number of my works and Niven\u2019s works were available for free download from scribd. Rather than get involved I informed our agent to let her handle it.She found that not only were there Niven and Pournelle copyrighted works available for download on scribd, but many from other clients. She sent polite letters to scribd. They replied.<\/p>\n Her experiences were not encouraging. Scribd is perfectly willing to remove any copyrighted material provided that an authorized agent for the copyright holder sends a valid DMCA takedown order, asserting under penalty of perjury that she is the authorized agent for the work, that it is copyrighted, and that it ought to be removed. I am told that scribd is fairly prompt about doing that \u2013 but it wants an exact URL for the offending material, and a notification of each and every instance of the unauthorized publication to be removed. If there are multiple unauthorized publications each must be specified.<\/p>\n Without that, scribd will do nothing. And there are dozens of copyrighted documents available for download from scribd. Dozens we know of; I suspect hundreds to thousands.<\/p>\n This in effect declares that scribd posters have the benefit of the doubt: it is assumed that they have permission to post whatever they put up. Authors have the right to \u201copt out\u201d each time their copyright is violated. Each time. Every time. You cannot, for example, tell scribd that no one is authorized to publish \u201cHigher Education\u201d by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, and all instances of it should come down and no new ones accepted. That, apparently, is too much work for scribd; if the authors (well, in this case one author and one widow) don\u2019t want their works posted on scribd, that\u2019s fine with scribd, and scribd will cooperate in removing them: just send a valid DMCA takedown order for each instance of the violation of the copyright. And keep watching the site, because it\u2019s not scribd\u2019s job to see that no one posts it again tomorrow.<\/p>\n When Google decided to scan everything in a number of libraries, and post electronic copies of the works, they gave authors a chance to \u201copt out\u201d \u2013 that is, you could go to Google, get a list of all of your copyrighted works, and tell Google to stop it. The Authors Guild with others sued Google to get them to stop all this, and Google settled with an agreement to make it even easier for authors to opt out, and also to pay a nominal fee \u2013 about $60 for each work scanned without authorization \u2013 for the insult. I thought that a reasonable settlement, but many did not, Google was denounced as evil, and a judge has thrown out the settlement. The going insistence is on \u201copt in\u201d, meaning that Google can\u2019t scan a work without the copyright owner\u2019s permission, which effectively ends the purpose of the whole exercise which was to preserve works still in copyright but whose copyright owners can\u2019t be found. These are what is called orphan works, and it is a problem for anthologists. But the general consensus was that authors should not be required to opt out \u2013 Google had to get them to opt in.<\/p>\n Note that scribd is given a free pass on this. Not only are they not paying any fee for the insult of their having published copyrighted works \u2013 and they are, surely, the publisher of those works posted on scribd are they not? \u2013 but authors must opt out, not opt in \u2013 and must do so each time someone decides to upload an author\u2019s work. I am not sure why scribd is allowed to do this while Google is not.<\/p>\n The last time we went through this with scribd, the value of eBook rights wasn\u2019t yet determined. Now it\u2019s clear: they\u2019re valuable, and backlists have become important sources of income to authors. <\/p>\n Our agent is painstakingly accumulating a list of URL\u2019s to works by her clients that are up on scribd. It takes a good bit of work on her part, but it will be done, and DMCA takedown orders will be sent on each one. It\u2019s work she didn\u2019t expect to do, but it\u2019s part of the modern world of digital publishing. DMCA sucks dead bunnies.<\/p>\n One question is, shouldn\u2019t Amazon be concerned here? It\u2019s true that the main victim\u2019s here are authors and their estates, but Amazon makes a profit on eBooks too. So does Barnes and Noble. And Apple. Perhaps they should pay some attention to this matter?<\/p>\n From Leslie Fish\u2019s Robbin\u2019 the Poor<\/a><\/p>\n What can we do, where can we go? To be done with scribd, I found this: http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/23403387\/The-Burning-City-by-Larry-Niven<\/a> . It has a bunch of stuff, then a word file of The Burning City, It\u2019s an early copy, as far as I can tell from one of our drafts. It has significant differences from the published version. The formatting is abominable. If anyone wants to read The Burning City \u2013 and if you haven\u2019t you should, it\u2019s a good novel that Niven and I wrote not too long after the Los Angeles riots \u2013 it\u2019s available as a Kindle Book on Amazon<\/a>, and that would be the way to go. I don\u2019t consider this scribd thing much of a threat to our BURNING CITY income (which is small, a couple of dozen copies a month, but it is steady, too). What I do object to is having a badly formatted copy of our book up there \u2013 someone might take a look, and decided not to buy the book because it reads badly. Sigh.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what ought to be done about scribd, but I do wish they\u2019d be more cooperative with agents and author associations.<\/p>\n And you\u2019ll like The Burning City<\/a>.<\/p>\n View 725 Wednesday, May 23, 2012 The reverberations of the Facebook IPO continue. Now there\u2019s to be an investigation because the bubble didn\u2019t get larger. I don\u2019t know what financial analysts do, and after this I understand it even less. I\u2019m an old operations research man. When we projected performance \u2026 Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
It takes much coin to learn how to know
Folks with cash can scratch where they itch,
So it’s not that easy robbin’ the rich
And there\u2019s more profit, too, in robbin’ the poor<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"