Angelina YangFounder and Host, TwoSetAI · AI builder for visibility and discoverability

Trip Adler: Got Cease & Desist Letters Days After Launch (And What It Taught Me About Copyright)

6 May 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Trip Adler recounts his early founder experience launching Scribd straight out of college. He describes how the platform initially allowed unrestricted document uploads, leading users to upload pirated books. Within days, the publishing industry sent cease‑and‑desist letters demanding the removal of infringing content. Confronted with these legal challenges, Adler and his team quickly built a DMCA takedown workflow and a copyright‑filtering system to comply with the law. He reflects that this painful mistake taught him the importance of understanding and embracing copyright early in a startup’s lifecycle, offering a cautionary lesson for other founders.

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What a lot of founders do do is they kind of like push the boundary on this a little bit just to get their business going. So when I was, you know, just out of college, I launched the site Scribd to let people upload documents to the web at the time, know anything about copyright. And of course, what happens, people start uploading pirated books to the website. And then, you know, immediately within days, we had all these cease and desist and threats from the publishing industry saying, hey, you have to take our books down. And then that was when I started to understand this whole issue. We implemented a whole DMCA takedown process. We built a whole copyright filter system. This is why I learned about it by first kind of, you know, making a mistake and missing understanding it. So I think that's a common founder journey. But I think ultimately though, I think like the earlier you embrace copyright, the better.