Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

And Lyft can access Uber's API, unless they're scrupulously avoiding doing so for legal reasons, which doesn't seem all that likely. There's a lot of stuff that is technically illegal, but we'd all be paralyzed if we followed the letter of the law (or every contract we sign) precisely. I'm sure Lyft and Uber BOTH understand this, as they're both generally operating in direct violation of local taxi regulations.

It's funny to read so many people acting like violating a ToS is some moral horror, apparently unaware that the ToS is routinely violated by normal usage, and that like most contracts, they're intentionally written that way. The goal of this, as all contracts, is to a) have a reason to sue someone they dislike and b) have a defense against suits from someone that dislikes them. Since the user has no individual/direct bargaining power, the contract will always be massively favorable to the company.

Businesses sue each other for breach of contract all the time. It could even be argued that this is not fundamentally immoral, which is why it's a civil matter; disagreements in business will sometimes occur, and resorting to the civil dispute resolution system that's in place for exactly this reason is not necessarily a sign of malfeasance.

No one reads ToS except lawyers, and then only when they're looking for something to sue over and/or decide how much likely they're going to get sued. Like most contracts, it doesn't become a consideration until something goes south.

In the football analogy, the opposing team could easily concoct a situation where a ToS prevents an opposing team member from watching the video of the game by creating an interstitial landing page that says "You must agree to the Terms to view this site", the person checking OK, and then viewing the video that technically was prefixed by mandatory agreement to a document that buried language like "This video must not be used against us in any way." under 50 paragraphs of boilerplate. This is unfair because they were able to say "Please don't compete with us, k?" in a potentially technically legally-binding way? Come on now.

>There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.

OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.

Is it impersonation if I just don't go in wearing the opposing team's colors? What if I go wearing the playing team's jersey? What if I'm the coach of that other team so I wear a hat and sunglasses? Where's the line of "impersonation"?

This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't", even if they're able to find a way to make this technically legally binding.

Morality does NOT require us to give up as soon as someone tries to block us.

>"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right?

Sure. I'm not disputing that this was almost definitely a technical violation of the CFAA. The CFAA is a disgustingly overbroad and outdated law, and Lyft finagling their process to get under its cover shouldn't be a moral indictment of Uber. [The bright side of this is that if similar lawsuits start coming out against some other big players, the law might finally change.]

Are licensing agreements automatically eval'd into moral absolutes? If we take such a strict position we can never win against any moderately powerful entity.

The path to ascendancy for most companies involves "avoid a lawsuit", because frequently there are laws on the books that could take them down. Google is a great example; their conduct technically violates the CFAA and rampantly violates copyright, even though the courts ended up giving them a pass in Perfect 10 v. Amazon because they're afraid to shut down Google.

>Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?

I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".

When you enter business, you know you are entering a competitive market where part of the game is getting an advantage over your competitors, and their attempting to do so over you. Concocting a complex legal apparatus that gives some meat to any potential lawsuit between competitors is routine. It doesn't affect the morality of the process, despite the theatrics of the court.

So although you are right that it's a competitive world, you have to compete fairly - and be seen to compete fairly - or you will drive your customers away. You do need consider what people have been "socialised" to think (which is what morals are, really) because otherwise your competitors will have a significant edge.

Look at it this way. It is beneficial to society for entities (people or companies) to spend their energy improving their own service rather than degrading their competitors', because this results in the best possible service being available to that society. This is what all our anti-competitive laws - and innate sense of fairness - spring from.

I once heard from an Uber driver that the CEOs of the two companies hated each other and have gone crazy competing against each other.

Either it's over a woman or they're really messed up in the head. Regardless, this is very disappointing.

You're playing with the words, rather than the meaning behind them, and you're smart enough to know that. You're mixing up morality and legality a lot, which I find interesting. I wouldn't say that they have much to do with each other. I'd consider corporations (generally speaking) as amoral entities, striving against the bounds of punishment under the law, and the law as an amoral construct acting as the buffer and interface between other entities (individuals, corporations, other nations). Its job is to act in the interests of the people, one aspect of which is encouraging, but also regulating, the competition in the market. Working toward an even playing field, and correcting when it falls short of providing that.

> I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".

I'd argue that it crosses the threshold into behavior that should fall outside the bounds of legal competition. We're better off with many weaker competitors than we are with one strong one.