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By that standard all startups are pirates. Why do you need special permission from the State to let people buy someone's driver services through your site? It

By that standard all startups are pirates. Why do you need special permission from the State to let people buy someone's driver services through your site? It's just commerce. Pay taxes on it, sure, but call it being a pirate? Whose property rights are you pirating? Let's look at an alternative end game: drivers start to market themselves to passengers directly, and keep all the money. Well how do they do that - obviously on the same place, it has to be centralized somehow, there has to be a place to look them up. So there would be some cheap free alternative where drivers can sign up but keep all of the cash from each ride. All right, nobody's built that yet. Since it costs just a few tens of hours of development time and hosting that is just a few dollars a month, suppose you build that. Should you, TeMPOraL, be legally forbidden for making that free web site, yourself, literally coding up a place where where drivers can coordinate with passengers and keep all of their earnings? Because, after all, by your standard this makes you a pirate.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
You miss my point. I'm not complaining about a startup popping up and enabling things that weren't before possible. I'm complaining about startups that enable things explicitly forbidden by law, exploiting the inertia of local governments, burning investor money to keep the law enforcement at bay, all in order to unfairly dominate their competition. Uber isn't a small underdog that bends some rules here and there. They're a large multinational backed by billions of dollars, whose modus operandi is blatant disregard of the law and antisocial behavior.
- logicallee 7y ago
  all right, fair. Could you explain why it is (why it should be) forbidden by law? What's any reason to do so?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Does it matter? The laws are what they are. Uber may or may not have a good argument that some of the laws in some of the places are wrong, but they didn't present it. They didn't bothered to work from within the system, or even to address it. They just show up everywhere and ignore the local regulations. Personally, I do believe most of the intellectual property laws range from bad to wrong to batshit insane, but I don't start a company whose main business model is violating these laws, and using investor money to keep the enforcement at bay.
    - logicallee 7y ago
      I can see your perspective but I personally do think it matters what the law in question is. While you wouldn't start a venture-backed company around the idea of violating IP, I think it's quite likely that if you do found a venture-capital backed company in any field (i.e. where you think it's okay), you wouldn't instantly wrap it up and close it down at the first whiff that it were let's assume technically against some regulations you disagreed with, but which you could ignore. If you ran an innocuous online forum and found out it's illegal to run any forum, you wouldn't just shut it down. You'd look at why, or how serious those laws against it are, and the consequences of ignoring them. Now granted Uber is a business, there are certain minimum compliance things such as taxes. But I don't share your view that everyone needs to follow all rules no matter how technical. In a sense it's clear that uber is "just an app".
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I understand that things aren't black and white, and I wouldn't immediately shut down a business if I learned it's in violation of some obscure rule - not without trying to get an exemption or otherwise fighting it, if I believed the rule is wrong. But if you look at Uber's history, you get quite a different picture. They went into the ride share business knowing they'll be violating many major rules in most cities they try to operate, and then they just proceeded to violating those rules without attempting to find a better solution; instead, they continue to burn money to escape enforcement, and they've built special software whose explicit purpose is to help them hide from regulators. Uber's approach to local regulations is entirely antagonistic, which is something I don't like. Adding to that all the other stories about their abusive behavior with respect to drivers, customers and journalists, it paints to me a picture of a very antisocial company - in the sense that they're willing to exploit and abuse anyone for profit, without paying any attention to laws. It's a much different thing than discussing an off law that's arguably unjust or out of touch with reality.
        logicallee 7y ago
        Don't you think taxi companies captured a lot of the regulators in many cities, though? (this was my impression), and act monopolistically? why are you basically OK with legal enforcement of the status quo to the point that you want a company to be unable to float its alternative model? I really don't get it.
jmiserez 7y ago
TeMPOraL is using the correct terminology, there's pirate taxis and there's also pirate radio, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio. It means operating without a proper license, in this case from the government. You may have heard pirate radio referred to as "stealing the airwaves", one could also say that pirate taxis are "stealing the public road space", both of which are public/shared property. >Because, after all, by your standard this makes you a pirate. It's not TeMPOraL's standard, it's the government's standard and the laws that matter and which make it a "pirate".
- logicallee 7y ago
  fair response. Setting aside the terminology, why should these transactions be regulated in a special way (over the level of regulation on giving a friend a lift for free)? I think collecting taxes on the earnings is fair, but why anything heavier? what makes it so special?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Cities that regulate taxis usually do that because they treat them as an extension of city's transport infrastructure. Cities put certain burdens on taxis - like the requirement of picking up and driving passengers even if it's unprofitable or inconvenient (e.g. to/from outskirts, to/from hospitals), making some of the fleet accessible to elderly and disabled, carrying appropriate insurance, having somewhat fixed rates. In exchange, the city gives a bunch of privileges to the taxi companies (like use of bus lanes, or a degree of monopoly), so that they can make a profit despite the extra burdens. The balance between requirements and benefits is different in different cities, and indeed in some places it got skewed badly over time to favor the companies over the public. The problem with Uber is that they've entered this regulated space and unilaterally decided to ignore all those regulations. Sure, they don't get the special benefits, but they also don't share the burdens. Thus they easily outcompete the taxis on the profitable routes, leaving the regular taxi companies to work the unprofitable ones, which they usually are required by law to serve.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

You miss my point. I'm not complaining about a startup popping up and enabling things that weren't before possible. I'm complaining about startups that enable things explicitly forbidden by law, exploiting the inertia of local governments, burning investor money to keep the law enforcement at bay, all in order to unfairly dominate their competition. Uber isn't a small underdog that bends some rules here and there. They're a large multinational backed by billions of dollars, whose modus operandi is blatant disregard of the law and antisocial behavior.

logicallee 7y ago
all right, fair. Could you explain why it is (why it should be) forbidden by law? What's any reason to do so?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Does it matter? The laws are what they are. Uber may or may not have a good argument that some of the laws in some of the places are wrong, but they didn't present it. They didn't bothered to work from within the system, or even to address it. They just show up everywhere and ignore the local regulations. Personally, I do believe most of the intellectual property laws range from bad to wrong to batshit insane, but I don't start a company whose main business model is violating these laws, and using investor money to keep the enforcement at bay.
  - logicallee 7y ago
    I can see your perspective but I personally do think it matters what the law in question is. While you wouldn't start a venture-backed company around the idea of violating IP, I think it's quite likely that if you do found a venture-capital backed company in any field (i.e. where you think it's okay), you wouldn't instantly wrap it up and close it down at the first whiff that it were let's assume technically against some regulations you disagreed with, but which you could ignore. If you ran an innocuous online forum and found out it's illegal to run any forum, you wouldn't just shut it down. You'd look at why, or how serious those laws against it are, and the consequences of ignoring them. Now granted Uber is a business, there are certain minimum compliance things such as taxes. But I don't share your view that everyone needs to follow all rules no matter how technical. In a sense it's clear that uber is "just an app".
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I understand that things aren't black and white, and I wouldn't immediately shut down a business if I learned it's in violation of some obscure rule - not without trying to get an exemption or otherwise fighting it, if I believed the rule is wrong. But if you look at Uber's history, you get quite a different picture. They went into the ride share business knowing they'll be violating many major rules in most cities they try to operate, and then they just proceeded to violating those rules without attempting to find a better solution; instead, they continue to burn money to escape enforcement, and they've built special software whose explicit purpose is to help them hide from regulators. Uber's approach to local regulations is entirely antagonistic, which is something I don't like. Adding to that all the other stories about their abusive behavior with respect to drivers, customers and journalists, it paints to me a picture of a very antisocial company - in the sense that they're willing to exploit and abuse anyone for profit, without paying any attention to laws. It's a much different thing than discussing an off law that's arguably unjust or out of touch with reality.
      - logicallee 7y ago
        Don't you think taxi companies captured a lot of the regulators in many cities, though? (this was my impression), and act monopolistically? why are you basically OK with legal enforcement of the status quo to the point that you want a company to be unable to float its alternative model? I really don't get it.

jmiserez 7y ago

TeMPOraL is using the correct terminology, there's pirate taxis and there's also pirate radio, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio. It means operating without a proper license, in this case from the government. You may have heard pirate radio referred to as "stealing the airwaves", one could also say that pirate taxis are "stealing the public road space", both of which are public/shared property. >Because, after all, by your standard this makes you a pirate. It's not TeMPOraL's standard, it's the government's standard and the laws that matter and which make it a "pirate".

logicallee 7y ago
fair response. Setting aside the terminology, why should these transactions be regulated in a special way (over the level of regulation on giving a friend a lift for free)? I think collecting taxes on the earnings is fair, but why anything heavier? what makes it so special?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Cities that regulate taxis usually do that because they treat them as an extension of city's transport infrastructure. Cities put certain burdens on taxis - like the requirement of picking up and driving passengers even if it's unprofitable or inconvenient (e.g. to/from outskirts, to/from hospitals), making some of the fleet accessible to elderly and disabled, carrying appropriate insurance, having somewhat fixed rates. In exchange, the city gives a bunch of privileges to the taxi companies (like use of bus lanes, or a degree of monopoly), so that they can make a profit despite the extra burdens. The balance between requirements and benefits is different in different cities, and indeed in some places it got skewed badly over time to favor the companies over the public. The problem with Uber is that they've entered this regulated space and unilaterally decided to ignore all those regulations. Sure, they don't get the special benefits, but they also don't share the burdens. Thus they easily outcompete the taxis on the profitable routes, leaving the regular taxi companies to work the unprofitable ones, which they usually are required by law to serve.