Is docstoc.com Safe?

An other case of grabbing copyrighted material belong to other sites and keeping them on their site when all documents were marked copyrighted, owner of copyright and date. The corresponding site who are the owners of the documentation had a provision on their site stating all the documentation was copyrighted and you could not use or hold on another site. Clearly this was ignored. So they are unethical and will wait until a DCMA complaint is filed to remove the documents.

Website implies you will get a free download of the document you found by giving them your email address. But you only get a link to pay for an account, which you must have to get the download. I used the unsubscribe on the resulting email, which acted like it worked, but will see if my spam count goes up.

This site makes you believe that you have a free download if you sign up and then tries to sign you up for a monthly. Unsubscribe and then they say come back and download what you wanted, only again to offer the paid membership. Very doggy for what is creative commons data.

This site is publishing copyrighted material and violating the laws of most countries in the world. When information is requested they respond with meaningless legal jargon and submit email addresses to every spammer they can. They are not only phishing for emails and other data, the site by its very reason for existence is violating federal law. From what I understand there are class action lawsuits being put together at this time.

Typical old school bait and switch site, offering something for free, collecting user input for example filling out a form, wasting users time and then requiring a payment at the end to get a simple form printed. Just be honest and tell people up front that there is fee.

After reading all the reviews in here, now I'm over confirmed that ***** is a big scammer. I've been messaging after messaging its customer care since February 20, 2014. But it's really weird that till now I've been getting the worst customer support from their part. I had a docstore (a store for selling premium documents) account in that site. Last February, I decided not to sell any more documents via Docstoc and clear the amount. So, I messaged to ***** about my intention to close the account and release the fund. But after sending the first email, things just started getting more and more worse! I don't know why, but the customer support just started (and till now) playing hide and seek with me. First, they just sent a generic email to me that they would take my issues seriously and solve those as soon as possible. But, five days over, no reply from their part. So I again sent them an email to inquiry about the progress. They replied that I would get ….. amount from my docstore account. I quickly replied them what the ……. you're talking about! I should be getting ……. Amount from my account. For more than three days, there was no reply from the support. After sending four consecutive emails, they replied that their finance department assured that the amount is what I told them! Well, things were not stopped there; they just came up with a new issue. This time they were asking about my mailing address. I was totally shocked with this new issue, because my store account was associated with my paypal email address and this information was there from the day one I created my account. I emailed them to know why they're now asking about mailing address. I requested them to send the money in my paypal account and not to send any check in my local mailing address. Well, again no reply -- this time for more than days. After sending five consecutive emails, on March 07, 2014, those ……… from the customer support replied: "Your payment is being processed, and the check in the amount of $45 will be sent out to you soon." Today is 11th March 2014 and still no sign of any reply or payment. Can you suggest what should I do now?

Bait-and-switch. The only document I did get from them had advertising inserted into it. The site offers public-domain documents for free to draw you in and get you to sign up, then refuses to give you access to the docs unless you pay. Also hosts potentially copy-right material (non-vetted) without giving any warnings. I notice that WOT gives the site an 'excellent' rating despite 6 pages of mostly negative revues. So much for being able to trust in WOT. Almost all public domain works are available on the internet. If a file they list is shown as public domain, just put the title in quotations and search google for it. You will almost certainly find it for free (honestly for free). If you do not find at least one honest source, then it is probably not public domain.

One gets very far into the web site before discovering (or having any obvious way to discover) that any real use requires registration and payment. Worse, the privacy policy allows them to spam, mail, or call you at any time (actually you "invite" them to do so) and explicitly indicates that they get those rights forever, even if you terminate the membership. So, even if one signs up for their "3 day free trial" (for which they want a credit card), one gives them permanent and irrevocable permission to market to you. Not acceptable from my point of view. Their policies explicitly prohibit use by children.