People do it for the reputation. It seems the only solution is to have one's identity linked across separate places on the Internet. Many are opposed to that for reasons such as the negative exposure you're giving people in your article.
> I saw no mention of Max Woolf, minimaxir, or any mention of the original visualization by the post author.
I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that.
There are a lot of open source licenses that give more protections to the original author. I have a theory that too many people choose MIT just because it is simple, but don't think through what they actually want from a license.
I think that's his point - he doesn't want a license to protect this, at the end he even explicitly states in spite of this he won't change his process - he just wishes people wouldn't be jerks about this kind of thing. It felt, to me, like he doesn't think he should need a license to enforce this kind of behavior, and instead is going to just call out that the guy is being a jerk.
It's also kind of stupid to rip someone off. Assuming all the information here is accurate, this could really come back to bite the guy who ripped him off - someone is going to google what you've done and will end up with this blog post slamming you. If it was an honest mistake, the author should probably take the time to fix the posts and apologize.
I imagine it is exceptionally unlikely that he would go to court to enforce any kind of breach of license. Therefore encoding his expectations within the license is approximately equivalent to simply hoping that people not act like jerks (which is how he chooses to handle it currently).
No need to go to court: DCMA is a thing and followed by Github, so at least getting his code embed in the medium post down shouldn't be too hard if he wants to do so, since removing the copyright info is pretty clear breach of license. If it's worth "it" is another question: probably not.
EDIT: and also IMHO a dick move without talking to him first. Just wanted to remind people that these tools also can work for "normal" people, not just against them.
Well, actually, the MIT license requires you not strip the attribution if it was present:
"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
"
In this case, it was present in the LICENSE file in the github repository he links to.
Not preserving it is a clear license violation in this case, since they took substantial portions of the software.
Derivatives absolutely don't have to be MIT as well. MIT/X11 is not viral. It only requires attribution, but you are free to modify, redistribute and even commercialize as you like, and to re-license your derivative work, as long as you simply give attribution for the original work.
But it doesn't mean "claim it as your own", as long as it's not significantly altered.
No, you cannot relicense. Only the original authors can do that. You can add on top of the existing code stuff of your own under a different license, so that the combination of the two is under both licenses. Practically, it amounts to almost the same, but for example, you cannot remove conditions such as attribution, which only the original authors can do via a license that does not require attribution.
Right, I didn't word that part very well indeed.
You still have to retain the original license in any case but it only covers that particular bit of code. Any product you create built on a MIT component can be licensed as you pleased.
It depends what was meant by derivative and how this impacts the original code (encapsulated, modified, etc...). I was thinking more of when you use an MIT-licensed lib or 3rd party tool, or when you would reuse a code-snippet licensed as MIT and modify it. License and attributions remain, but only for that part of the code.
You do add yourself to the copyright list. If your contributions are accepted, you are considered an author and the other authors must get your permission before changing the license.
This is why a lot of projects (ie clojure) require some sort of contributor agreement so that the original authors can retain control while still accepting contributions.
"If I made changes to the software, would I just add myself to the Copyright list of authors?
"
Here's a super-long answer:
You can if you want attribution. the problem with this is that the licenses refer to the "above copyright notice", and most people put the license in headers.
So as you might imagine, if you have 50 files, with different contributors, and they all list their names in the appropriate notices so that you have different notices on each file, well then,
Congrats, now people using the software have to reproduce 50 notices!
This becomes a mess, and it also turns out that other than the license referring to it, the notice is legally pointless.
It is cargo cult lawyering to have copyright notices for legal reasons. It isn't required in any berne signatory country (all 168 of them: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?treaty_id=15). It has basically no legal usefulness[1]
As a result, the better practice is to just use something that is legally okay, but more inclusive.
This is why when chromium was released, i had them put "The chromium authors" as the copyright owner. It's legally correct/valid, but means nobody has to add stuff to it.
[1] In the US, it prevents the innocent infringement defense. But the innocent infringement defense requires that
A. you bought a license
B. from someone you reasonably believed owned the code because of the incorrect copyright notice
Because of the legal standard, I cannot find a single successful innocent infringement defense since Berne.
Licenses are a way of codifying rights and responsibilities.
Ass-hattery is often completely orthogonal to this concern. Just because I have the right to do something doesn't mean I should, and it doesn't mean I am not being a jerk by exercising that right it certain contexts.
(Of course, i agree with your general point that you shouldn't need a license to get people to stop doing any of this, but such is society and it has been for thousands of years)
Most communities have some unwritten social rules which participants have to adhere to (or be shunned). The open-source software community is open to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, so it's disingenuous to pretend they will all get along without conflict/misunderstandings.
He acknowledges that MIT doesn't prevent this in the conclusion:
> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. However, I’m not going to change my workflow; I will still open-source my data visualization code, and it will have the same licensing. It wouldn’t be fair to punish others who have made very good use of my code.
> But outright using the code, without any attribution, and claiming it as your own when it blatantly isn’t, is a jerk move.
"> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. "
He's legally wrong, however ;-)
Let me clarify:
The MIT license does not prevent someone using the code to do a visualization without crediting him.
It does, however, prevent taking those snippets without reproducing the copyright notice
For anyone who wants to argue about the copyrightability of it, i'll point out
A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code
B. While copyright has some notion of de-minimis, it's not a
bright line in the code space. Copyright is more about originality. You can't really say, less than ten lines, do what you want. 10 lines of java does nothing. 10 lines of perl could be an entire OS.
>A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code
If I were a Google exec I'd strongly consider dumping a few million in sponsoring some developers to make postgres's clustering options feature competitive with RAC. You'd never unseat it in some places but a long term commitment to support development from a heavy hitter like Google might go a long way.
I've noticed there is a sub-population within open source who believe there is an etiquette to be followed that goes above and beyond the strict license terms. Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution and not just making a near carbon copy for personal gain or aggrandizement when these terms are not in the license, and so many ignore them, perhaps even literally being ignorant of these social norms they are violating to the irritation of the original author.
Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution
No, there isn't. Which, by the norms and conventions of the gift economy that open source software defines, jerks like this should be named and shamed for this sort of parasitism. Which is what this blog article is doing.
Copyright law specifies who owns (and therefore who controls) a 'work.' In the case of software, it does not specify licensing terms. (As opposed to lyrics, musical composition, musical recordings ... which do have compulsory licensing terms specified in law.)
Neither the output of computer software, nor the ideas themselves within software, are protected by copyright. Not providing attribution is simply douchey.
That's why I preface the post title with "please." I know that attribution isn't required and I can't enforce it, but pretending the original analysis doesn't exist is spiteful.
Are you going to continue using the MIT license in the future? Or will you use a more restrictive license to encourage people to give you more explicit attribution in the future?
Just following the minimum requirements of a license may not be a nice thing to do, but if you're going to be upset because someone did something you said they could but that you didn't really want them too, I can't really sympathize.
Totally unsolicited advice here, dismiss it if you like - consider removing the guy's full name from your posts. As you can see, people are quick to repeat it here in this thread and I'm sure elsewhere. The guy did something wrong and in your words "spiteful", being (much less) spiteful in return isn't going to make anything better.
When I was a teenager I did something similar and was caught. I ripped off someone else's site design. The guy wasn't happy, but his response taught me a lot. I'm thankful he didn't put my name out there for the vigilantes of the internet to come calling and I learned to respect the work and creativity of others.
I think it's even more spiteful when you write a blog post like this when someone uses your code in the way you intended it to be used. There was no slander against you, was there? If so, that's already covered by laws other than copyright. And if you want more attribution (I'm not sure if the authors' analysis counts as a "substantial" reproduction of your own work), then use a 3-clause BSD, which says,
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer.
That way, any reproduction of your work that wouldn't fall under fair use requires attribtuion. I'm not sure if the "substantial" part of the MIT license is the same scope as "fair use", but without that adjective, the BSD license might be more explicit about requiring attribution.
I have had my own free software used in ways I don't like, but I don't write a blog post about it. After all, I made it free. You want to insult me, mock me, satirise me, print out the source code and wipe your butt with it; go ahead. That's part of what free software must allow.
Point is, require with legalese what you want people to do. It's your prerogative.
Above all, don't code call copying "stealing". This is not theft. It might not even be copyright infringement. Calling it "stealing" is undue indignation that indicates that they did something worse than what you explicitly allowed.
Nonsense. The author still has a right to call him out in public and say "this jerk lied and claimed my work as his own". He did not give that right away when he used a permissive license.
Terms like substantial portion are for lawyers to decide. If you're not a contract lawyer your best bet is to always play it safe and assume the worst possible outcome for yourself. Huge lawsuits driven by huge corporations have used less as ammunition.
I don't think anyone was "pretending the original analysis doesn't exist". Your willingness to believe that it was a deliberate act of deception rather than a minor error (I'm not even convinced it was an error, truly) is more troubling than anything else I'm reading here. Is open source really this toxic?
> I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that.
False! This is the license:
>>
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
Permission is hereby granted [blabla do whatever you want] subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
>>
That copyright notice must be included and it wasn't.
It is tough to decide whether or not to call out someone when they blatantly steal your code.
On one hand, you want to take the high road and not have to squeal. But on the other hand, if you don't speak up, that person will just keep on stealing from others, in theory.
Personally, I think the best thing to do is to call them out in a public but quiet way that doesn't make it sound like you are offended, e.g. posting a link to your work in the comments with a "Glad you could use my code: (link)". That way they know that you know that they did it, and that anyone who looks at the comments will see but maybe not make the connection that they stole it. This way you get the point across without having to publicly beat them over the head with it.
I think OP's actions were proportional to the offense. You slag someone (or someone's work) off in public, and/or rip someone off publicly, you should expect to be publicly flogged.
The folks doing the ripping off here probably don't even see it as such. While it's easy to attribute something like this to malice, it's saner to attribute it to staggering incompetence and lack of introspection. Pity the poor fools who are so unable to do something original that they must stoop to claiming someone else's originality as their own.
I've seen exactly this sort of thing before in all sorts of walks of life, from school work to academia, from corporate environments to international politics - a bunch of mediocre, confused, out of their depth but don't know it types take someone (singular or plural) else's idea, barely repackage it, claim it as their own, wholeheartedly convince themselves that it is their own, and run with it - far too often somehow winning the battle of hearts and minds, as when the original author comes along going "Oi!", their readership or allies go "sore loser".
I've learned by this point in life to take people using my work, even if they do so spitefully or in ignorance, as a compliment. Fabricators usually get shown up sooner or later.
Originally there was the concept of reblogging where one site would publish something original and others would publish a small excerpt with a clearly defined link to them.
From there came the idea of the [via] link where another site published its own article based on information from the original publisher and attributed a small link.
And from there it seems like there is just so much republished content that sites think of the information as just public information and glean from wherever without any sort of attribution.
I find this amusing because I'm generally suspicious of sites that don't include some form of reference to wherever the information was retrieved - perhaps a habit from when I did more stuff in academia. Things don't exist in vacuum except things that are basically pure opinion articles - just about everything else is based on something and should probably be showing it.
I think AOL pioneered "discrete attribution", years ago their content farming strategy leaked and one of the big priorities was "recirculating traffic" by ensuring as many links as possible go to their own properties -
Throughout most of human history, any information you could find was always public. Private information is a social construct, and not one that often advantages individuals to concern themselves with.
One thing I've noticed is that those who come out of the woodwork to mitigate the impact of thieving tend to be of the same mentality as the thief.
Yes, a person can normally defend many matters without being attacked as identifying with any one matter. Yet this is one of those subjects, like plagiarism, where you would have to be ignorant or a thug to justify it.
They are probably the same people who complained when their teachers in college gave them "C"'s because they didn't properly attribute, also. I guess some people don't ever learn to be nice citizens.
(Note: Yes, I know the MIT license doesn't require it. I can read. But reading the Medium article, they KNEW they were replacing minimaxir, etc with "The Author". Doing this is really showing their ass.)
> The folks doing the ripping off here probably don't even see it as such.
But I'm pretty sure many of them would if they saw it happening to their original works.
A fair number of times I've seen people accused of copying stuff that someone else copied form elsewhere (certain petty contacts I have on facebook who find jokes, repeat them without attribution, and don't like them being repeated again similarly without attribution). It often amuses me more than the original joke...
Fake internet points can translate to real world points. A good blog post can build someone's reputation, it's a sales tool. If you're looking for a better job, or a consulting gig you may seriously consider trying to show your stuff in blog form.
Someone "stealing" your tools without attribution hurt's your internet reputation which can have a real world impact.
It doesn't hurt your internet reputation as much as it gives them fake internet reputation. Which eventually will come bite them back if they try to use it.
Why not use a BSD license? IIRC, that legally requires attribution.
Also, I think OP would have some legal recourse in that the MIT license didn't accompany the code in the copycat Medium post -- doesn't MIT require that you at least include the license in any modified or redistributed code?
> doesn't MIT require that you at least include the license in any modified or redistributed code?
Yep[1] (emphasis mine):
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
1) The Medium author fucked up and should of credited you. Even if not legally required, its the decent thing to do.
2) Complaining about your analysis being 'insulted' comes off as petty. Ideas/analysis aren't sacred and they should be insulted if someone disagrees with them.
I didn't get the feeling he was insulted that the author disagreed with him, but because the author dismissed his analysis as "useless" while then using all his work as a base. Clearly it was not useless and saying so was an unnecessary insult.
> 2) Complaining about your analysis being 'insulted' comes off as petty. Ideas/analysis aren't sacred and they should be insulted if someone disagrees with them.
I have zero problem with criticizing my analysis with contradicting information, but the manner it comes across is relevant.
You can say something is wrong without calling it "a key mistake."
It is pretty strange to me you see that as an insult. Maybe this is a language thing? Claiming someone make a key mistake is nowhere near an insult in my understanding of english.
I was also put off by that part of your article, even though I agree that he should've credited you. But I could not discover any insult in any of your citations.
I said this upthread, but I honestly don't read "a key mistake" as insulting. It just means a mistake that materially changed the conclusion. I can easily imagine reading that in an academic paper about prior work.
(I'm not claiming wether or not there was a key mistake, just whether or not it is insulting.)
An analysis isn't a human being. It doesn't have emotions or feelings or any expectation or respect. By definition, it can't be "insulted". It can only be criticized (even if the criticism is over the top or flat out wrong).
I can definitely now see why you would interpret what I wrote as being malicious or mocking. I'd just like to let you know that it definitely wasn't meant to be, and that I'm incredibly sorry that it came off that way. I did not intend to offend you; I was just trying to explain why I made the choices I made.
They absolutely should not be insulted if someone disagrees with them. Presumably the people involved are adults, and should be able to disagree in a civil manner.
Well don't stop there, the MIT license says some more:
'subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.'
And that copyright notice on the code written by OP says 'Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf' (OP). The Medium author include that and posted his use of the code in the article and on github without this copyright notice.
The MIT License still has requirements. If those requirements aren't meant, you don't have a license to use the code. The problem is the person is using the code without the proper copyright attribution that the MIT license demands.
Too many people see MIT as the same thing as public domain. It's not.
While I think it'd be nice to be referenced as inspiration, what Max did was probably done before and not that novel. These other authors added actual analysis to the data compared to just plotting it.
I've no intention to address the credit issue, but I think you're getting a little worked up over not much, regarding the mockery part. For example, in /u/dleybzon's comment,
"Since this is a link to my blog post explaining how the visualization was created, I'm not sure if it's necessary to include a comment, but here goes:
"I used BigQuery to query this dataset, and then made the visualization in R using ggpot2. I normalized the data by dividing the total score for that hour of the week by the number of posts posted in that hour. For more info check out the article, or the commented code at the bottom."
I'm unable to see anything that calls for your comment, "As shown above, the quotes from the article itself were written with just as much unnecessary ego."
Yeah, I actually read that quote twice to be sure I wasn't missing anything and didn't detect any of the alleged ego. I had trouble taking the article seriously after that.
I have to agree on this point. If everyone thought the original analysis was the final word, then there would be no need to release the source. Other people are going to think that there was a better way to do things, and that was the point of releasing the code, to facilitate that exploration.
This reminds me of the argument among comics about joke stealing. Stealing code, ideas or jokes from working programmers or comics can negatively impact the original author, sometimes even causing them to be accused of theft! For a fascinating discussion about the psychology of a thief see Marc Maron's WTF podcast interview with Carlos Mencia (part 1 and 2 - 2 is where it gets interesting.) It's a pathological condition.
A good friend of mine is a comic, and through him I've met other comics. They'll often riff off of each other. Upon hearing something really funny, you'll often hear, "Hey, that's good! Can I steal that?" This is totally accepted and expected behavior among this group of comics. So stealing jokes, per se, is not the problem.
The troublesome part is that there's not a good way for other people outside this group of comics to join in and ask for permission. All they can do is listen to the material live, and then kinda take it if they think they can get away with it.
I'm not sure if this is a problem that needs to be solved, but it's easy to see where these misunderstandings might arise. Everyone copies and steals. Sometimes it's unclear or uncool to ask for permission.
This is all separate from the main article here, where I think it's clear the copier is a huge asshole. I also need to listen to that podcast.
Joke theft sucks (if you've ever tried to write standup material, it's hard) "can I steal that" is more akin to asking permission to use a joke than actual theft. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft
Good read. This has made me realize I should probably reevaluate the license of my open source work and instead of using MIT I think I may transition to use Apache License 2.0 (which sounds like a better fit for the author...I think; I am not a licensing expert).
> That won't stop people from copying your work without attribution. No license can do that.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is. Of course you can't prevent someone from copying your own without attribution especially if you're publishing it openly.
Apache License 2.0 seems to require more inclusions in its usage over MIT hence my thinking of switching to it but that doesn't mean people still won't. It's just a license.
Think about the type of person motivated to do something like this. They probably aren't happy, they probably lack self esteem. This is a way to validate themselves. Not saying anything about this is right or moral, just saying that maybe you don't put the full name of the guy out there for anyone to blast. I really doubt this came from a malicious place.
edit: guess this is an unpopular opinion. I don't understand why HN lately is so fond of public shaming, as seen in this thread.
"But then I realized that whoever made this graphic made a key mistake"
This sort of conflation has happened with my work as well - where a deliberate decision is taken by someone else as a "mistake" that must be fixed. Fine to have a differing opinion, but the author is right that the insulting tone is unnecessary.
Also unnecessary from the author's facebook post:
"I made a thing (again)!"
Wow, you made a thing! Again!? Good for you! This is so annoying, I can't help it.
I don't find the quoted claim to have an "insulting tone". It is perhaps insensitive - being told in plain language that you made a mistake often hurts, even if true - but not outright insulting.
I sort of agree, I hate public shaming and I could do without. But this isn't a mistake you just resolve over the mail.
For example, I've used toooons of open-source code in my life, lots of snippets, and I've not attributed every single thing although I usually do. When I copy a pretty standard implementation of a sorting algorithm that is used in a minor way to present the final results of some fancy code I completely wrote myself, sure, contact me and ask me to attribute properly and I will. My intention is to build something new, and use some code here and there by others instead of reinventing the wheel, and sometimes you slip up and don't track your attributions properly.
But in this case, nothing new seems to have been created, it seems to have been almost entirely copied, variable names changed specifically for no real reason (it's one page of code, on a big project I understand changing variables to suit your project structure but on a one-pager...), and the work is even referenced as being inferior (by pointing to a 2 year old version, saying that is inferior, then copying the 1 month old version that already solved the issues you're pointing out on the 2 year old work, and not attributing anything). At that point, the notion someone is a cool dude looking to build cool stuff and made an honest mistake goes out the window, and the chances you're dealing with a guy who inflates his own ego while dissing an author he's copying and goes out of his way to muddy the evidence he's copying, pretty high. In this particular case I can really see where OP is coming from in not resolving this by email.
I'm not the author (or the other guy) but it's revelatory, in a bad way, that this possibility never occurred to me. Stupid de-personalization of the internet.
I'm ashamed of how Mr. Woolf handed this issue, and I think we should collectively apologize to Mr. Leybzon for flipping our shit over nothing. This is total silliness.
Public shaming is an appropriate reaction to demonstrable theft of credit, and works by like mechanisms as the original offense. The threat of being exposed for building a fake reputation can preserve the (relative) reliability of "judge me by my portfolio" by making the expected reputational gain from plagiarism neutral or negative.
On an unrelated note, some comments on the visualization...
By visualizing the temporal position of posts matching a particular criteria, I suspect the author has accidentally just visualized the temporal position of all posts. There is no correlation between the criteria and the visualization.
It's a variant of the heatmap visualization error explained by xkcd[1]
it's a sad reality that in this world, marketing ability is far more important than originality, unless the new idea is 10x times better than the old ones.
Just to throw another perspective in here. I once wrote a tool for a teacher to detect copied code for CS assignments for some extra credit. Every step you take to dig deeper just led to more similarity -- things like normalizing variable names. At one point it looked like 80% of the class had turned in the same assignment. Granted these where toy problems.
The heatmap layout you're saying people copied has been done over and over again by almost everyone who's done data visualization on time series data. Is not it possible you looked at the same StackOverflow post?
Even if they where copying you I'd be ecstatic - you've inspired a bunch of people to pick up a dataset on go play around with it. That's wonderful thing, because the world needs more people doing this.
The kid is just really bad with appropriate attribution, but he does refer to the people that inspire him loosely. The issue is that he's posted code in various places without any direct reference, so anyone copying that code will attribute him, rather than the original author. Which sucks because he's literally copying large chunks of code 100%.
He does refer to Benson in the article, but not the code or its repository. Anyone looking at the code would now attribute him, not Benson, the 100% original author. It's an issue but it's not out of malice or ego or anything like that in this particular case, I think he's just messing up a lot rather than trying to present other people's work as his own. (the OP's article does have hints of that, though)
>This is off-topic, but wait, what? #1138 is a joke about subsets of populations which look the same as the general population because there is no statistically-significant difference between geographies. It’s not a normalization joke. Normalizing per capita would still make the maps look same.
Wait, wouldn't normalization make the map look uniform, and not a population map?
Normalising "subscribers to Martha Stewart Living" and "consumers of furry pornography" by population would give you per-capita values, showing you places where those properties had high incidence per-person (to which you'd have to apply significance tests). I'm pretty sure it is a normalisation joke.
I worked at Broderbund many years ago. In the interview my future boss asked me if I had any game ideas. I mentioned I'd not seen a good game with the Smokey the Bear. When I started a couple of weeks later, as I was introducing myself to the other programmers, one mentioned that he's working on a Smokey the Bear pitch that came out of the blue from the boss. I mentioned it was my idea from the interview, and this programmer insisted it couldn't have been because the boss had brought it as his idea.
Fast forward a few months, I've presented 23 game concepts and they were all turned down as "not good game ideas. Two weeks later i stumbled into a meeting where one of those that turned down my idea, an artist, was presenting 3 of my ideas as his own. I companied to the boss who said: "Ideas are free". My retort was: "Sure, but the credit isn't".
That was many years ago and I still find those two people to be disgusting in their attitude.
>" I mentioned I'd not seen a good game with the Smokey the Bear. When I started a couple of weeks later, as I was introducing myself to the other programmers, one mentioned that he's working on a Smokey the Bear pitch that came out of the blue from the boss."
You could have turned the whole thing into a game. If he's willing to steal a Smokey the Bear idea, just how ridiculous of an idea is he willing to steal?
Maybe this is a lesson for the future for us all: Don't give away ideas unless you've been hired, or someone has signed an NDA. Otherwise he's kinda right: They stole your idea because you had no legal claim to it. Morally they're dicks but hopefully you've learned from this.
I agree, no legal standing on my part. Morally they're both dicks. I did learn my lesson. When I interviewed at another game company, iMagic, they asked for game designs and I told them to buy the cow instead of trying to get milk for free. They didn't hire me, and were later sued by someone else for stealing his copywritten game concept. They're long gone as a company.
Oh wow, dodged a bullet with that one! I work in government relations and have a similar problem. Potential employers want to know how I'm going to solve their government relations, lobbying, or PR issues. I've had ideas stolen many times and it's very frustrating. Sometimes I suspect interviews are treated like fishing expeditions by some employers.
Maybe in this situation, if you're going to divulge an idea to someone, do it very publicly (Twitter, company Slack, etc) so all can see you as the source and judge the idea-thieves for themselves.
I have to be missing something here. Someone mind helping me out?
The code posted in the "infringing" article does not appear to be a copy of the code in the OP's repository. Nor do the images (OPs are green, the "infringing" articles are blue).
The OP's code also does not have the header in the file, which makes innocent infringement a lot easier to do.
It really does look like the "infringing" author was inspired by the OP... but there's nothing being stolen that I can see here.
146 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadI agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that.
There are a lot of open source licenses that give more protections to the original author. I have a theory that too many people choose MIT just because it is simple, but don't think through what they actually want from a license.
It's also kind of stupid to rip someone off. Assuming all the information here is accurate, this could really come back to bite the guy who ripped him off - someone is going to google what you've done and will end up with this blog post slamming you. If it was an honest mistake, the author should probably take the time to fix the posts and apologize.
EDIT: and also IMHO a dick move without talking to him first. Just wanted to remind people that these tools also can work for "normal" people, not just against them.
In this case, it was present in the LICENSE file in the github repository he links to.
Not preserving it is a clear license violation in this case, since they took substantial portions of the software.
If I made changes to the software, would I just add myself to the Copyright list of authors?
But it doesn't mean "claim it as your own", as long as it's not significantly altered.
No, you cannot relicense. Only the original authors can do that. You can add on top of the existing code stuff of your own under a different license, so that the combination of the two is under both licenses. Practically, it amounts to almost the same, but for example, you cannot remove conditions such as attribution, which only the original authors can do via a license that does not require attribution.
It depends what was meant by derivative and how this impacts the original code (encapsulated, modified, etc...). I was thinking more of when you use an MIT-licensed lib or 3rd party tool, or when you would reuse a code-snippet licensed as MIT and modify it. License and attributions remain, but only for that part of the code.
This is why a lot of projects (ie clojure) require some sort of contributor agreement so that the original authors can retain control while still accepting contributions.
Here's a super-long answer:
You can if you want attribution. the problem with this is that the licenses refer to the "above copyright notice", and most people put the license in headers.
So as you might imagine, if you have 50 files, with different contributors, and they all list their names in the appropriate notices so that you have different notices on each file, well then, Congrats, now people using the software have to reproduce 50 notices!
This becomes a mess, and it also turns out that other than the license referring to it, the notice is legally pointless.
It is cargo cult lawyering to have copyright notices for legal reasons. It isn't required in any berne signatory country (all 168 of them: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?treaty_id=15). It has basically no legal usefulness[1]
As a result, the better practice is to just use something that is legally okay, but more inclusive.
This is why when chromium was released, i had them put "The chromium authors" as the copyright owner. It's legally correct/valid, but means nobody has to add stuff to it.
[1] In the US, it prevents the innocent infringement defense. But the innocent infringement defense requires that A. you bought a license B. from someone you reasonably believed owned the code because of the incorrect copyright notice
Because of the legal standard, I cannot find a single successful innocent infringement defense since Berne.
Ass-hattery is often completely orthogonal to this concern. Just because I have the right to do something doesn't mean I should, and it doesn't mean I am not being a jerk by exercising that right it certain contexts.
There are all kinds of interesting claims you can make: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202
That's ignoring any interesting state law torts.
(Of course, i agree with your general point that you shouldn't need a license to get people to stop doing any of this, but such is society and it has been for thousands of years)
Most communities have some unwritten social rules which participants have to adhere to (or be shunned). The open-source software community is open to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, so it's disingenuous to pretend they will all get along without conflict/misunderstandings.
> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. However, I’m not going to change my workflow; I will still open-source my data visualization code, and it will have the same licensing. It wouldn’t be fair to punish others who have made very good use of my code.
> But outright using the code, without any attribution, and claiming it as your own when it blatantly isn’t, is a jerk move.
He's legally wrong, however ;-)
Let me clarify:
The MIT license does not prevent someone using the code to do a visualization without crediting him. It does, however, prevent taking those snippets without reproducing the copyright notice
For anyone who wants to argue about the copyrightability of it, i'll point out
A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code
B. While copyright has some notion of de-minimis, it's not a bright line in the code space. Copyright is more about originality. You can't really say, less than ten lines, do what you want. 10 lines of java does nothing. 10 lines of perl could be an entire OS.
If I were a Google exec I'd strongly consider dumping a few million in sponsoring some developers to make postgres's clustering options feature competitive with RAC. You'd never unseat it in some places but a long term commitment to support development from a heavy hitter like Google might go a long way.
No, there isn't. Which, by the norms and conventions of the gift economy that open source software defines, jerks like this should be named and shamed for this sort of parasitism. Which is what this blog article is doing.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
That's not true.
https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LIC...
> Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
[...]
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Neither the output of computer software, nor the ideas themselves within software, are protected by copyright. Not providing attribution is simply douchey.
Just following the minimum requirements of a license may not be a nice thing to do, but if you're going to be upset because someone did something you said they could but that you didn't really want them too, I can't really sympathize.
When I was a teenager I did something similar and was caught. I ripped off someone else's site design. The guy wasn't happy, but his response taught me a lot. I'm thankful he didn't put my name out there for the vigilantes of the internet to come calling and I learned to respect the work and creativity of others.
I have had my own free software used in ways I don't like, but I don't write a blog post about it. After all, I made it free. You want to insult me, mock me, satirise me, print out the source code and wipe your butt with it; go ahead. That's part of what free software must allow.
Point is, require with legalese what you want people to do. It's your prerogative.
Above all, don't code call copying "stealing". This is not theft. It might not even be copyright infringement. Calling it "stealing" is undue indignation that indicates that they did something worse than what you explicitly allowed.
[1]: http://www.pixelstech.net/article/1408152349-The-9-lines-of-...
It doesn't but the person lying about having written the code can still be shamed for it.
Separate code/assets/associated content, and license them accordingly.
False! This is the license:
>> The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
Permission is hereby granted [blabla do whatever you want] subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. >>
That copyright notice must be included and it wasn't.
On one hand, you want to take the high road and not have to squeal. But on the other hand, if you don't speak up, that person will just keep on stealing from others, in theory.
Personally, I think the best thing to do is to call them out in a public but quiet way that doesn't make it sound like you are offended, e.g. posting a link to your work in the comments with a "Glad you could use my code: (link)". That way they know that you know that they did it, and that anyone who looks at the comments will see but maybe not make the connection that they stole it. This way you get the point across without having to publicly beat them over the head with it.
I've seen exactly this sort of thing before in all sorts of walks of life, from school work to academia, from corporate environments to international politics - a bunch of mediocre, confused, out of their depth but don't know it types take someone (singular or plural) else's idea, barely repackage it, claim it as their own, wholeheartedly convince themselves that it is their own, and run with it - far too often somehow winning the battle of hearts and minds, as when the original author comes along going "Oi!", their readership or allies go "sore loser".
I've learned by this point in life to take people using my work, even if they do so spitefully or in ignorance, as a compliment. Fabricators usually get shown up sooner or later.
Originally there was the concept of reblogging where one site would publish something original and others would publish a small excerpt with a clearly defined link to them.
From there came the idea of the [via] link where another site published its own article based on information from the original publisher and attributed a small link.
And from there it seems like there is just so much republished content that sites think of the information as just public information and glean from wherever without any sort of attribution.
Maybe that's just me though.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way?op=1
[0] http://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/post/41879001445/the-interne...
I.e. Hanlon's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Yes, a person can normally defend many matters without being attacked as identifying with any one matter. Yet this is one of those subjects, like plagiarism, where you would have to be ignorant or a thug to justify it.
(Note: Yes, I know the MIT license doesn't require it. I can read. But reading the Medium article, they KNEW they were replacing minimaxir, etc with "The Author". Doing this is really showing their ass.)
But I'm pretty sure many of them would if they saw it happening to their original works.
A fair number of times I've seen people accused of copying stuff that someone else copied form elsewhere (certain petty contacts I have on facebook who find jokes, repeat them without attribution, and don't like them being repeated again similarly without attribution). It often amuses me more than the original joke...
Someone "stealing" your tools without attribution hurt's your internet reputation which can have a real world impact.
Also, I think OP would have some legal recourse in that the MIT license didn't accompany the code in the copycat Medium post -- doesn't MIT require that you at least include the license in any modified or redistributed code?
Yep[1] (emphasis mine):
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
[1]: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
> Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LIC...
So in this case, the MIT license would actually require attribution.
2) Complaining about your analysis being 'insulted' comes off as petty. Ideas/analysis aren't sacred and they should be insulted if someone disagrees with them.
I have zero problem with criticizing my analysis with contradicting information, but the manner it comes across is relevant.
You can say something is wrong without calling it "a key mistake."
I was also put off by that part of your article, even though I agree that he should've credited you. But I could not discover any insult in any of your citations.
(I'm not claiming wether or not there was a key mistake, just whether or not it is insulting.)
I can definitely now see why you would interpret what I wrote as being malicious or mocking. I'd just like to let you know that it definitely wasn't meant to be, and that I'm incredibly sorry that it came off that way. I did not intend to offend you; I was just trying to explain why I made the choices I made.
'For these reasons, all such projects are MIT-licensed, where anyone can freely evaluate, transform, and edit the code.'
'subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.'
And that copyright notice on the code written by OP says 'Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf' (OP). The Medium author include that and posted his use of the code in the article and on github without this copyright notice.
Too many people see MIT as the same thing as public domain. It's not.
"Since this is a link to my blog post explaining how the visualization was created, I'm not sure if it's necessary to include a comment, but here goes:
"I used BigQuery to query this dataset, and then made the visualization in R using ggpot2. I normalized the data by dividing the total score for that hour of the week by the number of posts posted in that hour. For more info check out the article, or the commented code at the bottom."
I'm unable to see anything that calls for your comment, "As shown above, the quotes from the article itself were written with just as much unnecessary ego."
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The troublesome part is that there's not a good way for other people outside this group of comics to join in and ask for permission. All they can do is listen to the material live, and then kinda take it if they think they can get away with it.
I'm not sure if this is a problem that needs to be solved, but it's easy to see where these misunderstandings might arise. Everyone copies and steals. Sometimes it's unclear or uncool to ask for permission.
This is all separate from the main article here, where I think it's clear the copier is a huge asshole. I also need to listen to that podcast.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is. Of course you can't prevent someone from copying your own without attribution especially if you're publishing it openly.
Apache License 2.0 seems to require more inclusions in its usage over MIT hence my thinking of switching to it but that doesn't mean people still won't. It's just a license.
edit: guess this is an unpopular opinion. I don't understand why HN lately is so fond of public shaming, as seen in this thread.
This sort of conflation has happened with my work as well - where a deliberate decision is taken by someone else as a "mistake" that must be fixed. Fine to have a differing opinion, but the author is right that the insulting tone is unnecessary.
Also unnecessary from the author's facebook post:
"I made a thing (again)!"
Wow, you made a thing! Again!? Good for you! This is so annoying, I can't help it.
Do we really need more public shaming without at least a civil discussion between the belligerents? Remember Adria Richards anyone?
For example, I've used toooons of open-source code in my life, lots of snippets, and I've not attributed every single thing although I usually do. When I copy a pretty standard implementation of a sorting algorithm that is used in a minor way to present the final results of some fancy code I completely wrote myself, sure, contact me and ask me to attribute properly and I will. My intention is to build something new, and use some code here and there by others instead of reinventing the wheel, and sometimes you slip up and don't track your attributions properly.
But in this case, nothing new seems to have been created, it seems to have been almost entirely copied, variable names changed specifically for no real reason (it's one page of code, on a big project I understand changing variables to suit your project structure but on a one-pager...), and the work is even referenced as being inferior (by pointing to a 2 year old version, saying that is inferior, then copying the 1 month old version that already solved the issues you're pointing out on the 2 year old work, and not attributing anything). At that point, the notion someone is a cool dude looking to build cool stuff and made an honest mistake goes out the window, and the chances you're dealing with a guy who inflates his own ego while dissing an author he's copying and goes out of his way to muddy the evidence he's copying, pretty high. In this particular case I can really see where OP is coming from in not resolving this by email.
By visualizing the temporal position of posts matching a particular criteria, I suspect the author has accidentally just visualized the temporal position of all posts. There is no correlation between the criteria and the visualization.
It's a variant of the heatmap visualization error explained by xkcd[1]
[1] https://xkcd.com/1138/
The heatmap layout you're saying people copied has been done over and over again by almost everyone who's done data visualization on time series data. Is not it possible you looked at the same StackOverflow post?
Even if they where copying you I'd be ecstatic - you've inspired a bunch of people to pick up a dataset on go play around with it. That's wonderful thing, because the world needs more people doing this.
https://community.smartthings.com/t/hack-the-amazon-dash-but...
I found that by Googling the code snippet, which the original author actually gives a shoutout for.
[0] https://medium.com/@edwardbenson/how-i-hacked-amazon-s-5-wif...
The kid is just really bad with appropriate attribution, but he does refer to the people that inspire him loosely. The issue is that he's posted code in various places without any direct reference, so anyone copying that code will attribute him, rather than the original author. Which sucks because he's literally copying large chunks of code 100%.
e.g. https://gist.github.com/theleybzon/4e721f17e5dfc642c738
is 100% similar to the source he copied it from (Benson).
https://gist.github.com/eob/a8b5632f23e75b311df2
He does refer to Benson in the article, but not the code or its repository. Anyone looking at the code would now attribute him, not Benson, the 100% original author. It's an issue but it's not out of malice or ego or anything like that in this particular case, I think he's just messing up a lot rather than trying to present other people's work as his own. (the OP's article does have hints of that, though)
Wait, wouldn't normalization make the map look uniform, and not a population map?
Fast forward a few months, I've presented 23 game concepts and they were all turned down as "not good game ideas. Two weeks later i stumbled into a meeting where one of those that turned down my idea, an artist, was presenting 3 of my ideas as his own. I companied to the boss who said: "Ideas are free". My retort was: "Sure, but the credit isn't".
That was many years ago and I still find those two people to be disgusting in their attitude.
You could have turned the whole thing into a game. If he's willing to steal a Smokey the Bear idea, just how ridiculous of an idea is he willing to steal?
The code posted in the "infringing" article does not appear to be a copy of the code in the OP's repository. Nor do the images (OPs are green, the "infringing" articles are blue).
The OP's code also does not have the header in the file, which makes innocent infringement a lot easier to do.
It really does look like the "infringing" author was inspired by the OP... but there's nothing being stolen that I can see here.