6 ms·

How I Killed A Startup In 4 Hours (And Why I Don’t Regret It)

45 points by samx18 12y ago

mehwoot 12y ago
I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of a lasting cultural contribution. Gee, you can't think of a technology business that has excelled in a completely different field that has nothing to do with it? Stop the presses! Would I critique Beethoven because he doesn't know how to scale a ruby on rails website to thousands of concurrent users? It's completely incoherent.
- optimusclimb 12y ago
  I would name Atari, but I'll instead just say that probably 1000s of video game companies have created "cultural contributions" that have driven youth creativity and imagination - possibly planting seeds that lead to careers. Apple? Remember watching Jurassic park and being blown away? Great claymation wasn't it? It's almost too easy to go on, so I'll stop there.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  What a expletive is this guy. The world would have been inasenly poorer in culture if not for TCP/IP ...
jeffe3000 12y ago
Meh this guy seems so full of himself. What if the company could act as a kind of printing service so that the user must posses the rights to access the material in first place, sounds like a good idea to me.
- Mandatum 12y ago
  These companies can and do exist, the onus is put onto the user to not submit materials they don't have permission/rights to print or share. This would be a little hard for printing personalized news websites that remove ads however..
  - hamburglar 12y ago
    I don't know, it doesn't seem so cut and dried to me. I can print out web pages for my own personal use, and I can even run adblock while I do it. Can I remotely print them at my personal assistant's office and ask him to deliver them to me? It seems like the very specific personal use case for the content could provide a lot of wiggle room for lawyerin' if they really wanted to pursue it.
    - Mandatum 12y ago
      I agree but it likely wouldn't be worth the hassle. Technically they're taking content for different sources, stripping ads and reselling the content in a different media format. It'd be akin to recording a song off of the radio, removing ad breaks and selling it as a CD/downloadable MP3. Law may differ with publications and citing sources however.
      - MichaelGG 12y ago
        Is it legal to record songs from the radio to a CD, even for personal use? If not then it's not like what they're doing at all. If it's legal to print a page your browser renders, then it should be legal to have someone else run the printer for you. "Removing ad breaks" is a simple browser function. It's an interesting business (not that I have that much use for paper printouts of web pages) and this article does a poor job of explaining why it should be shut down. Terrible attitude, too.
treelovinhippie 12y ago
If there is attribution, how is this any different to what Instapaper and Pocket and any RSS/content aggregator do? Why does printing it out suddenly become copyright infringement?
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Anybody? I don't see the difference either. Is it the act of charging $2 for the printing and shipping? And man, is this guy ever full of himself.
  - almata 12y ago
    I don't think it's the fact of charging money that makes the difference. The creator of Instapaper did also charge money for the app itself (I don't know current owners, but they still probably do). To be fair I also don't see the difference (I mean regarding legality) between this new service and Instapaper.
  - andrewfong 12y ago
    I'm not sure Instapaper is entirely in the clear either, but I think the printing and shipping actually do make a difference. With digital copies, you have the benefit of the DMCA (that is, copyright holders have to issue you a takedown notice for user-generated content before you can be held liable, assuming you comply with all of the other DMCA requirements). However, there is no DMCA for print.
- kapitalx 12y ago
  I'm also curious how this differs with flipboard.com and other RSS aggregators. What if he was to only charge for 'pager, shipping & handling' while the service itself becomes free?
abracar 12y ago
> "innocence and naivety are really no excuse for robbing other people of their paycheck." Says the guy who once failed to pay contributors... http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued-former-contributors http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued...
MichaelGG 12y ago
The ad removal option should be customizable, and rendering done by some headless browser. Then he'd literally be renting out a browser and printer. That shouldn't be copyright infringement, but as Zediva and others have shown, copyright law can twist its head around. So it might be possible to rule against this guy.
- protomyth 12y ago
  They would be earning money by distributing copyrighted works with no prior agreement. No change to process would mask this. Their business model is a copyright violation. [edit: why do you think FedEx / Kinkos will not copy a book for you and makes you sign a sheet declaring your ownership of material before copying for you]
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Would that also apply to a cyber cafe that rents out machines and I print a copy off? What if the printer is located behind the counter and someone has to go get it for me?
    - aethr 12y ago
      Printing a copy of an article for your own personal use is only legal due to fair use / format shifting provisions, which aren't guaranteed in every country. In the countries that do allow this, there are guidelines to ensure that your "fair use" is done in the spirit of the law. In Australia there are fairly clear suggestions for what consitutes personal use. A few guidelines are: - you have to do it yourself - you can make a single copy - you can share the copy with members of your household or family, but no one else - if it's a copy of a physical work such as a book or CD, you have to make the copy yourself (ie, you can't download a movie that you own on DVD) I think no matter how you spin it or try to make it sound like fair use, this is a clear case of unauthorised distribution of someone else's work for a profit. If the matter ended up in court, their intent to follow the spirit of the law would be hard to argue.
      - 12y ago
dk8996 12y ago
Techcrunch is still relevant?
anigbrowl 12y ago
Regular HN readers will know I often play Devil's Advocate for the existing copyright/content model - because I think a lot of HNers have a poor understanding of the economics of creation and publishing. And yet I think Personalpaper.me is a fine idea and that Milo Yiannopoulis is full of it. You’ve probably spotted the problem already: personalpaper.me represents copyright infringement, unauthorised republication and . In other words, its entire business model is predicated on theft. Wrong on every count. If users submit text to the site, that's very different from personalpaper.me pre-emptively scraping it and then offering that to the user as if it were their own. The fact that the transaction is user-initiated is key. It could be a problem if personalpaper.me started pre-emptively fetching articles based on the user's past preferences, eg scraping all editorials published by the New York Times each week because a user had submitted a week's worth of editorials previously. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Unauthorized republication doesn't hold up either. When you're sending it to an individual customer, by definition you're not publishing it, which implies an offering to the public. Taking the user's submission, printing it out, and sending it to the user is no different from someone submitting a printing job to Kinkos or some other fast-print service and having the results delivered. As for illicit distribution on an industrial scale, this just begs the question, depending on the same fallacy as the previous point. Sending one user's submissions back to the user that submitted them in a different form is a print job. The scale of the business is irrelevant because there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal about the basic model. By Milo Yiannopoulis's standards, photocopies are weapons of mass (commercial) destruction because they could be used to infringe, even if they're not. Personalpaper.me: yes, of course, you should be running things past lawyers - I like to say that startups should be looking for a Chief Legal Officer long before looking for a CFO or possibly even a CTO. Any long-time HN reader has sen multiple startups fall apart at the first hurdle because nobody stopped to consider whether there might be any legal ramifications. Now, I'm not a lawyer, and you shouldn't treat this as legal advice, but I'm pretty confident of my argument above and would be happy to refer this to some copyright specialists at Stanford if that will help. I think this startup is on far firmer ground than services like AirBNB. Get your Is dotted and your Ts crossed, and then get back into business.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Exactly, no one will care unless it's successful, and if it's successful it can be sold to the newspaper industry, as they no longer have any idea how to get people to buy dead trees smeared with ink.
GuiA 12y ago
I know the guys and gals at ustwo. They're a bunch of passionate, talented, hardworking people with minds that stretch a bit further ahead than the average technologist. They're internet surrealists (just check out Rando). One of their leaders (https://twitter.com/millsustwo https://twitter.com/millsustwo) is insane in the same way that Salvador Dali was. This is most definitely they did for fun in their off hours (and surely not a "startup" - ustwo is an ad agency), and got caught up in the excitement. And when they realized that actually, the one entity artists can't fuck with are copyright, they backed down. All the best to them! May the writer of this slightly arrogant TC piece have stale toast for breakfast tomorrow!
kevinwang 12y ago
MAN, I really detest this guy's writing style. Even if the content were good, I doubt I've read a more an article from an author that sounds more arrogant than this.
chazu 12y ago
> I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of a lasting cultural contribution. Uhm, Xerox? Apple? Commodore? Nintendo? Sony?
VxMxPx 12y ago
The author, above all wanted to get out the following points: - he's very important and powerful, - he (as a content creator) is making great cultural contribution, which no tech company can match, - tech companies cannot exists without people like him. On a side note. I really wonder weather he bought that gravestone photo, or just did Google image search. Hmmmm...
ASneakyFox 12y ago
I agree it would be copyright infringement. But its not malicious. Just a good concept that doesn't fit in to the current legal climate. For comparison. I read that tech crunch article via hacker news... on an app called flipboard. I wouldn't have read it without hn or flipboard to "deliver" it to me. The paper delivery system is only minimally different. Content creators. Please join 2014. Learn how content is consumed. change your business plan accordingly. Trying to hold on to pre internet mentality isnt going to work forever.

45 points by samx18 12y ago

I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of a lasting cultural contribution. Gee, you can't think of a technology business that has excelled in a completely different field that has nothing to do with it? Stop the presses! Would I critique Beethoven because he doesn't know how to scale a ruby on rails website to thousands of concurrent users? It's completely incoherent.

optimusclimb 12y ago
I would name Atari, but I'll instead just say that probably 1000s of video game companies have created "cultural contributions" that have driven youth creativity and imagination - possibly planting seeds that lead to careers. Apple? Remember watching Jurassic park and being blown away? Great claymation wasn't it? It's almost too easy to go on, so I'll stop there.
venomsnake 12y ago
What a expletive is this guy. The world would have been inasenly poorer in culture if not for TCP/IP ...

jeffe3000 12y ago

Meh this guy seems so full of himself. What if the company could act as a kind of printing service so that the user must posses the rights to access the material in first place, sounds like a good idea to me.

Mandatum 12y ago
These companies can and do exist, the onus is put onto the user to not submit materials they don't have permission/rights to print or share. This would be a little hard for printing personalized news websites that remove ads however..
- hamburglar 12y ago
  I don't know, it doesn't seem so cut and dried to me. I can print out web pages for my own personal use, and I can even run adblock while I do it. Can I remotely print them at my personal assistant's office and ask him to deliver them to me? It seems like the very specific personal use case for the content could provide a lot of wiggle room for lawyerin' if they really wanted to pursue it.
  - Mandatum 12y ago
    I agree but it likely wouldn't be worth the hassle. Technically they're taking content for different sources, stripping ads and reselling the content in a different media format. It'd be akin to recording a song off of the radio, removing ad breaks and selling it as a CD/downloadable MP3. Law may differ with publications and citing sources however.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Is it legal to record songs from the radio to a CD, even for personal use? If not then it's not like what they're doing at all. If it's legal to print a page your browser renders, then it should be legal to have someone else run the printer for you. "Removing ad breaks" is a simple browser function. It's an interesting business (not that I have that much use for paper printouts of web pages) and this article does a poor job of explaining why it should be shut down. Terrible attitude, too.

treelovinhippie 12y ago

If there is attribution, how is this any different to what Instapaper and Pocket and any RSS/content aggregator do? Why does printing it out suddenly become copyright infringement?

macspoofing 12y ago
Anybody? I don't see the difference either. Is it the act of charging $2 for the printing and shipping? And man, is this guy ever full of himself.
- almata 12y ago
  I don't think it's the fact of charging money that makes the difference. The creator of Instapaper did also charge money for the app itself (I don't know current owners, but they still probably do). To be fair I also don't see the difference (I mean regarding legality) between this new service and Instapaper.
- andrewfong 12y ago
  I'm not sure Instapaper is entirely in the clear either, but I think the printing and shipping actually do make a difference. With digital copies, you have the benefit of the DMCA (that is, copyright holders have to issue you a takedown notice for user-generated content before you can be held liable, assuming you comply with all of the other DMCA requirements). However, there is no DMCA for print.
kapitalx 12y ago
I'm also curious how this differs with flipboard.com and other RSS aggregators. What if he was to only charge for 'pager, shipping & handling' while the service itself becomes free?

abracar 12y ago

> "innocence and naivety are really no excuse for robbing other people of their paycheck." Says the guy who once failed to pay contributors... http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued-former-contributors http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued...

MichaelGG 12y ago

The ad removal option should be customizable, and rendering done by some headless browser. Then he'd literally be renting out a browser and printer. That shouldn't be copyright infringement, but as Zediva and others have shown, copyright law can twist its head around. So it might be possible to rule against this guy.

protomyth 12y ago
They would be earning money by distributing copyrighted works with no prior agreement. No change to process would mask this. Their business model is a copyright violation. [edit: why do you think FedEx / Kinkos will not copy a book for you and makes you sign a sheet declaring your ownership of material before copying for you]
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Would that also apply to a cyber cafe that rents out machines and I print a copy off? What if the printer is located behind the counter and someone has to go get it for me?
  - aethr 12y ago
    Printing a copy of an article for your own personal use is only legal due to fair use / format shifting provisions, which aren't guaranteed in every country. In the countries that do allow this, there are guidelines to ensure that your "fair use" is done in the spirit of the law. In Australia there are fairly clear suggestions for what consitutes personal use. A few guidelines are: - you have to do it yourself - you can make a single copy - you can share the copy with members of your household or family, but no one else - if it's a copy of a physical work such as a book or CD, you have to make the copy yourself (ie, you can't download a movie that you own on DVD) I think no matter how you spin it or try to make it sound like fair use, this is a clear case of unauthorised distribution of someone else's work for a profit. If the matter ended up in court, their intent to follow the spirit of the law would be hard to argue.
    - 12y ago

dk8996 12y ago

Techcrunch is still relevant?

anigbrowl 12y ago

Regular HN readers will know I often play Devil's Advocate for the existing copyright/content model - because I think a lot of HNers have a poor understanding of the economics of creation and publishing. And yet I think Personalpaper.me is a fine idea and that Milo Yiannopoulis is full of it. You’ve probably spotted the problem already: personalpaper.me represents copyright infringement, unauthorised republication and . In other words, its entire business model is predicated on theft. Wrong on every count. If users submit text to the site, that's very different from personalpaper.me pre-emptively scraping it and then offering that to the user as if it were their own. The fact that the transaction is user-initiated is key. It could be a problem if personalpaper.me started pre-emptively fetching articles based on the user's past preferences, eg scraping all editorials published by the New York Times each week because a user had submitted a week's worth of editorials previously. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Unauthorized republication doesn't hold up either. When you're sending it to an individual customer, by definition you're not publishing it, which implies an offering to the public. Taking the user's submission, printing it out, and sending it to the user is no different from someone submitting a printing job to Kinkos or some other fast-print service and having the results delivered. As for illicit distribution on an industrial scale, this just begs the question, depending on the same fallacy as the previous point. Sending one user's submissions back to the user that submitted them in a different form is a print job. The scale of the business is irrelevant because there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal about the basic model. By Milo Yiannopoulis's standards, photocopies are weapons of mass (commercial) destruction because they could be used to infringe, even if they're not. Personalpaper.me: yes, of course, you should be running things past lawyers - I like to say that startups should be looking for a Chief Legal Officer long before looking for a CFO or possibly even a CTO. Any long-time HN reader has sen multiple startups fall apart at the first hurdle because nobody stopped to consider whether there might be any legal ramifications. Now, I'm not a lawyer, and you shouldn't treat this as legal advice, but I'm pretty confident of my argument above and would be happy to refer this to some copyright specialists at Stanford if that will help. I think this startup is on far firmer ground than services like AirBNB. Get your Is dotted and your Ts crossed, and then get back into business.

fleitz 12y ago
Exactly, no one will care unless it's successful, and if it's successful it can be sold to the newspaper industry, as they no longer have any idea how to get people to buy dead trees smeared with ink.

GuiA 12y ago

I know the guys and gals at ustwo. They're a bunch of passionate, talented, hardworking people with minds that stretch a bit further ahead than the average technologist. They're internet surrealists (just check out Rando). One of their leaders (https://twitter.com/millsustwo https://twitter.com/millsustwo) is insane in the same way that Salvador Dali was. This is most definitely they did for fun in their off hours (and surely not a "startup" - ustwo is an ad agency), and got caught up in the excitement. And when they realized that actually, the one entity artists can't fuck with are copyright, they backed down. All the best to them! May the writer of this slightly arrogant TC piece have stale toast for breakfast tomorrow!

kevinwang 12y ago

MAN, I really detest this guy's writing style. Even if the content were good, I doubt I've read a more an article from an author that sounds more arrogant than this.

chazu 12y ago

> I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of a lasting cultural contribution. Uhm, Xerox? Apple? Commodore? Nintendo? Sony?

VxMxPx 12y ago

The author, above all wanted to get out the following points: - he's very important and powerful, - he (as a content creator) is making great cultural contribution, which no tech company can match, - tech companies cannot exists without people like him. On a side note. I really wonder weather he bought that gravestone photo, or just did Google image search. Hmmmm...

ASneakyFox 12y ago

I agree it would be copyright infringement. But its not malicious. Just a good concept that doesn't fit in to the current legal climate. For comparison. I read that tech crunch article via hacker news... on an app called flipboard. I wouldn't have read it without hn or flipboard to "deliver" it to me. The paper delivery system is only minimally different. Content creators. Please join 2014. Learn how content is consumed. change your business plan accordingly. Trying to hold on to pre internet mentality isnt going to work forever.