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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

#191

Post by allait »

potatolicious wrote: post #188
Peaker wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

BSD, Apache and many other licenses allow exactly this: derived works may be released under proprietary license.

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

#192

Post by edanm »

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 waiting for a tool like this ever since I got into Web Design. I just couldn't understand why it didn't exist already - it's such a clearly valuable thing to have.

A lot of designers right now (like ronaldj in another comment) think that it's not practical or unnecessary. They think that the design will come out too rigid or it's too subjective.

But the thing is, as someone who just does a few pages once in a while, I don't care about this - I just want to be able to throw up a button on a page, choose it's place/size/color, and then be able to just say "add rounded corners" with a checkbox, instead of having to research on the web the various ways to do that, and finding out why certain solutions will work, but not in IE6, and why JS solutions will work and have their own problems, etc.

Such a tool will open up a whole new set of people into web design, which is a huge net plus.

By the way, matt1 from HN has built a tool that's working on doing this: www.leandesigns.com. It's not perfect yet, but it's already pretty great and saves me lots of time. Check it out.

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

#193

Post by Peaker »

potatolicious wrote: post #188
Peaker wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, given that I oppose copyright, I support the GPL -- exactly because it uses copyright restrictions to neutralize copyright restrictions.

In other words, the only restrictions placed by the GPL are those that restrict use of copyright -- and I definitely support those.

Apache and BSD licenses are basically only anti-plagiarizing, afaik.

How would companies profit from a work that everyone can freely copy, in a way that does not add value to society and indeed to the original author?

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

#194

Post by richardw »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #112

One thing I see coming up over and over in these comments is that people get upset that this is called "stealing". The logic goes that stealing deprives the original owner, and since 37signals hasn't been deprived of the code and images that were copied (the hosting is a separate issue), this doesn't constitute theft. While that may be a good argument that file-sharing is not "stealing" (though may still be unethical…

But Javascript that has been hand-coded to offer uniqueness in identity and function, is largely considered fair game. Front-end specialists use view-source as a learning technique.

I think many of these arguments lean in the direction of the interests of the person making the statement. For example, I have been impacted by file-sharing sites so I feel nothing but satisfaction when they're taken down. I'd imagine the forums where movie creatives spend their time are generally filled with high-conviction arguments about 'downloading=stealing'. The startup industry hit the roof when a few colour combinations and png's are taken, but feels nothing for old-media industries whose bedrock is being eroded.

There's a lot of 'grey' in there, no obvious answers. Personally I don't torrent, but I have friends that do. I'll view-source but make it hard to steal my own source. Unique visual identity? Same as anything else - better have a lawyer advise you before you upload it for the world to see, and enough firepower to protect it.

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

#196

Post by vacri »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #132
vacri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure all those 300-byte images have the 37signals servers at melting point. I don't think this is the horse you want to ride.

I'll take that pony ride. Someone who's happy to steal from someone else just because that person is richer than them and they're only stealing little things still, IMO, lacks morally. With proviso's which aren't I don't think pertinent to this current situation (eg immediate life-preservation). Your argument is basically the shoplifter's manifesto - the store is rich, I only took some of their stuff, it's barely a d…

No, my argument is that of all the things wrong with this situation, stealing 300-byte bandwidth is so far down the list it's unimportant. That's what I meant by this is not the horse - there are far better horses to ride in this race.

It's nice of you to tell me what my argument is, but you have it utterly wrong.

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

#197

Post by bandushrew »

Peaker wrote: post #170
bandushrew wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design done well is fantastically useful, fantastically creative work. It is an art, and you do not reward those who are good at it by copying not just their ideas but their actual works. I agree, as a developer who does not have much talent for design, that it would be a 'better' world for me if I could just grab the html from places that do have that talent and not suffer for it. It is hard in an area where you don…

I haven't tried design, so I don't know if I have talent for it or not. But I do have talent for programming, and I don't mind people copying my knowledge and work there, assuming: A) a world where everyone does so, B) credit is given.

Fair enough. I am also happy to share my knowledge, such as it is, with whoever wants it. Some of my code I am happy to share, some I make money off and I would rather nobody copy wholesale to compete, some I have done on behalf of clients and cannot make the decision on. The nice thing about the world as it is, is you and I mostly have a choice about how we share our work and where/when we make our source code available.

The interesting thing about designers is that on the whole, they have less of a choice. Everything that they do is out in the open and - if they do their job well - lots of people see it and want to copy it.

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

#198

Post by Peaker »

bandushrew wrote: post #197
Peaker wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried design, so I don't know if I have talent for it or not. But I do have talent for programming, and I don't mind people copying my knowledge and work there, assuming: A) a world where everyone does so, B) credit is given.

Fair enough. I am also happy to share my knowledge, such as it is, with whoever wants it. Some of my code I am happy to share, some I make money off and I would rather nobody copy wholesale to compete, some I have done on behalf of clients and cannot make the decision on. The nice thing about the world as it is, is you and I mostly have a choice about how we share our work and where/when we make our source code avail…

One of the bad things about the world as it is, is it encourages people to release things closed, because they can make more financially that way -- and we get a very closed world.

In an open world, we could all be making derivative works of awesome works and advance the state of the art, rather than having to duplicate it first, before advancing it.

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

#199

Post by simonb »

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…

http://pllop.it/ (disclaimer: I'm an adviser) does some of what you are describing (with a lot more to come), but is positioned more as a product than as tool to be integrated.

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

#200

Post by revorad »

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…

Thank you for making this. It's one of those things which I have been tempted to make for a long time.

You might want to look into the editors of Optimizely and VWO. Even though they are A/B testing tools, I've used them just for thinking through quick design changes. From looking at the code they generate, it looked like they are just altering the CSS using jquery (often just assigning absolute positions to elements). So maybe you are already doing something better than that.

Have you looked into working on a small subset of web design? For example, make your editor work really well for Woothemes or sites built on Twitter Bootstrap. It will give you constraints to make at least one kind of popular design format really easy to edit and also possibly an easier way to get users because people recognise those brands.

I don't want to pivot your pivot, but positioning your product primarily for editing existing web pages, rather than creating news ones from scratch might be a good idea.

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