YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by Peaker » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 9:38 AM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #233

jaekwon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have no rules is the simplest and most fair way for a creative professional to convert their effort into scarce attention, which leads to scarce resources. If you do not do anything new and worthy of my attention tomorrow, I do not want you to have my bread.

People should have control over their creations long enough to make it worth the effort. I might as well go do something more profitable if I can't make a living from my own creations in the way that's most efficient (licensing). Encouraging creation is the point of copyright. We shouldn't throw the whole system out just because a few rogue organizations are abusing it.

> People should have control over their creations long enough to make it worth the effort.

We don't actually know that it would enhance authorship. Current restrictions on copying also heavily restrict authorship -- because most authorship could have been derivative works, and those are disallowed.

So it is not clear whether we're helping authorship or destroying it, and I'm betting on the latter.

Also, authors have control over their works until they distribute them -- and that is enough to make money. Maybe it would make significantly less money, but that too isn't clear that it will not be enough to be worth the effort.

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

#242

Post by Peaker » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 9:43 AM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #202

Peaker wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without copyright (the law) there would be an even bigger incentive to obfuscate things or move them to the cloud. DRM only exists because the law by itself doesn't work. This is not an easy problem to fix.

DRM is backed by the law, and without its backing it would become a laughable measure that is completely ignored by everyone after the first hacker releases a DRM-free version that is completely legal.

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

#243

Post by jtheory » Sat, Feb 11, 2012, 9:07 PM UTC

jaekwon wrote: post #228

jtheory wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand the reasons why many people who will argue strongly for fair use, etc., still find this wrong, you have to look two steps ahead. Let's say 37 signals has done the extensive work to create a page design that really converts. And we live in the world where anyone else who wants to lift their carefully-researched design can do so in 10 minutes, and reap the same benefits. Unfortunately, that would put 37 s…

Yes, they are at a disadvantage, but they would still be at a local and global advantage. Local because they are first to put the innovation out, and they will naturally gain attention. Global because this system lifts everybody up overall. There is this midway hump that people can't seem to see over, but if what I say is true, the barrier will be broken and stay broken one day. Plenty of good innovators (and artists…

This is days old now, but I don't cycle back often, unfortunately....

This doesn't add up, though. They're only at a very local advantage, because if their competitors have the same feature the next day, only very few folks will realize who had it first.

And globally, everyone gets the same advantage (everyone is lifted up), but the creators who put in X months of work have paid X months for that advantage, and everyone else paid nothing. So, add that up and you get red, for the creators only. Everyone else can thus charge pennies for whatever service, while the creators need to recoup their costs, so they can't... so they go out of business.

Or they change their strategy.

It gets pretty clear that to "win" in this game, you need to either be the #2 site with any new feature (be ready to snap it up as soon as the competition brings it out), or find some contorted way you can innovate without anyone else nicking it.