What we did when a patent troll asked for our help

Scientology certainly operates in violation of the letter of the law - framing people for murder is illegal, I'm pretty sure - they just avoid conviction by bribing local judges and so on.

I don't see why you can't just tell the patent troll to go away. Are they being punished for telling you what they do? Yes, but if patent trolls have to operate furtively, not telling anyone what they do, on pain of being denied service in many places, the world is a better place. Make the world a better place.

I don't see why you are obligated to lend a helping hand to evil that happens to be legal. I'm not saying to throw a punch at someone doing something legal that you don't like; I'm saying that you are not obligated ethically or morally to do business with them. Or if the law has something to do with ethics in your world, then consider that since it's legal to deny service to patent trolls, it must be all right, right?

And I don't see what's unethical about one adult selling another adult neuroactive pharmaceuticals, but let's leave that aside for now.

Drawing the line around what's "legal" says to me, "We'd rather not think about ethics, so we're going to draw the line somewhere defensible that we don't have to think about." In another world this might make sense, but not in a country that criminalizes marijuana and has, well, patent trolls. To respect that line, and not try to promote good or retard evil any further than that, is just an abdication of ethics.

With that said, I respect Less Annoying CRM for trying to think about the issue at all and post about it, which most companies don't. I mean, they got the wrong answer, but most companies don't even try or think at all, so this blog post actually does rate LACRM in the top 10% of all companies in my book.

> a process that doesn't require the customer to get blogtweetHN traction before the company opens a dialogue.

To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen a story where someone complained about an App Store rejection, and that story led to an approval. Typically the story is accompanied by other action, such as actually talking to the App Store review board, and it's the other action that leads to the approval.

I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether your primary responsibility to protect the interests of your real users (the non-patent trolls) or to take a stand against people you don't like.

This would be a much easier decision if we sold a discrete product. A grocery store or Amazon.com can deny someone service and then they can go shop somewhere else. No big deal. Our users store their most important business data with us for years. How can our legitimate users trust us if they think they might wake up one day and be banned?

Thanks for the comment, this is definitely an interesting discussion.

By the way, I can tell you that I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone using the software for something illegal but not necessarily unethical (like selling drugs). The problem is that as soon as they tell you they're doing that, you're effectively assisting them in the illegal activity which makes me a criminal. That's the main reason why we have to take action when someone tells us they're using the CRM to do something illegal (not that it's ever happened).

I agree somewhat and I disagree somewhat. At one point, I helped to moderate a religious discussion community, several hundred listed members. The Community Founders had set up a bunch of odd rules which sort of made sense given the history. For example, when you mix religion and Internet, civility becomes an issue. But after some situations where both of the insult-flingers were telling the mods "hey, cut it out, we're having fun here!" they had decided that we would only get involved when someone complained. That worked until people started trolling other members and then tried to complain when they were abused in return, as if they hadn't been trying to pick a fight in the first place. So they had also decreed that we might issue warnings for wasting our time, to get rid of these new trolls. But then people became afraid of complaining, because this process was difficult to make honest and transparent.

The "lower level" mods among us mostly tried to keep the peace without disciplinary actions, then: we would just say, "hey, this discussion is getting too heated: cool down, come back tomorrow, we're all humans here." This wasn't too bad, but some of our mods had these sorts of "itching-for-a-showdown" personalities, and I guess people always were a little worried about the powers we technically held. In the end it was gaining a reputation for being too abrasive, which meant good-hearted religious people didn't come by anymore. It reminded me of nothing so much as Sartre's statement, "we have the war we deserve."

I guess the lesson that I'm trying to articulate is that, especially in Internet communities, transparency is necessary to alleviate fear, but inaction can lead to your community passively falling astray from its goals, discouraging the members who you want.

When community is at stake, as it is in Facebook and Google, there is a higher-order priority. You have to decrease worldsuck and foster awesome[1]. That is a somewhat arbitrary priority, and creating rules and transparency around it can seem like an impossible task.

[1] Cheers, nerdfighters.

Right, hence the reason they do technically have that right, but don't expressly have that right.