15 ms·

When is it stealing?

71 points by fekberg 13y ago

lazyjones 13y ago
> What are your thoughts, Dear Reader? Honestly? Like you wrote, everything's going to be copied anyway, better don't let it cause frustration. It's just information, something we've never controlled successfully before the digital age and haven't given up trying to control on the web yet. If we didn't try to (pointlessly really) fight over attention from search engines and revenue from annoying ads where we ought to put our content, it wouldn't be such a big issue and the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue.
- jeremysmyth 13y ago
  the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue 1: How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers) 2: How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? (like Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow) My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.
  - lazyjones 13y ago
    I have no idea how much of the content I read is paid for (and how). A large part of it is certainly summaries written by people who aren't paid to do so (copied, digested and filtered for me). > My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place. It's funny that you named FB, Twitter and SO as important sources of content you "rely on every day". Who actually writes the content and who gets paid for it? Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)
    - jeremysmyth 13y ago
      Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P) Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not answer: Are there any such communities today? Your question seems to imply that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created by universities without profit. However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where it's likely "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today. To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes anyone's mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to replace her use of Facebook today?
      - lazyjones 13y ago
        > Are there any such communities today? Yes, there's Wikipedia and there are IRC channels (and to some extent still, Usenet). > [...]the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today. Why would the world have to change? Did it have to change for FB to exist and siphon users off of myspace? We just need the product / the infrastructure / the volunteer work to get some stuff done. It hasn't been done yet, but it's not an otherworldly idea. > do you think my mother [...] would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow Which part of it would make her unhappy? Would she miss the corporate entity behind it? The decentralization? Or do you assume that FB's (highly complex by the way) UI is something that cannot be replicated in a sufficiently recognizable manner?
  - warp 13y ago
    The bits of the internet I care about would stay largely the same, mostly because I'm lucky that the content I consume is stuff I pay a yearly subscription for. (They also have some ads and so some of their ad revenue would disappear, I'm assuming that evens out by more people paying for a subscription when there are no free, ad-based alternatives :)
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers) It's funny, I try to actively avoid such content. I.e. most of the time, I don't trust text written for money, because of the misaligned incentives. Even on HN, I focus mostly on the comments. > How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? This is, unfortunately, a good point.
  - nfoz 13y ago
    Since we live in a world that has copyright, it is reasonable to expect that a lot of works will be created with the expectation of copyright, so we are surrounded by copyright-incentivized works. Obviously if we changed the rules, behaviours would change. Perhaps for you it's hard to imagine how bloggers/journalists could do good work without advertising revenue, but for many of us we would much prefer that. There are alternate business models, but they are obviously secondary since copyright/ads is the social norm.
  - summerdown2 13y ago
    There is no copyright in fashion, yet we're not going around wearing beige sacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act#Current_Status_of_Fashion_Design_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act#... I think there is not much of an argument to be made in favour of copyright. I do think there's a strong argument to be made that artists should be paid. For which, we need a different business model. Maybe the fashion industry, advertising or Patreon would be worth exploring for that.
- crusso 13y ago
  the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue. Replace "published stuff" with whatever you do in your job every day to make a living and replace "ad revenue" with "compensation". Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it? [edit, added the question]
  - lazyjones 13y ago
    > Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it? If I'd had issues with working without compensation, I'd never have built a website in late 1996 (for free!) that eventually got VC-funded in 2000 and led to a situation where I can retire for good any time I wish to. And even though I don't need the compensation, I am still doing this job. Does that answer the question?
    - KC8ZKF 13y ago
      I'm confused. You don't have issues with compensation because you were compensated such that you no longer need compensation. Therefore other people shouldn't expect compensation?
      - lazyjones 13y ago
        Yes, you are. People can expect compensation and not get anywhere (see OP), especially if they publish content (they absurdly think it can be made accessible to everyone but not be copied - heck, we still copy content today that was published thousands of years ago!). Or they can build something that is useful with no such expectations and sometimes they will be rewarded anyway. If I had stuck to expecting compensation for every hour of work, I'd now be very likely stuck in a dull job somewhere ...
        crusso 13y ago
        We're confused because you appeared to contradict yourself. Besides... the point you're not getting is that the content is copied because people value it. No one is digging and filling holes pointlessly and expecting compensation for useless "work". We're talking about content that is created that other people like and use. The difference between what you did and kept your compensation for vs what content creators do that they don't get compensated for is a matter of the proper protection via laws and technologies. While I would agree that maybe technology-wise it's a losing battle - legally and ethically, saying that the world would be better off if these people would produce what others want for free is problematic.
betterunix 13y ago
s/stealing/copying/
- jordigh 13y ago
  Because we need to hear this more often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ Copying is not theft!
lukasm 13y ago
The whole problem comes down to definition of property. What is it, really? People don't consider content to be proprietary. We treat a blog post in the same way we treat speech. Users ain't gonna pay for that. Period. Some of them may, but no the majority.
- pantaril 13y ago
  Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution (i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but that's all. The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works. Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of his works.
  - chilldream 13y ago
    Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know, link to it. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's work.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
robinwarren 13y ago
Call me non typically British but it's pretty obvious why they didn't ask. Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly. "Better to do something now and apologise later than ask for permission and not get it" as I think a saying goes. Better attribution would have been good, and possibly reaching out to original creators asking them to opt out if they'd rather not be involved. Offering something in return (the embedded player for relevant articles) could have helped grease the wheels. Ultimately, if they get bug they may not need massive support from content creators like Scott but they do need not to be on the wrong side of them.
- reidrac 13y ago
  That's why creative commons licenses are useful. If the content they want to use is under CC, they don't need to ask because the terms are perfectly clear. There's also fair use, but IANAL and I think that they should definitely ask (because of the "all right reserved" part).
  - chilldream 13y ago
    Copying entire works (even a blog post counts) is not fair use.
    - reidrac 13y ago
      I didn't say that; but I'm still not a lawyer.
    - Amezarak 13y ago
      There have been several cases where courts ruled that copying an entire work was fair use. Substantiality is only one of the considerations. For example, in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, the court ruled that even though they had copied the entire work, it was OK because that's how much they needed to copy for their intended (otherwise legitimate, commercial, and transformative) use.
- 13y ago
qwerta 13y ago
It is never stealing, but unlicensed use or license violation! Steeling would be taking away copyright ownership from author.
ap22213 13y ago
Stealing exists at a culturally-defined threshold. One must be brought up (or assimilated) with an understanding of what is 'property' and what is not. Then, one has to also understand what is 'ownership'. Most of us learn this stuff implicitly, from the people around us, but in a globally connected world, this is much more difficult. I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now. Even though we were under the jurisdiction of local, state, and national laws regarding such things, we followed the norms of the people around us. But, as I became assimilated into the urban 'middle-class', I had to re-learn these things. I think this is why file sharing in the US became so popular in the 90s/2000s. Kids (and adults) who were otherwise raised with an understanding of US 'property rights' were nonetheless stealing media. The media that was being shared just didn't have a cultural foundation as property, to them. Anyway, there are a lot of people on the internet that don't necessarily have the same understanding of property and rights and ownership than us. Some people just don't know that what they're doing is bad and/or illegal.
- rjbwork 13y ago
  >I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate on some of these differences? Both from a real property (land) and object property (trinkets, devices, food, etc) perspective?
  - ap22213 13y ago
    It was more of a shared, collective kind of property model. People generally knew which things that people had and who currently had it. Generally, one would 'borrow' a thing indefinitely, until someone else 'borrowed' it. It wasn't uncommon for someone to 'borrow' a car, for example. You would just take it, if you needed it. It worked well, in that small culture of people. But, it certainly presented a lot of challenges for me as I left that area. It took me a long time to learn that that wasn't accepted behavior for middle-class urban people. For example, in college, people would come to my dorm, and I'd give them my stuff, not expecting that I'd get it back. Tensions would flare up when I'd 'borrow' other kids' stuff and then lend their stuff out to others. It took me awhile to understand that that was frowned upon. I also had to learn that I couldn't just take stuff. I was used to going to other people's houses and just eating their food, taking video games, music, etc. - Yeah, the middle-class urbanites didn't like that very much. Even now, I have strange understandings of property. I'm very likely to just give my stuff away, to even people that I don't know very well. Most people who witness this think it is very, very odd.
rjzzleep 13y ago
my Facebook stream has lately been filled with people copying and pasting 27bslash6 posts to their buzz feed clones. i don't know, is them keeping the real names, such as david thorne in them without reference to the original fair use? in academia this would be considered plagiarism i recon(but i may be wrong), while quoting the source wouldn't. at the same time someone below said by the definition of the word it's not stealing because they don't take it away from you. but in a legal sense that statement might be incorrect since if they're getting more buzz they could be stealing the attribution. just like edison never really stole a light bulb, but he very well stole the fame of the light bulb.
mrtksn 13y ago
When you use the word "stealing" to describe anything other than shoplifting or burglary it instantly starts endless conflicts with each party with it's own definition of what is stealing based on their own definition of what is property and so on. I would like to describe the situation as cheating in the game without trying to going down into the rabbit hole that the digital goods opened(or expanded, since before the digital era we already had goods that are valuable other than it's material and building value. Books, Paintings, Designs, Blueprints and more). So, you are producing something with intention to gain money or maybe just reputation but often you already use other peoples work to do that - nothing is made out out of thin air. Then somebody is building some other product with some intention like making money, gaining reputation or something else and his product is using your product and maybe many other people's products. Let's say a website with AI that awesomely curates the content of other people. In this situation everybody produced a valuable product but the other guys product's success is on your expense. Ideally you would have an arrangement where everybody wins. I will give an example from the movies and music industries: a)When you have the arraignment it's iTunes store. b)When you don't have one, it's the Prate Bay. or Defense industries: a) When you have a contract it's joint venture and you exchange some information to build some product. b) When you don't have one and you spy on each other to create similar product its espionage. or personal relationships: a) When a couple are also seeing other people with the consent of the other one, it's open relationship b) If there is no consent, it's called cheating. It's not about stealing, it's about managing the resources in coordination with other parties so that everybody wins. Otherwise often one party wins in expense of the other, many time everybody loses in the long run.
programminggeek 13y ago
This is exactly why I came up with the idea of the Pirate License. http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html Not everything makes sense to put out as Creative Commons. Sometimes you want to actually sell something like software or an ebook, but you don't think it makes sense to go after people torrenting your stuff and giving it away for free. My philosophy is there can still be an exchange of value. So, with the Pirate License, you make a version of your product explicitly licensed under the Pirate License which calls those who steal your product pirates, and asks them to pass it along to other pirates or potential customers. I think it makes the expectations for piracy much more clear and should lead to better outcomes.
psionski 13y ago
It's stealing when a company takes your hard-earned cash (not "copies", but "takes") and doesn't deliver a product you actually enjoy using.
spindritf 13y ago
Never. It's never stealing. It may be infringing, douchey, objectively wrong, illegal, despicable, plagiarism but, unless it deprives you of your copy, it's not stealing. While I understand the rhetorical usefulness of calling copyright infringement stealing, it's simply not accurate and nitpickers will be right. Again, they may also be annoying, myopic, or outright stupid, but they will be correct. However, the article is much better than the title would imply so if you were just irked by the headline, don't skip it.
- jordigh 13y ago
  We need to hear this more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ Copying is not theft!
- superuser2 13y ago
  Sure, intellectual property "theft" is not actually theft of content. However, it deprives its victim of the ability to monetize and get credit for his/her creation. It's "theft" of revenue. You can say that competition does the same thing. We tend to be okay with this because if you can figure out how to write better software or manufacture a better widget and offer it at a lower price, you deserve to win. Writing, producing, and distributing a better movie is completely fair. Beating the studio at distributing the movie it paid to create deprives it of the position in the market which it earned and you didn't. That sounds an awful lot like theft to me.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    Don't redefine theft to mean "unethical" or "creating a inefficient market" or something.
  - crazygringo 13y ago
    The whole point is, don't redefine words. So no, it's still not "theft" of revenue, not even in quotes. If I break into the movie studio's bank account and steal their money, THAT's theft of revenue. Like you say, by your logic, competition has the same effect of reducing a company's revenue, but only a crazy person would call that theft. So STOP calling it theft. Call it unfair competition, call it copyright infringement, call it illegal copying, call it intellectual property violation. There are plenty of correct names for it. Theft is NOT one of them.
Thiz 13y ago
> When is it stealing? Never. A good read about IP: http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property
krstck 13y ago
How does Umano make its money? Do they charge for the app or play ads? Sell data? I've always felt it questionable ethical territory to take somebody else's work, slap ads on it, and pocket the money. "Aggregators" have been doing that forever, though.
vrikis 13y ago
I clicked through hoping this would be about physical objects... I've always wondered, if I leave a bike unchained and someone takes it, it's considered stealing, right? But what about littering a box of cigarettes on the floor, and someone taking the last one in it, did that person just steal your cigarette? Totally off-topic, so I apologize, but I've always wanted to read into this topic a bit more...
ds9 13y ago
For multiple reasons including those stated by mrtksn, "stealing" is an unsuitable term - it invites an ideological digression on copyright, property rights, law and justice. However, the situation hanselman describes is certainly copyright infringement, and in my opinion he ought to look at the possibility of legal action. It might not be worthwhile, but might be satisfying and set a precedent for control of ripoff sites (modulo jurisdiction and other practical issues). On the principles involved, IMHO copyright infringement can be justified and even admirable and virtuous in some contexts - but commercial exploitation of others' works, without the creators' permisssion, is not among them. In a just world Hanselman would get the all the profit the infringer realized plus the full cost of suing. What's most egregious here is the relationship of economic power and enforcement of rights. Big, evil copyright-hoarding companies, that do not create anything but exploit the creations of others, are able to enforce their legal rights to an extreme and excessive degree, including interference with civil communications, taxes on blank media, false takedown orders and other abuses - while individuals subjected to exactly analogous, or even worse violations have no recourse. It's a two-tier system that deserves little respect. 'Scuze me for ranting.
edw519 13y ago
When is it stealing? As soon as you have to ask, "When is it stealing?", it's stealing, simple as that. As much as people would like to believe otherwise, all the rest is hand waving, semantics, and window dressing.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  You can assert that, but plenty of people have an over-entitlement and will claim stealing for anything. Not saying that the author is being over-entitled, but just asking if it's stealing shouldn't somehow elevate things. For one, this completely destroys fair use, even for parody. Just claim something was stolen. It'd kill any innovation driven by competitor enhancements: stealing. Heck, some people felt that Kindle's text-to-speech was stealing.
deleted 13y ago
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joshvm 13y ago
This came up quite recently with the twitter account that posted historical pictures without attribution. Arguably they're showing people wonderful photographs that they would otherwise not see, however they were basically lifting archive photos and publishing them without giving any nod to the photographers or the institutes that provided them. http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-copyright-creative-credit/ http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-co... The attitude in most of these cases is innocent unless you can prove you own it and complain enough. Extreme example - is Google stealing from you because it aggregates your content, stores it, makes it easily searchable and then serves adverts to make money from it?
pbreit 13y ago
With this line of thinking you'd never get things like YouTube or Uber. Switching to opt-in would basically imply shutting down so that's not really an option. I suppose they could default to computer-generated reads and wait for content owners to request a human-read version. We're likely in a gray area here but it's hard to get too objectionable (except for the part where Umano claims some future ownership).
deleted 13y ago
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leephillips 13y ago
I'm conservative about words. I object to using "literally" to mean "not literally." When I do, I'm invariably taken to task: "words change!" "language evolves!" "it means what people use it to mean!" "dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive!" "get with it, you curmudgeon!". But the use of "theft" or "stealing" here seems perfectly natural to me, even after reading the legalistic objections to it. And, certainly, people use these words to describe copyright violation, all the time. So why, in this case, does everyone suddenly join the usage police? In not once place on this long page of comments do I see the usual descriptivist lament. Where are my old friends who should be popping up to explain that "stealing" means copyright violation because people use it that way?
antonl 13y ago
Full disclosure. I'm one of the Umano cofounders, I figured it's time to jump in here. There are many things mentioned in comments that I'm not going to try to cover, but I will cover the basics. I'd be happy to answer any direct questions. The vision behind Umano is simple. We want to provide our users with a new way of consuming content. Many times it's the content they wouldn't otherwise read. How many times have you come across an interesting article that bubbled up in your twitter stream, you added it to your Pocket, and you forgot about it forever and ever. Reading is a heavy task. Reading takes time and your full attention. You can't read while you are cooking breakfast, getting dressed, standing in a crammed Muni bus, or riding on your bike to work. Listening is passive. Listening is easy. Listening allows you consume longer pieces of content with less effort, while doing something else. Umano is here to offer great content in a different medium. We started Umano with no licensing deals from any publishers (big or small). Sure, having licensing deals would be amazing, but "Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly." as @robinwarren said above. Now that we are bigger and more mature, we have deals with many large publishers. However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission from all bloggers that write amazing content that our community would like to be voiced. If the content producer doesn't want their content on the platform, we will happily take it down. As we grow and start to make money, our mission is to do revenue shares with content owners. Until then, the benefit that we bring to many bloggers is distribution. Popular articles often generate a significant number of listeners. Finally, one interesting point about Scott's article that was narrated - it was actually requested by one of our users through a new "Submit Any Link" feature that we recently launched as an experiment on Android. Now to attribution. We never claim that the content we voice is original Umano content, and we always provide attribution. We link to the original article, and always include the name of the publisher and the author in the narration. Scott mentioned that we do it poorly on mobile web and will fix that shortly.
- shanselman 13y ago
  It's this part that concerns me primarily. "However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission"
summerdown2 13y ago
I think the problem is time, not the law. I read this article a while ago, and it really opened my eyes as to how much, despite massive effort by the copyright lobby, society is changing away from the idea that copying is theft: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-divide-in-copyright-morality/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-d...

71 points by fekberg 13y ago

> What are your thoughts, Dear Reader? Honestly? Like you wrote, everything's going to be copied anyway, better don't let it cause frustration. It's just information, something we've never controlled successfully before the digital age and haven't given up trying to control on the web yet. If we didn't try to (pointlessly really) fight over attention from search engines and revenue from annoying ads where we ought to put our content, it wouldn't be such a big issue and the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue.

jeremysmyth 13y ago
the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue 1: How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers) 2: How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? (like Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow) My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  I have no idea how much of the content I read is paid for (and how). A large part of it is certainly summaries written by people who aren't paid to do so (copied, digested and filtered for me). > My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place. It's funny that you named FB, Twitter and SO as important sources of content you "rely on every day". Who actually writes the content and who gets paid for it? Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)
  - jeremysmyth 13y ago
    Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P) Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not answer: Are there any such communities today? Your question seems to imply that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created by universities without profit. However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where it's likely "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today. To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes anyone's mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to replace her use of Facebook today?
    - lazyjones 13y ago
      > Are there any such communities today? Yes, there's Wikipedia and there are IRC channels (and to some extent still, Usenet). > [...]the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today. Why would the world have to change? Did it have to change for FB to exist and siphon users off of myspace? We just need the product / the infrastructure / the volunteer work to get some stuff done. It hasn't been done yet, but it's not an otherworldly idea. > do you think my mother [...] would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow Which part of it would make her unhappy? Would she miss the corporate entity behind it? The decentralization? Or do you assume that FB's (highly complex by the way) UI is something that cannot be replicated in a sufficiently recognizable manner?
- warp 13y ago
  The bits of the internet I care about would stay largely the same, mostly because I'm lucky that the content I consume is stuff I pay a yearly subscription for. (They also have some ads and so some of their ad revenue would disappear, I'm assuming that evens out by more people paying for a subscription when there are no free, ad-based alternatives :)
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers) It's funny, I try to actively avoid such content. I.e. most of the time, I don't trust text written for money, because of the misaligned incentives. Even on HN, I focus mostly on the comments. > How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? This is, unfortunately, a good point.
- nfoz 13y ago
  Since we live in a world that has copyright, it is reasonable to expect that a lot of works will be created with the expectation of copyright, so we are surrounded by copyright-incentivized works. Obviously if we changed the rules, behaviours would change. Perhaps for you it's hard to imagine how bloggers/journalists could do good work without advertising revenue, but for many of us we would much prefer that. There are alternate business models, but they are obviously secondary since copyright/ads is the social norm.
- summerdown2 13y ago
  There is no copyright in fashion, yet we're not going around wearing beige sacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act#Current_Status_of_Fashion_Design_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act#... I think there is not much of an argument to be made in favour of copyright. I do think there's a strong argument to be made that artists should be paid. For which, we need a different business model. Maybe the fashion industry, advertising or Patreon would be worth exploring for that.
crusso 13y ago
the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue. Replace "published stuff" with whatever you do in your job every day to make a living and replace "ad revenue" with "compensation". Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it? [edit, added the question]
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it? If I'd had issues with working without compensation, I'd never have built a website in late 1996 (for free!) that eventually got VC-funded in 2000 and led to a situation where I can retire for good any time I wish to. And even though I don't need the compensation, I am still doing this job. Does that answer the question?
  - KC8ZKF 13y ago
    I'm confused. You don't have issues with compensation because you were compensated such that you no longer need compensation. Therefore other people shouldn't expect compensation?
    - lazyjones 13y ago
      Yes, you are. People can expect compensation and not get anywhere (see OP), especially if they publish content (they absurdly think it can be made accessible to everyone but not be copied - heck, we still copy content today that was published thousands of years ago!). Or they can build something that is useful with no such expectations and sometimes they will be rewarded anyway. If I had stuck to expecting compensation for every hour of work, I'd now be very likely stuck in a dull job somewhere ...
      - crusso 13y ago
        We're confused because you appeared to contradict yourself. Besides... the point you're not getting is that the content is copied because people value it. No one is digging and filling holes pointlessly and expecting compensation for useless "work". We're talking about content that is created that other people like and use. The difference between what you did and kept your compensation for vs what content creators do that they don't get compensated for is a matter of the proper protection via laws and technologies. While I would agree that maybe technology-wise it's a losing battle - legally and ethically, saying that the world would be better off if these people would produce what others want for free is problematic.

betterunix 13y ago

s/stealing/copying/

jordigh 13y ago
Because we need to hear this more often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ Copying is not theft!

lukasm 13y ago

The whole problem comes down to definition of property. What is it, really? People don't consider content to be proprietary. We treat a blog post in the same way we treat speech. Users ain't gonna pay for that. Period. Some of them may, but no the majority.

pantaril 13y ago
Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution (i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but that's all. The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works. Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of his works.
- chilldream 13y ago
  Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know, link to it. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's work.

deleted 13y ago

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robinwarren 13y ago

Call me non typically British but it's pretty obvious why they didn't ask. Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly. "Better to do something now and apologise later than ask for permission and not get it" as I think a saying goes. Better attribution would have been good, and possibly reaching out to original creators asking them to opt out if they'd rather not be involved. Offering something in return (the embedded player for relevant articles) could have helped grease the wheels. Ultimately, if they get bug they may not need massive support from content creators like Scott but they do need not to be on the wrong side of them.

reidrac 13y ago
That's why creative commons licenses are useful. If the content they want to use is under CC, they don't need to ask because the terms are perfectly clear. There's also fair use, but IANAL and I think that they should definitely ask (because of the "all right reserved" part).
- chilldream 13y ago
  Copying entire works (even a blog post counts) is not fair use.
  - reidrac 13y ago
    I didn't say that; but I'm still not a lawyer.
  - Amezarak 13y ago
    There have been several cases where courts ruled that copying an entire work was fair use. Substantiality is only one of the considerations. For example, in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, the court ruled that even though they had copied the entire work, it was OK because that's how much they needed to copy for their intended (otherwise legitimate, commercial, and transformative) use.
13y ago

qwerta 13y ago

It is never stealing, but unlicensed use or license violation! Steeling would be taking away copyright ownership from author.

ap22213 13y ago

Stealing exists at a culturally-defined threshold. One must be brought up (or assimilated) with an understanding of what is 'property' and what is not. Then, one has to also understand what is 'ownership'. Most of us learn this stuff implicitly, from the people around us, but in a globally connected world, this is much more difficult. I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now. Even though we were under the jurisdiction of local, state, and national laws regarding such things, we followed the norms of the people around us. But, as I became assimilated into the urban 'middle-class', I had to re-learn these things. I think this is why file sharing in the US became so popular in the 90s/2000s. Kids (and adults) who were otherwise raised with an understanding of US 'property rights' were nonetheless stealing media. The media that was being shared just didn't have a cultural foundation as property, to them. Anyway, there are a lot of people on the internet that don't necessarily have the same understanding of property and rights and ownership than us. Some people just don't know that what they're doing is bad and/or illegal.

rjbwork 13y ago
>I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate on some of these differences? Both from a real property (land) and object property (trinkets, devices, food, etc) perspective?
- ap22213 13y ago
  It was more of a shared, collective kind of property model. People generally knew which things that people had and who currently had it. Generally, one would 'borrow' a thing indefinitely, until someone else 'borrowed' it. It wasn't uncommon for someone to 'borrow' a car, for example. You would just take it, if you needed it. It worked well, in that small culture of people. But, it certainly presented a lot of challenges for me as I left that area. It took me a long time to learn that that wasn't accepted behavior for middle-class urban people. For example, in college, people would come to my dorm, and I'd give them my stuff, not expecting that I'd get it back. Tensions would flare up when I'd 'borrow' other kids' stuff and then lend their stuff out to others. It took me awhile to understand that that was frowned upon. I also had to learn that I couldn't just take stuff. I was used to going to other people's houses and just eating their food, taking video games, music, etc. - Yeah, the middle-class urbanites didn't like that very much. Even now, I have strange understandings of property. I'm very likely to just give my stuff away, to even people that I don't know very well. Most people who witness this think it is very, very odd.

rjzzleep 13y ago

my Facebook stream has lately been filled with people copying and pasting 27bslash6 posts to their buzz feed clones. i don't know, is them keeping the real names, such as david thorne in them without reference to the original fair use? in academia this would be considered plagiarism i recon(but i may be wrong), while quoting the source wouldn't. at the same time someone below said by the definition of the word it's not stealing because they don't take it away from you. but in a legal sense that statement might be incorrect since if they're getting more buzz they could be stealing the attribution. just like edison never really stole a light bulb, but he very well stole the fame of the light bulb.

mrtksn 13y ago

When you use the word "stealing" to describe anything other than shoplifting or burglary it instantly starts endless conflicts with each party with it's own definition of what is stealing based on their own definition of what is property and so on. I would like to describe the situation as cheating in the game without trying to going down into the rabbit hole that the digital goods opened(or expanded, since before the digital era we already had goods that are valuable other than it's material and building value. Books, Paintings, Designs, Blueprints and more). So, you are producing something with intention to gain money or maybe just reputation but often you already use other peoples work to do that - nothing is made out out of thin air. Then somebody is building some other product with some intention like making money, gaining reputation or something else and his product is using your product and maybe many other people's products. Let's say a website with AI that awesomely curates the content of other people. In this situation everybody produced a valuable product but the other guys product's success is on your expense. Ideally you would have an arrangement where everybody wins. I will give an example from the movies and music industries: a)When you have the arraignment it's iTunes store. b)When you don't have one, it's the Prate Bay. or Defense industries: a) When you have a contract it's joint venture and you exchange some information to build some product. b) When you don't have one and you spy on each other to create similar product its espionage. or personal relationships: a) When a couple are also seeing other people with the consent of the other one, it's open relationship b) If there is no consent, it's called cheating. It's not about stealing, it's about managing the resources in coordination with other parties so that everybody wins. Otherwise often one party wins in expense of the other, many time everybody loses in the long run.

programminggeek 13y ago

This is exactly why I came up with the idea of the Pirate License. http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html Not everything makes sense to put out as Creative Commons. Sometimes you want to actually sell something like software or an ebook, but you don't think it makes sense to go after people torrenting your stuff and giving it away for free. My philosophy is there can still be an exchange of value. So, with the Pirate License, you make a version of your product explicitly licensed under the Pirate License which calls those who steal your product pirates, and asks them to pass it along to other pirates or potential customers. I think it makes the expectations for piracy much more clear and should lead to better outcomes.

psionski 13y ago

It's stealing when a company takes your hard-earned cash (not "copies", but "takes") and doesn't deliver a product you actually enjoy using.

spindritf 13y ago

Never. It's never stealing. It may be infringing, douchey, objectively wrong, illegal, despicable, plagiarism but, unless it deprives you of your copy, it's not stealing. While I understand the rhetorical usefulness of calling copyright infringement stealing, it's simply not accurate and nitpickers will be right. Again, they may also be annoying, myopic, or outright stupid, but they will be correct. However, the article is much better than the title would imply so if you were just irked by the headline, don't skip it.

jordigh 13y ago
We need to hear this more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ Copying is not theft!
superuser2 13y ago
Sure, intellectual property "theft" is not actually theft of content. However, it deprives its victim of the ability to monetize and get credit for his/her creation. It's "theft" of revenue. You can say that competition does the same thing. We tend to be okay with this because if you can figure out how to write better software or manufacture a better widget and offer it at a lower price, you deserve to win. Writing, producing, and distributing a better movie is completely fair. Beating the studio at distributing the movie it paid to create deprives it of the position in the market which it earned and you didn't. That sounds an awful lot like theft to me.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Don't redefine theft to mean "unethical" or "creating a inefficient market" or something.
- crazygringo 13y ago
  The whole point is, don't redefine words. So no, it's still not "theft" of revenue, not even in quotes. If I break into the movie studio's bank account and steal their money, THAT's theft of revenue. Like you say, by your logic, competition has the same effect of reducing a company's revenue, but only a crazy person would call that theft. So STOP calling it theft. Call it unfair competition, call it copyright infringement, call it illegal copying, call it intellectual property violation. There are plenty of correct names for it. Theft is NOT one of them.

Thiz 13y ago

> When is it stealing? Never. A good read about IP: http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property

krstck 13y ago

How does Umano make its money? Do they charge for the app or play ads? Sell data? I've always felt it questionable ethical territory to take somebody else's work, slap ads on it, and pocket the money. "Aggregators" have been doing that forever, though.

vrikis 13y ago

I clicked through hoping this would be about physical objects... I've always wondered, if I leave a bike unchained and someone takes it, it's considered stealing, right? But what about littering a box of cigarettes on the floor, and someone taking the last one in it, did that person just steal your cigarette? Totally off-topic, so I apologize, but I've always wanted to read into this topic a bit more...

ds9 13y ago

For multiple reasons including those stated by mrtksn, "stealing" is an unsuitable term - it invites an ideological digression on copyright, property rights, law and justice. However, the situation hanselman describes is certainly copyright infringement, and in my opinion he ought to look at the possibility of legal action. It might not be worthwhile, but might be satisfying and set a precedent for control of ripoff sites (modulo jurisdiction and other practical issues). On the principles involved, IMHO copyright infringement can be justified and even admirable and virtuous in some contexts - but commercial exploitation of others' works, without the creators' permisssion, is not among them. In a just world Hanselman would get the all the profit the infringer realized plus the full cost of suing. What's most egregious here is the relationship of economic power and enforcement of rights. Big, evil copyright-hoarding companies, that do not create anything but exploit the creations of others, are able to enforce their legal rights to an extreme and excessive degree, including interference with civil communications, taxes on blank media, false takedown orders and other abuses - while individuals subjected to exactly analogous, or even worse violations have no recourse. It's a two-tier system that deserves little respect. 'Scuze me for ranting.

edw519 13y ago

When is it stealing? As soon as you have to ask, "When is it stealing?", it's stealing, simple as that. As much as people would like to believe otherwise, all the rest is hand waving, semantics, and window dressing.

MichaelGG 13y ago
You can assert that, but plenty of people have an over-entitlement and will claim stealing for anything. Not saying that the author is being over-entitled, but just asking if it's stealing shouldn't somehow elevate things. For one, this completely destroys fair use, even for parody. Just claim something was stolen. It'd kill any innovation driven by competitor enhancements: stealing. Heck, some people felt that Kindle's text-to-speech was stealing.

deleted 13y ago

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joshvm 13y ago

This came up quite recently with the twitter account that posted historical pictures without attribution. Arguably they're showing people wonderful photographs that they would otherwise not see, however they were basically lifting archive photos and publishing them without giving any nod to the photographers or the institutes that provided them. http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-copyright-creative-credit/ http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-co... The attitude in most of these cases is innocent unless you can prove you own it and complain enough. Extreme example - is Google stealing from you because it aggregates your content, stores it, makes it easily searchable and then serves adverts to make money from it?

pbreit 13y ago

With this line of thinking you'd never get things like YouTube or Uber. Switching to opt-in would basically imply shutting down so that's not really an option. I suppose they could default to computer-generated reads and wait for content owners to request a human-read version. We're likely in a gray area here but it's hard to get too objectionable (except for the part where Umano claims some future ownership).

deleted 13y ago

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leephillips 13y ago

I'm conservative about words. I object to using "literally" to mean "not literally." When I do, I'm invariably taken to task: "words change!" "language evolves!" "it means what people use it to mean!" "dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive!" "get with it, you curmudgeon!". But the use of "theft" or "stealing" here seems perfectly natural to me, even after reading the legalistic objections to it. And, certainly, people use these words to describe copyright violation, all the time. So why, in this case, does everyone suddenly join the usage police? In not once place on this long page of comments do I see the usual descriptivist lament. Where are my old friends who should be popping up to explain that "stealing" means copyright violation because people use it that way?

antonl 13y ago

Full disclosure. I'm one of the Umano cofounders, I figured it's time to jump in here. There are many things mentioned in comments that I'm not going to try to cover, but I will cover the basics. I'd be happy to answer any direct questions. The vision behind Umano is simple. We want to provide our users with a new way of consuming content. Many times it's the content they wouldn't otherwise read. How many times have you come across an interesting article that bubbled up in your twitter stream, you added it to your Pocket, and you forgot about it forever and ever. Reading is a heavy task. Reading takes time and your full attention. You can't read while you are cooking breakfast, getting dressed, standing in a crammed Muni bus, or riding on your bike to work. Listening is passive. Listening is easy. Listening allows you consume longer pieces of content with less effort, while doing something else. Umano is here to offer great content in a different medium. We started Umano with no licensing deals from any publishers (big or small). Sure, having licensing deals would be amazing, but "Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly." as @robinwarren said above. Now that we are bigger and more mature, we have deals with many large publishers. However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission from all bloggers that write amazing content that our community would like to be voiced. If the content producer doesn't want their content on the platform, we will happily take it down. As we grow and start to make money, our mission is to do revenue shares with content owners. Until then, the benefit that we bring to many bloggers is distribution. Popular articles often generate a significant number of listeners. Finally, one interesting point about Scott's article that was narrated - it was actually requested by one of our users through a new "Submit Any Link" feature that we recently launched as an experiment on Android. Now to attribution. We never claim that the content we voice is original Umano content, and we always provide attribution. We link to the original article, and always include the name of the publisher and the author in the narration. Scott mentioned that we do it poorly on mobile web and will fix that shortly.

shanselman 13y ago
It's this part that concerns me primarily. "However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission"

summerdown2 13y ago

I think the problem is time, not the law. I read this article a while ago, and it really opened my eyes as to how much, despite massive effort by the copyright lobby, society is changing away from the idea that copying is theft: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-divide-in-copyright-morality/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-d...