Wattpad’s eReader was one of the first applications to go live on RIM’s BlackBerry App World — and now it’s one of the first to be taken down over concerns about copyright infringement. Wattpad is a user-generated content site which lets people upload their own stories to share, and suffers the same problem most user-generated sites have of people uploading content they that’s copyrighted. It’s unclear whether the application was removed due to a specific complaint or a general uneasiness over its content — RIM’s vendor guidelines don’t mention user-generated content, but they do dwell on the importance of complying with intellectual property law. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) hadn’t responded to requests for comment.
“We do take steps to prevent inappropriate content,” Allen Lau, founder of Wattpad, told mocoNews. “In addition to the standard DMCA requirements (which provide a mechanism to report abuse, remove uploads immediately once notified by copyright owner etc.), we also monitor the uploads as much as we can, which is not required by DMCA. Our biggest challenge is the volume of uploads and identifying copyright infringement. For example, there are many fan fiction uploads, unless we have read or have access to the original, it is quite difficult for us to distinguish the fan fiction from the real one.” The majority of the uploads aren’t in English, which adds another layer of difficulty.
There are bound to be other applications that involve user-generated content, and it’s something that each app store should clarify for its developers. Each store is taking a different approach when it comes to verifying content for their app store. For instance, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) allows everything to be posted — and the community is expected to report abusers. Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), and presumably RIM, are all taking a more managed approach by reviewing each application before it goes live.
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