4 ms·

I wrote a lengthy response but I'm just going to pretend I stopped reading when you called protecting interests in your creations unethical.

slowpoke 15y ago
I could write a lengthy response to this too but you are unwilling to even try to grasp my point, as apparent by your utter misinterpretation of what I said. Hint: I was talking about policing the internet, not about protecting interests. The latter will always have to take a backseat if we have to prevent the former. Oh, and yes, I consider the notion that you can "own" non-scarce resources such as music and software highly unethical. Anyways, have nice day. Or night.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Right?! It's unethical to check to see if someone is ripping off your work online? Let me tell a kind of embarrassing story related to this. Some years ago I got into blogging... Like, a lot. And I was checking out all sorts of desktop apps that posted to your blog and I came across one I liked. It was going for about $20 so I got a pirated copy and decided to share it on a certain torrent site. The creators tracked me down and asked me to take it down. They very sanely explained how they worked how to produce this and would like to be able to keep making it better but couldn't if people like me kept ripping them off. They had to police the web and I don't see anything wrong with their actions. I ended up seeing things their way and took it down. They weren't being unethical by asking me not to steal their app. It was me who was being unethical. I'm baffled by that statement.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  And I'm still baffled that people like you are insisting that a) this is a problem with piracy, and not - for the umpteenth time now - the brokenness of distribution as a business model in the face of a world where copying is virtually costless. It's not my problem if people still cling to it and are unwilling to adapt. b) that copying something is stealing (or "ripping someone off"). It's stupid, it's wrong, and most of all it is dishonest. At least call it what it unfortunately is: copyright infringement. I have made it a personal rule to not take anyone serious who calls copying "stealing", as it shows either a total lack of understanding of the matter or deliberate deception.
  - earbitscom 15y ago
    If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution. I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.
    - waqf 15y ago
      "exercised [...] shares"? That's not a meaningful sentence, so it's not clear what situation you're trying to describe. In any case, either your partners can (in this example) dilute you or they can't. Neither of these is a fundamentally dishonest situation, you just have to make sure that everybody and their lawyer is on the same page as to which it is (and write your contracts accordingly). Same with copyrights. People will be understandably aggrieved if they create works believing that the law will protect them and then it doesn't. But if we change the law so that new works created in future are not eligible for copyright protection, there's no such problem (because everybody should know what to expect).
      - earbitscom 15y ago
        Sorry...authorized shares. I guess your commitment to semantics really does outweigh your commitment to productive discourse. I think we're done here.
    - graphene 15y ago
      I think the essential difference is that shares in a company are not pure information that can be reproduced at negligible cost. Point is that even though "shareholder rights" are somewhat abstract, they are less at odds with the laws of physics than "intellectual property rights".
  - 15y ago

slowpoke 15y ago

I could write a lengthy response to this too but you are unwilling to even try to grasp my point, as apparent by your utter misinterpretation of what I said. Hint: I was talking about policing the internet, not about protecting interests. The latter will always have to take a backseat if we have to prevent the former. Oh, and yes, I consider the notion that you can "own" non-scarce resources such as music and software highly unethical. Anyways, have nice day. Or night.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

Right?! It's unethical to check to see if someone is ripping off your work online? Let me tell a kind of embarrassing story related to this. Some years ago I got into blogging... Like, a lot. And I was checking out all sorts of desktop apps that posted to your blog and I came across one I liked. It was going for about $20 so I got a pirated copy and decided to share it on a certain torrent site. The creators tracked me down and asked me to take it down. They very sanely explained how they worked how to produce this and would like to be able to keep making it better but couldn't if people like me kept ripping them off. They had to police the web and I don't see anything wrong with their actions. I ended up seeing things their way and took it down. They weren't being unethical by asking me not to steal their app. It was me who was being unethical. I'm baffled by that statement.

slowpoke 15y ago
And I'm still baffled that people like you are insisting that a) this is a problem with piracy, and not - for the umpteenth time now - the brokenness of distribution as a business model in the face of a world where copying is virtually costless. It's not my problem if people still cling to it and are unwilling to adapt. b) that copying something is stealing (or "ripping someone off"). It's stupid, it's wrong, and most of all it is dishonest. At least call it what it unfortunately is: copyright infringement. I have made it a personal rule to not take anyone serious who calls copying "stealing", as it shows either a total lack of understanding of the matter or deliberate deception.
- earbitscom 15y ago
  If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution. I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.
  - waqf 15y ago
    "exercised [...] shares"? That's not a meaningful sentence, so it's not clear what situation you're trying to describe. In any case, either your partners can (in this example) dilute you or they can't. Neither of these is a fundamentally dishonest situation, you just have to make sure that everybody and their lawyer is on the same page as to which it is (and write your contracts accordingly). Same with copyrights. People will be understandably aggrieved if they create works believing that the law will protect them and then it doesn't. But if we change the law so that new works created in future are not eligible for copyright protection, there's no such problem (because everybody should know what to expect).
    - earbitscom 15y ago
      Sorry...authorized shares. I guess your commitment to semantics really does outweigh your commitment to productive discourse. I think we're done here.
  - graphene 15y ago
    I think the essential difference is that shares in a company are not pure information that can be reproduced at negligible cost. Point is that even though "shareholder rights" are somewhat abstract, they are less at odds with the laws of physics than "intellectual property rights".
- 15y ago