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YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

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Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#181

Post by nick_dm »

jakejake wrote: post #173

This is an honest question, I'd be curious to hear how you might differentiate this from music and movie sharing? I hope that people won't just down-vote me without responding. I am truly curious because I myself have mixed feelings about all of these issues as both a content creator as well as a consumer. It's hard for me to understand why certain types of art must be free for all, but others are defended vigorously…

I don't see a huge difference between this and music/movie piracy. I feel it's down to the financial/commercial nature of the infringement and also the scale. I think this is fairly consistent with the legal viewpoint, if the copyright owner was suing for damages what could they reasonably claim?

It's one thing for somebody to copy a DVD for a few friends or family members, worse if they put it on BitTorrent, and worse still if they start selling bootleg copies.

I don't think there would be such a big outcry over this if it was a personal website getting a few hundred hits a month, or even if it was a moderately successful non-commercial project. Curebit had already received funding from Y-combinator and I assume their team were working on it full time, so in my opinion that's rather different to somebody cutting a few corners on a weekend project.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#182

Post by jacalata »

stevenp wrote: post #176
jakejake wrote: post #173

This is an honest question, I'd be curious to hear how you might differentiate this from music and movie sharing? I hope that people won't just down-vote me without responding. I am truly curious because I myself have mixed feelings about all of these issues as both a content creator as well as a consumer. It's hard for me to understand why certain types of art must be free for all, but others are defended vigorously…

There's a difference between downloading music (albeit illegally) and taking someone else's work and trying to pass it off as your own. When I download a Duran Duran album, I don't post it on my website and claim that I made the album and attempt to sell it as my own (as much as I wish I was Simon LeBon). This isn't an issue of piracy -- it's an issue of plagiarism, which is quite different in my opinion.

How about we compare it to someone who put up a youtube video of themselves lip-syncing to Duran Duran? They're not necessarily claiming that the music is theirs, they're just using some random song they found to provide a background/prompt for their own performance.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#183

Post by baddox »

potatolicious wrote: post #166
Peaker wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is the world a better place when you have to reimplement the design from scratch - as opposed to a world where anyone can copy a design (assuming some credit is given)? Sounds like the latter world will free up a lot of resources for more useful creative work.

Because of the fundamental concept of property, and ownership, and the right to control your own creations? It's one thing to voluntarily release something into the public domain (or enable its direct re-use via licenses like Creative Commons). It's another thing to say that all work should be public property, usable as long as credit is given. Or are you suggesting that everything belongs to the People, comrade? Eve…

True, it is another thing, but I'll say it: all work (obviously, in this context of digital "intellectual property") should be public. I left "property" off the end of the sentence for the same reason I put "intellectual property" in quotes: I don't believe that property rights make sense when applied to abstract, non-scarce things like ideas and digital works. 

This really isn't about controlling the fruits of your labor, because creative works are really only valuable if they're distributed. If you want to design a website and keep it secret on your local machine, then by all means property rights protect it (i.e. it's illegal to steal your laptop). But if you distribute it on a global network where people freely trade bits, I don't believe you should have the right to control which bits people can copy and which bits they can't.

Both choices (keeping the website secret or publishing it) constitute your legal rights to the fruits of your labor. But once someone gets the bits onto their computer with your consent (by visiting your public website), I don't believe you should have the right to control what they can do with those bits. 

If you like, I believe you have the right to perform any obfuscation you want to with your digital works, or find ways of providing scarce (non-copyable) value. DRM and software as a service are examples of these, respectively.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#184

Post by waitwhat »

hippo33 wrote: post #125
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, perhaps both of those companies used purchased themes or artwork from something like themeforest as a starting point. But this definitely looks bad, particularly in light of the 37signals dustup. EDIT: Looks that way for the rocket ship at least: http://www.bigstockphoto.com/image-5418738/stock-vector-retr...

Hey -- yeah, I'm one of the co-founders of LaunchBit, and it's true that on a startup budget, we bought the image from iStockphoto.

You should be aware that the iStockPhoto (and BigStockPhoto) license specifically excludes using their content in logos.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#185

Post by shad0wfax »

stevenp wrote: post #176
jakejake wrote: post #173

This is an honest question, I'd be curious to hear how you might differentiate this from music and movie sharing? I hope that people won't just down-vote me without responding. I am truly curious because I myself have mixed feelings about all of these issues as both a content creator as well as a consumer. It's hard for me to understand why certain types of art must be free for all, but others are defended vigorously…

There's a difference between downloading music (albeit illegally) and taking someone else's work and trying to pass it off as your own. When I download a Duran Duran album, I don't post it on my website and claim that I made the album and attempt to sell it as my own (as much as I wish I was Simon LeBon). This isn't an issue of piracy -- it's an issue of plagiarism, which is quite different in my opinion.

Maybe its more fundamental? - People do it if they know they aren't going to be exposed (like downloading illegally) and they won't if there was a way to expose them (say via facebook/blog)? Just a theory.

I still believe downloading illegally is wrong, but thats my opinion.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#186

Post by ncw »

tim_h wrote: post #180
west1737 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but changing the little checks to little middle finger bullets would have been a much more elegant method of retaliation.

What if Curebit had an important demo/presentation that was botched as a result of this? I think the response should be tailored to provide them with a learning opportunity rather than to hurt their startup. A private naming/shaming like betageek suggested would probably do the trick.

Surely that is the risk they took when using content that they have no control over.

If the demo/presentation is that important, then it would be wise to remove that risk by using their own design and their own images.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#187

Post by potatolicious »

danbmil99 wrote: post #169
potatolicious wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the fundamental concept of property, and ownership, and the right to control your own creations? It's one thing to voluntarily release something into the public domain (or enable its direct re-use via licenses like Creative Commons). It's another thing to say that all work should be public property, usable as long as credit is given. Or are you suggesting that everything belongs to the People, comrade? Eve…

> Because of the fundamental concept of property, and ownership, and the right to control your own creations? heh, good thing this crowd sincerely applies that ethic to music and visual art/entertainment.

I don't think the community in general objects to ownership of music and visual art/entertainment. The objection usually centers around the draconian and unethical ways of enforcing this ownership.

You can support the concept of intellectual ownership without supporting the draconian (and sometimes illegal) means by which some people would like to enforce said ownership. We can also accept the reality and futility of perfect control of your creations without relinquishing moral claim to our creative work.

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#188

Post by potatolicious »

Peaker wrote: post #171
potatolicious wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the fundamental concept of property, and ownership, and the right to control your own creations? It's one thing to voluntarily release something into the public domain (or enable its direct re-use via licenses like Creative Commons). It's another thing to say that all work should be public property, usable as long as credit is given. Or are you suggesting that everything belongs to the People, comrade? Eve…

But we're talking about ideas and expressions, not property. Yes, the WBC should be allowed to copy if everyone else is. The benefits seem to me to dwarf the downsides.

So you oppose the GPL, Apache, and BSD licenses? Or really, any software license? After all, they are conditions for the distribution and derivation of a creative work.

You support private companies taking this freely-given resource, creating products from it, profiting from them, and not release the source as the conditions demand?

Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

#190

Post by edanm »

matt1 wrote: post #62
nirvana wrote: post #60

This incident strikes me as a glaring example of how broken web design is. A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool, and then publish to a web platform that support it.... than copying the source and then editing it in a text editor. I know in the past such WYSIWYG tools were too rigid and thus we have a generation of designers that work in text.... but it just s…

I've been slowly building a high fidelity WYSIWYG web design tool called Lean Designs that might interest you: http://www.leandesigns.com It's hard to get folks to switch over to a less-than-complete web design tool (and building an unconstrained editor that generates quality HTML is a challenge), but I think it will get there eventually. I'd love to hear your feedback on the current product or advice on how to proce…

I'd like to give a big recommendation for this program. I've been watching LeanDesigns from the beginning, and I haven't used it much, not being a serious designer. But when I do need to build a site, I turn to LeanDesigns to make my life much easier.

I don't do everything in it, and the code that comes out isn't quite production ready, but it's damn close.

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