"have spoken to Curebit founder Allan Grant, he has taken down the pages with Highrise assets. he's also now drafting a public response. needless to say, he is re-thinking recent behavior.
although i'm sure DHH will not forget the transgression, but hope he may allow them opportunity to show
they can learn from their mistakes & change."
This happens more often than you think. Curebit just happened to get caught because the developer probably just copied and pasted the original HTML. And the fact that they copied from a ridiculously high profile site.
I remember when Leaky (YC S11) launched, its design was quite obviously taken from Square, but they put the notice: "All design credit goes to Square. We based our design on their home page until we can hire a designer of our own." http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/yc-backed-leaky-is-hipmunk-...
OK, I guess I can see why somebody might have written that, especially after reading the other HN thread (which I had skipped before) and seeing the stuff about ghetto testing, etc.
BUT... I still believe that "lean principles" and "doing stupid things" are orthogonal ideas. Nothing about embracing lean mandates (or even suggests) doing something this lame-brained. I think it was a bit of an unreasonable jab at lean startup advocates, by the author of this piece.
At what point does inspiration become imitation? Clearly Curebit stepped over the line in this case, but it's undeniable that lots of startups draw design inspiration from other companies.
But at what point does this become unacceptable? For example, if Curebit merely used the same design, except hosting the assets on their own server, would that be okay? What if they just copied the layout but used their own styles, images, and fonts? Or if they just copied the button?
If I was DHH I would have replaced the images with something else. It is always entertaining what you can do to someone's site if they are foolish enough to pull images off your server. Or they could have blocked the hotlinking of the image.
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.
I'm sure that line is subjective, though one could argue linking to assets from someone else's servers is akin to theft (stealing bandwidth and money).
But I think the bigger story here is how Curebit handled their reaction to DHH. This could have all been avoided if Allan replied with a more humble stance.
Personally, I think DHH's initial reaction was on the strong side. If Allan had realized that, he wouldn't have tried to rationalize their actions. I suspect if he humbly apologized, then stayed quiet, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache.
And if was really troubled by DHH's reaction, he could have just emailed him privately. Getting into a pissing match in a public forum can sometimes backfire (even if you think that negative press can be good press).
When you are clearly in the wrong, a pissing match will never end well for you. Apologize sincerely, fix it, maybe offer some form of remediation, and let it blow over. You will never be able to make yourself look better if you try to make excuses or attack the grieved party.
Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same.
Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted.
Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars.
Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ.
Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more.
Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much.
Not only did Curebit copy 37Signals design in this case, they also essentially copied the source code. If Zynga was somehow able to decompile another game's source code, change the assets, and then sell it as their own, it would be just as wrong and potentially illegal as what Curebit did.
From a purely artistic standpoint, imitation is a large piece of the modern creation process, if only because of it's increased use in modernism/postmodernism. Everyone's influenced by someone or something, it's just the way things work.
In terms of what is acceptable, I tend to lean towards the notion that it's fine for someone to be inspired, or imitate as long as they've added their own artistic flare/soul to the piece and it's not just a forgery. As in they've only imitated a part of the piece, and not it's entirety. The issue with this whole process though is, art is subjective.
Is this really such a big deal? We are all only where we are today based on building on the improvements of others.
This isn't exactly like Zynga copying other small studios games, it's just a bit of design rip off, which incidentally, I'm not a designer, but if I see something that I think looks good on another site, I'm happy to copy the css styles for it. I've often thought if I'm just kidding myself, and what I'm doing should be considered totally wrong, but ultimately, it's just some styles. I've still coded everything myself.
While linking directly to assets you are using for your site, is clearly ridicuslously stupid, I don't think we should call the lynch mob out on them just yet. (Thoughts?)
For me personally I found his attitude towards the entire thing the real problem. He asked if crediting the original creators was enough, he then hid behind all manner of silly startup buzzwords ("a/b testing", "ghetto test", "lean startup") and didn't seem to understand it was wrong. His tweets after the fact were worrying too, especially when others uncovered that they had other products that took designs from elsewhere.
Shit happens and hopefully this doesn't damage curebits business long term, but Allan really needs to understand what he did wrong, he seems to think the problem was he didn't credit and it's perfectly okay to take someone elses work, pass it off as your own and then hide behind silly phrases. No matter what your business is or how old you are stealing is wrong.
Allan did have some silly responses. Either he was panicking and couldn't think clearly (he does have a lot on the line) or he genuinely doesn't understand what the problem is. On the other hand, I think David is overreacting and trying to get as much attention as possible -- seems a bit childish.
If I was in David's shoes, I'd be shocked to see how much they directly copied and simply ask them to take it down, and possibly notify their investors. I'd also be proud that they used my design.
I'm surprised that some people don't even understand what is being discussed here. Hint: it's not the hot-linking, it's not the borrowing of html, css or anything else. It's the brazen theft of someone else's work that @allangrant has engaged in and his apparent inability to see why this is an incorrect attitude. Not being a designer is not an excuse for being an apologist, either.
"I'm happy to copy the css styles for it."
vs
" I've still coded everything myself."
No, you haven't.
Seeing a website look that you like and emulating it by creating a blackbox version of it is fine, seeing a website look that you like and grabbing the css styling for it is breaching copyright.
Its also ridiculously lazy in a bad way, getting someone else's css to work with your html is going to be way more painful than simply writing your own.
Unless you also copy the html for it?
Seriously. As a professional you do not get to take other people's work without their permission.
As a civilian you can do what you like, but if you want people to think of you as a professional, you need to act professionally.
What if you are web browsing and you see a background colour of a site that looks really good, so you decide to get it from the source and use it from your website?
"I'm happy to copy the colour code for it." vs " I've still coded everything myself."
yep, what if you do? copying a color code is certainly not speaking to copyright concerns.
There are a couple of points to consider though. the first and most obvious is that generally a background color by itself will not work well with the other colors on your site - choosing items in isolation like that is generally a fantastic way to end up with coder art (believe me, I know something about how to produce coder art).
The thing that good designers do, and do well, is make all the elements work together, generally if you simply take a single element (background color, font sizes, etc) from someone else's site and dump it on your own site without considering the overall effect, you are doing a stupid thing.
I don't think anyone here is worried about the sharing of ideas - uses of color, general placement of elements and so forth, taking those things and merging them with your own needs and messages is how new art is made.
The problem with copyright usually comes when someone simply does wholesale copying without the process of considering each element in terms of its effect, the message you want to get across and so forth.
IMO A 'good faith' copying of highrise done competently would produce something new, something where the source of inspiration can be clear, but where there is sufficient change and obvious consideration of the factors that made your own product unique that there is no question of direct copying.
The damage done by straight copying is always twofold, the first is the obvious - the breach of copyright, the second is also clear but many people miss it - a design produced that speaks to a specific product, specific website goals and specific messages is very unlikely to have the same positive effect if transplanted wholesale.
That is why wholesale copying is not just a sign of a lack of ethics, it is also a clear indication of a total lack of competence. The person doing the copying entirely lacks knowledge of the process that is required to produce good work, and has no idea why the site they admire so much works so well.
Even putting copyright and ethical concerns aside, I would have no interest in working with someone who lacks the competence to understand why wholesale copying is usually a stupid idea. They will not produce good work targeted at my needs, they will produce good work targeted at something entirely unrelated.
I'm sorry, but am I the only one wondering about the ... tone of dhh's response? I mean, "fucking scumbags", is he like 14? He has every right to be upset, but the choice of words are in no way helpful. just saying..
Exactly, This doesn't make him look very good. Beside the rude language, this isn't something grown-ups need to settle publicly via twitter. Very immature.
Agreed. Not that it matters much, but I just took Rework out of my wish list on Amazon. Reading his tweets in response to this has totally turned me off to 37Signals.
Why do we tolerate this behavior from people in our 'community' (or anyone really)? It's comically childish and infuriating to see it get a pass because 'oh, that's just their thing'.
Are you offended by the tone? What would you call a person who steals your ideas (no value), steals your work ($$$), steals your bandwidth (~$), passes it all off as their own and then brags about raising money, a venture which was probably aided in no small from the theft? And when caught redhanded, further insults you by offering you credit for your work?
What would you call that person? I call those people scumbags.
They didn't steal anything. I thought we've discussed this enough already, what with RIAA/MPAA's attempts to redefine copyright infringement as thievery. Hell, they didn't even steal bandwidth. Linking is not theft. It might be something else, but it's not stealing.
That, more than anything, pisses me off about this. That somehow the RIAA is wrong when it calls people infringing it's copyright thieves, but when it's one of our own getting hurt, we hang the culprits out to dry.
Call them scumbags. Get all indignant and tweet about it to your followers and whine to the 'interwebz.' But at least have the courtesy to be truthful and accurate. Otherwise, your just a scummy.
My apologies, I did not realize that they either received permission from or licensed design, code and image hosting from 37signals.
Or maybe I just choose to ignore your pathetic misdirection and call things as I see them, which couldn't be more obvious to the eye. Because that's what a retraction of the work and the (forced) composition of a public apology are all about.
> Or maybe I just choose to ignore your pathetic misdirection and call things as I see them,
I'm sorry. Maybe you could point to me where 37Signals no longer has what was stolen?
I also applaud your open commitment in support of redefining copyright infringement as thievery. Let me know how that works out for you.
Finally, you should avoid baseless insults. It makes you appear stupid and detracts from what you are attempting to say. Throwing around insults like you do hurts the quality of HN. Maybe that's what you want, but I'd prefer to keep things accurate and intelligent.
It doesn't making it stealing. Poor word choice is poor word choice.
> No need for lawyering.
No, there is every need to be accurate. Maybe you aren't aware of how long the fight has been going on, but the use of the term pirate and stealing isn't a new thing. Allowing it's use frames the argument in a light that isn't accurate.
You say that. It's fairly rude. You can disagree with me, but trying to belittle my argument with insults is rude. I don't think my original comment went over the line at any point to warrant such a reaction. Be honest, your comment from the first word, was fairly facetious.
Disagree with me, but do so on the merits of intelligence, not insults.
Semantics over whether copying their code and images constitutes "theft" or "stealing", it's pretty obvious that using images hosted from their server is a type of theft of resources. Granted, the amount of resources in this case is likely a small fraction of a cent, but still.
> Maybe you could point to me where 37Signals no longer has what was stolen?
I'm in full agreement that copyright infringement is not theft.
However, I think this part of the argument is weaker. Things can have value through scarcity, and even more so through uniqueness. To copy something, in such cases, can lead to a reduction in value of the original. If what you had was "the only <whatever> in the world" someone copying it takes that away from you without ever taking the item away.
Whether that's true in this specific case, is a somewhat different argument, of course.
What I get from this situation is that the people over at 37 Signals are unfortunately, large kids, from the tweets present in the article. I see companies copying other companies' work all the time and although that's morally wrong, I also don't see how some lines of html are going to be the a relevant part of a company. (and if they are... bad news)
What I don't see everyday is this kind of immature responses from the copied companies. Usually they just brush it off, because they know that in the end of the day, they are the better company. I say this without any other knowledge of the situation apart from the article though.
It's one thing to complain that another company built a design largely influenced by yours. And that's a legitimate complaint, although the most you can do is say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"
This is wholesale ripping off (in particular, indicated by the direct linking to 37signals site assets). I would be pissed off too if I found that my bandwidth was being used to serve another company's site. Especially if the site was for a competitor. This is more than just design copying
I still don't see how any of this validates such an immature response from the copied company. Don't they have a PR guy or something to shut them up before they say things they might regret?
Why would they regret what they said? We should all be glad they called them out in such a public and unequivocal fashion. It means that scumbags might think twice next time before ripping off other people's work verbatim. Your response would have been more apropos if DHH's allegations had turned out premature, but the reality is that the extent of their plagiarism went much further than initially assumed.
Calling them out in no uncertain terms was a community service. Let's not quibble over vocabulary.
Well this is very subjective, and I can understand your views, but I just don't think it is professional to be impolite in this manner. Being right should not give you the right to be rude! I can see where you're coming from though.
There's a difference between eLance's "inspiration" and actually referencing hosted images & code that CureBit did, but it's not a night and day difference.
Murky territory with us all copying eachother's moments of brilliance, but I don't think curebit deserves the full bodyslam, "scumbag" treatment.
Copying the design doesn't necessarily deserve "scumbag" treatment. Some brusque words, sure, but certainly not the escalation of DHH.
What Curebit did DEFINITELY qualifies as scumbag. There's some unknown tangible cost for 37signals (in the form of bandwidth, hosting assets for a competitor's site). There are small claims court cases considering similar situations nearly every day.
<sarcasm> Naah, they were just A/B testing that one. I guess crediting it will make it fine. Unless the other party demands it to be taken down.</sarcasm>
Agreed. 37Signals generates numerous "lessons learned" posts under the pretense (implied or otherwise) of helping other people learn from their experience. If they don't see it that way, they should add the text "This design is ours and if you copy it or produce anything that looks like it, we'll publicly humiliate you f'ers and insult your investors as well!" to the beginning of each of their supposedly educational posts.
Or, they should spell out the degree to which something has to be changed before they'll be okay with it. Such as "you can put a big customer image on the page because, well, we didn't invent that. You can also put screenshots on the page because, well, we didn't invent that either. And same goes for customer quotes, checklists, and company logos. But we'll take you down if you put checklists with green checks to the right of the giant customer image, a quote to the right of the client's head, and two screenshots below the checklist, etc., etc."
That said, it is an unfortunate that Curebit linked to 37's assets instead of creating their own. And it is clearly a copy beyond just the linked assets. But I don't think it's an international incident on the order of Wikileaks or such. But that's how it's being treated for some reason.
Personally, I would have emailed Curebit privately and asked them to change it instead of trying to tarnish an individual's and company's reputation. That's called "being civil," but that's not how 37Signals works. Remember the time Google created something that resembled Campfire as a demonstration of what Google App Engine could do? It was a 3-pane window with a chat log on the left, the name of the room and a list of people in the room on the right, and a text entry area across the bottom. 37Signals treated it as if they were the first and only company to develop a chat client that worked that way. Here's a link to that incident: http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/08/google-to-close-huddlechat/
Here's the choice (dangling) quote: "we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout…We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for."
I saw this play out yesterday in the comments and kept thiking "why won't someone stop him from posting?!" It was getting bigger and bigger the more he opened his mouth.
I learned an important lesson a few years ago: sometimes you can't make something better, and trying to make it better only makes it worse.
Stop, regroup with others and get a proper plan together.
Yes, but it's also good to respond to comments, to a certain extent. I like when founders come on HN and answer questions, solve problems and speak frankly. But there's a point when you're having a PR nightmare that you need to stop trying to fix things yourself.
My suggestion would be to acknowledge the issue, let people know you will address it shortly but you need time to talk with your partners so you could get a proper response together.
Perhaps some version of "we're going to get to the bottom of this." Sure, it could be deemed a short term cop-out but it's better than sticking your foot in your over and over.
I'm curious how public relations experts recommend people handle a situation like this.
Seems to be some logical inconsistencies in the startup community over what is and is not ok to copy. Usually, like anything, it comes back to whatever is self-serving to the person doing the talking.
Investors speak out against patents on methods of doing business because their well-funded current or future portfolio companies could "build on" the ideas and use the cash lead to make a ton of money.
Digital media distribution platforms want online content to be freely distributed off of or outside of the publishers' sites that paid for the content to be produced.
This is all still pretty new and the rules of law and of decency are still being determined (and, in the case of the latter, are different for each individual).
I think the more productive outcome of this line-crossing is this exact discussion to help shape those rules.
> Seems to be some logical inconsistencies in the startup community over what is and is not ok to copy.
Let's not pretend that we're dealing with a couple of noobs here, people.
If it weren't for the cumulative years of technology-related experience of everyone involved, a case could be made for excusing a blatant misstep with an admonishment, but for outright copy/paste theft? Allan Grant knew better and decided to steal anyway.
From a copyright-law perspective, it's not a slam-dunk that Curebit infringed any protectable aspect of the 37Signals design, as opposed to "stock" elements.[1] West Side Story has a lot in common with Romeo and Juliet, but the latter itself has a lot in common with a long line of still-earlier romantic tragedies.[2]
Some of the reactions here are fascinating. As a group, HNers prize the freedom to copy from others and the ethic of helping others --- but for some, it seems to be "I get to copy from others, but no one else is allowed to copy from me."
EDIT 1: That said, from a purely-practical perspective it's usually better and cheaper to steer clear of controversy (depending on how you think the PR scales will tip). Curebit might have been better off had it not copied what it did, not least because this controversy is sucking up management time that could probably be put to better use.
EDIT 2: Plus, stealing someone else's bandwidth by linking directly to their copies of images, etc., without permission does cross the line, if that's what Curebit did.
EDIT 3: Even copying HTML and CSS might not constitute copyright infringement if there are only a limited number of ways to express the same idea(s). This is even more the case if there's an optimal way to code a given set of ideas.
It's also often a very successful strategy for companies to copy the design of competitors, and differentiate on other things. Zynga copying competitors' games is a great example.
In this case, Curebit was only copying the design of a landing page, so it was probably not worth pissing off DHH even if that landing page was legally usable and worked better. Although it really seems that DHH was more pissed off by Allan's tweets and posts about it than by the design itself.
I am a software developer, I believe strongly in copyright.
I also believe strongly that people should not have their lives ruined, and citizens should not have their freedoms curtailed to protect it on a large scale.
I do believe that businesses who take a relaxed attitude to using copyrighted material that belongs to someone else are displaying a lack of ethics that is worrying and deserve to be taken down pretty hard.
There is a world of difference between some random person downloading a movie for viewing, copying a website for their personal blog etc and a company doing it.
These guys have made a really unfortunate decision here. To be fair, based on their response so far I expect its because they dont have a clue what copyright even means, so its about ignorance rather than malice, and it will soon be rectified.
Anyone who says there's no such thing as bad PR has never worked in PR.
Yes, seemingly bad PR can cause unexpected good things, and bad PR can sometimes be turned into a good thing when handled skillfully (even then, not always). The idea that all PR is good PR is just naive.
If Allan Grant hadn't dug himself deeper into his hole, but instead come back with modesty, apologies and flattery to DHH at the very least (perhaps something outside the box as well, "Hey @DHH, to show we're sorry we'll donate $10k to a charity of your choice"?) then the bad PR would have got their name out there and their response might have prevented people from thinking badly of them, and even made people like them. But even then, there's never a guarantee that any response can turn bad PR to good.
Wow, talk about lazy. I'm ok with taking the layout, changing the images and using the same basic styles. At least change some of the fonts. I mean, How many sans serif fonts are out there that would've worked? Thousands.
They lost me when they started copying the HTML VERBATIM. Apparently they don't have capable developers either. The layout in question is not that complicated, and I'm struck on why they decided to do what they did. Even in A/B testing you could've mocked this thing up in a few hours and had it ready to go.
This kind of thing happens often and I think it is ok as long it hurts no one and is temporary.
If you are testing 10 variations, getting "inspiration" is faster than come up with your own design and doesn't hurt 37Signals during the short length of the test.
Why did people get so angry so fast?
The only people who got really hurt in this story are Curebit, not 37 Signals.
Curebit shouldn't have used assets off the 37Signals site, but I don't think this is a huge deal. If you write an article talking about how to do a/b tests (like 37Signals did), and talk about how great your results were from adding people instead of text to the landing page, then you have to expect that some people will use that information to influence their design decisions.
The whole point of technical blogging is to help other people solve a problem the author has already solved. In this case, it was how to improve conversions on landing pages. If you put that content out there, don't be surprised when people use that content to help them solve a problem. You loose the right to whine and complain about someone using that information as soon as you blog about it. In return, you get more credibility (people treat you as a thought leader) and more page views.
My two cents: everyone is making this a big deal, and it isn't. 37signals is respected, and they do great work. For a startup trying to get funding, a few images and a layout goes a long way, especially if it's just a small team of devs with zero design experience, etc. Sure they shouldn't have copied, but sure I shouldn't have googled the answer to that coding problem I just spend 2 hours slamming my head against the desk over.
They are not a 'normal' startup. With 1.2M, they can hire designer from Asia which probably cheaper rate compare to the state. Looking at the founder respond on twitter, He clearly have no idea about design and how web works.
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 seems so archaic to me.
Like building images with text, rather than using photoshop.
I write code on the backend, that lives on servers, I don't write HTML for a living, so maybe I'm missing some necessary requirement that forces people to work in text editors.... but a straightforward page like that should be much faster to create by dragging a button element onto it, even a generic one and picking the image, and then putting text boxes in there and setting their style, etc, should take maybe 2 minutes if the assets are already created. Not being able to do so seems like such a time sync.
I remember once not too long ago tweaking a landing page, by going back and changing absolute pixel offsets 2-3 pixels at a time in text. I've done this with iOS code as well. Change the text, compile, run, how does it look? ok, need to go farther, back into the editor, bump it up 2 more pixels. etc.
FWIW, if anyone knows of visual tools from startups or open source that are trying to solve this problem, I'd be keen to hear about them. (I'm building a web platform, and rather than create my own design tool would rather support existing ones with my platform.)
The closest I'm aware of is Cappucino which supports using Apple's Interface Builder to layout UI for Webapps, and then export the IB files to the Cappucino format. Sproutcore had Greenhouse which looked even better, but seems to have been abandoned.
A better tool would mean easier AB testing, maybe even ABC testing... faster development and more iterative design. I see no reason that such a tool couldn't be made, or would have to necessarily impose restrictions that limited its functionality... and I think that boosting web designer productivity would be hugely valuable. On the other hand, I can't imagine why nobody has tackled this.
PS-- on the mac there's Flux, which sorta does this, but it doesn't integrate with a common web framework like rails, etc. I mean, you can, but it seems more suited to static pages. http://theescapers.com/flux/
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 proceed long term.
I signed up for your other site (jmockups) and I already had an account on file so I tried it out. It's pretty cool. Depending on how intuitive and slick this is I could see a big market for this.
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.
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.
Perhaps, but definitely not from a technical perspective. They're often going to be the simplest. A good WYSIWYG tool would make iterating on the design much easier.
As someone that writes HTML for a living I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor. A lot of markup, especially the new semantic HTML5 stuff is pretty subjective. Different organizations/teams have different markup patterns/views on this stuff. A WYSIWYG editor would have to be pretty customizable to fit in different organizations I think.
You can use Firebug/Web Inspector to adjust your layouts in real-time without needing to go back, modify code in your editor, save, and reload the page. There are some new tools (backfire) out that will even let Firebug/Web Inspector automatically update your CSS file so you don't have to go back after tweaking it in browser. Hopefully, browser vendors will one day bake this functionality in to their browsers.
The biggest time sink is not being able to drag and drop it's cross browser support. I can spit out a page from a design pretty quick, but getting it to look consistent across four or five different browsers takes forever.
> As someone that writes HTML for a living I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor.
You can't imaging using any existing WYSIWYG editor. I would argue that using Firebug to make changes, see them in real time, and have the code auto-saved is just begging for a good WYSIWYG editor. Image if a WYSIWYG editor could create decent markup and css and provide perfect cross-browser support for all relatively modern browsers. You still couldn't imagine using it?
This still seems to focus too much on what WYSIWYG is now, as opposed to what it could be.
Problem 1 can be solved by designing your WYSIWYG editor UI around modular page components and templates, kind of like desktop software designers like QtCreator.
Problem 2 is a matter of designing a good visual diff tool for the DOM. You could combine the Tilt Firefox addon with other visual difference tools like A/B overlays and highlighting changed attributes (e.g. if the text color or border size is changed on a particular element between two versions being compared, set the text or border color or size of that element to some highly-contrasting or even animated value when the element is hovered in the diff view).
I think Adobe is working on something like this. Though Dreamweaver leaves much to be desired, I think what their working on is something completely different. Plus, the announcement that they're committed to HTML5 is more or less a hint of this. My guess is that it's something like Adobe Flash Builder, but instead of Flash, it outputs HTML5.
I've tried Adobe Edge and the biggest issue I found was with the amount of HTML output and the human readability/context of elements. There seemed to be a lot of wrapper elements used in succession and named long, generic names with numbers. In my brief trial it looked OK in the browser but due to the excessive HTML, it would be a huge burden to edit in anything other than Adobe Edge if you wanted to go back and change anything. In a text editor, I can create a page using only 20% of the elements Edge did and have the opportunity to name them something relevant (e.g. #author_info rather than #generic-1-3-15).
If your only mission is to adjust one asset by 2 pixels, they're similar. If you want to see how those 2 pixels affect the design in its entirety, then photoshop is a much better option.
If your only mission is to adjust one asset by 2 pixels, they're similar. If you want to see how those 2 pixels affect the design in its entirety, then photoshop is a much better option.
It looks like this account was auto-killed ~570 days ago, but it's not clear why, as there's no obvious massively downvoted comment or OT submission.
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.
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
We had all that in tools like Powerbuilder, back in the 1990s. AFAIK you still have that if you build your site using Flash (though I've never used Flash to build anything, so I don't know).
The world decided that browser-based apps were better, warts and all. In a way it's a shame that plugin vendors didn't take seriously the concepts of security, performance, and openness, the web could have ended up a very different place.
Likewise, more developers would probably be happy to use WYSIWYG layout tools if they did not generate hideously formatted, immensely verbose and complex markup that is nearly impossible to hand-tweak when needed, or if the tools themselves were not so complex that mastering them was just as much work as mastering HTML/CSS.
I would be interested in a tool that lets me visually build a basic page layout, something like a wireframe, and generates clean markup and CSS that I then easily enhance/fine tune by hand. I'll check out this Lean Designs tool that's been mentioned a few time here...
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.
Folks can design images in WYSIWYG tools like Photoshop because the output standards are much more stable and consistently implemented than HTML + CSS + JS. Every OS, browser, image viewer, etc. will render a JPG, GIF, or PNG almost exactly the same. But give them all the same HTML, CSS, and JS, and you might get very different results--especially if you are trying to make use of the coolest new features. Basically, hand-coding is the price we all pay for an industry that is innovating its technology so quickly.
If it is, why? Because it has been "contextualised" in another site? Please note that I did not copy the file, nor I distributed it, I just made a reference to it. You did use it, you did download it, your browser on your computer did all the composition.
If hot-linking an is an infringement, then also distributing a bittorrent file is, the mechanism is very similar, just with one more level of indirection. And it is common option (mine as well) that the distribution of a bittorrent file does not constitute any kind of infringement by itself.
I just did a quick search and couldn't find any court cases directly on point. Three possible arguments come to mind:
Alternative 1: By making your file available via the Web, you implicitly consented to having anyone download it who wants to do so, even via hot-linking, therefore there's no infringement.
Alternative 2: It's established custom that the implicit consent applies only to people who are downloading the whole page, not individual images --- therefore you didn't implicitly consent to hot-linking, therefore whoever downloads your content that way is an infringer, therefore the hot-linker is liable for contributory infringement or perhaps inducement of infringement.
Alternative 3: The person who created a page including hot-linked images, etc., has thereby created an unauthorized, and therefore infringing, derivative work [1]. (This assumes the hot-linked content is copyrightable.)
"The court held that Google's framing and hyperlinking as part of an image search engine constituted a fair use of Perfect 10's images because the use was highly transformative"
When something is stolen, the original owner no longer has posession of the stolen object. If the story were about money or physical property, "stealing" would be appropriate. It is not.
The word "copying" is quite adequate. In this case, direct copying is obviously poor behaviour. It betrays a lack of capability on the part of the copyer. This story would have had the same emotional impact, had it used the correct term.
Using the word "stealing" mires the story in the intricacies of digital copyright debate, which is not what this is about. It is about a startup not doing its own work, and thus demonstrating inability.
You are confusing everyday English with court pleadings. Here are some illustrative examples to show the difference.
1. You come home from work, and find that while you were gone someone came into your garage and stole your motorcycle.
It would be quite normal to exclaim "I've been robbed!". Yet you in fact have been burgled, not robbed. Nevertheless in common English usage people use "robbed" in a more expansive sense than it is use in law. If writing a police report, or an indictment, one must make the distinction, but not in regular conversation.
2. You are in a bar, in a tuxedo, obviously trying to drink yourself into oblivion. I ask you what is wrong. You tell me "my best friend stole my fiancé...on our wedding day!".
Technically, he did not steal her, as she is not property. He perhaps committed tortious interference with contract, or maybe alienation of affection. However, if you are not writing the pleadings for a lawsuit, it is in fact perfectly acceptable to say the bastard stole your fiancé.
3. You are the quarterback for your high school football team. The big game is coming up with your most hated rival high school. Your sister starts dating the quarterback of their time. While he is at your house visiting your system, he sneaks into your room, where you have your team's confidential playbook. He quickly uses his cell phone camera to take photos of each page.
This would generally be described as him stealing your plays, even though it is not legally stealing (and probably isn't even legally a crime).
The use of terms like stealing, theft, robbery, and so on to describe situations where they do not literally apply in the legal sense goes back a long way. E.g., from Shakespeare: "Who steals my purse, steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed." Note that he is using both filching (a synonym for stealing) and robbery to describe damaging a reputation.
Copyright law's mechanism is to create a property interest in the right to make and distribute copies of a given work. Exercising someone else's property interests without there permission is acceptably called "theft" in ordinary English.
They even copied the pricing page verbatim, I have personally incorporated some 37signals design elements in my own websites but nothing to this extent. 37signals is a bit hypocritical in my opinion because they brag about their design practices and then whine when someone copies it, either you're an open company sharing your inner-workings with the world or you're not, they can't have it both ways.
Wow, they even copied a lot of the CSS ids/class names.
> 37signals is a bit hypocritical
There's a difference between leveraging the lessons learned/data gathered from a particular design and copying the design itself nearly verbatim. A big one.
If 37 Signals wanted to point out how it is not a costless transgression, they could send and invoice for the data transfer of the image at Amazon rates. More work than value.
I am just struck by the fact that they thought no one would notice. It just seems like one of those judgement things that could be a red flag for future direction.
What scares me most is how many people here seem to think it is OK or 'not that bad'.
I don't know a designer who hasn't or doesn't draw inspiration from other websites. However, that process goes something like this...
1) Look at website. || 2) Assess what is good about the design || 3) Mock up own version.
What a decent person doesn't do is rip the existing site. HTML + all. Tweak it slightly then publish it.
What Curebit did is indefensible. This is something some 2-bit web designer fob's off to a client paying $200 for a website... the fact Curebit is a start up is not a defense. It is frankly scary that a company can get $1M+ in funding and not realise they cannot just rip other peoples work...
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.
Creatives work on design to be creative; they don't outright steal it to save time and resources. It's what thy do and witness what happens when you cross them.
I think the OP is about copyright infringement and plagiarism, which is a form of fraud. I do not justify it but it is not theft.
I don't think the world has much to benefit from plagiarism, but I think the benefits of copying others' work and building upon them freely far outweigh the downsides.
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 dont have much to offer, to accept that you do not have a right to take from those who do, but accepting that and learning to work within those constraints will make you both a better person and a better developer.
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.
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.
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?
Even disregarding the profit motive for a second here - if I created a successful web page, should, say, the Westboro Baptist Church be free to take my web page and use it to support their (IMO vile) efforts, so long as they gave credit?
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.
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?
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.
This is the same argument that was had about whether it was OK to make photocopies of content in books and magazines at the library, or record a radio broadcast or TV program. I would agree with you that up to a point it is: the content is made available to or broadcast to the public, and that implies a certain license to personally do what you want with it once you receive it. Hence copying or scanning printed material for later reference, time-shifting TV programs and sports events with DVR is generally and legally recognized as "OK" (I believe that "fair use" is the legal term here).
Likewise when you put your creative content on the internet, you are implicitly granting some license to people who view that content. They can view the source, study your CSS and javascript, save it for offline viewing if they want.
But when you take someone else's content, be it a book, a TV broadcast or a web site design, copy it either completely or substantially, and then proceed to personally profit from that work without the permission of the creator, you've crossed the line. Granted the distinction between copying (bad) and imitation (flattery?) can be fuzzy, but in this case it seems very clear.
Do you ever wonder why law is so complicated? Maybe it's because the people who make them have a vested interest in complicating matters such that lawyers become necessary. The same logic that you are advocating is what is necessitating the existence of IP law and IP lawyers.
If we simply say that with regards to information, no laws except the laws of nature are necessary, then some lawyers will lose their jobs, but there will be less friction and eddy currents in the system. Overall our endeavors will be more productive and quality of life will generally improve.
You can't eat bits. When everything else is non-scarce, you can reasonably argue that everything should be freely available. Until then, the right to control licensing is the simplest and most fair way for a creative professional to convert their effort into scarce resources.
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.
The reward of creation for me is the act of creation itself and the giving of my creation to others to build upon. It is an interaction, not a transaction.
I prefer not to consume your copyrighted work. The nature of copyright is such that it becomes abusive. If you are the creative type whose bread depends on your ability to restrict others from copying or modifying your work, you inevitably become abusive.
I encourage the kind of positive creation that breaks out of or transcends such a system.
You still haven't made a case for your position. "The system will be abused, so we need to get rid of the system" is not a sound argument. Why do you think we should toss the system and not adjust it to help protect the public from abuses? Copyright worked fine for centuries before the RIAA and MPAA showed up. Its protections gave creators incentive to create in a world where money is exchanged for scarce resources.
Where is your case? Your "creators" aren't helping the very real scarcity problem that you refer to. My case is based on simple mathematics. By adopting a radically simple and natural law, (that information should not be regulated at the federal//global level) we as a society free ourselves from the burden of having to manage the artificial scarcity of "intellectual property", and we gain additional man-power to focus on real problems.
Let me paint a picture for you. A bunch of people on earth need bread, and there isn't enough to go around to satisfy all the demand for bread. In order to feed the "creators" the people made up some notion of "intellectual property" so that these "creators" can be guaranteed their daily bread. Since it costs next to nothing in today's technological world to copy information, the "creators" have devised a legal system and an army of lawyers whose job it is to interpret the written law such that the "creators" are paid their due in accordance to "intellectual property" law. The people spend a significant portion of their time either (1) recreating works that already had been created (to abide by these laws), (2) paying lawyers to sue other "infringers", (3) devising new methods of DRM or anti-DRM hacking measures or (4) lobbying the lawmakers to change the law in their favor, all the while (5) complicating the system even further, and (6) leaving the real problem of natural scarcity (bread) unsolved because the "intellectual property" required to innovate in bread-making is locked away and controlled by the existing bread making industry.
This society is diseased with the obsessive dwelling upon past memories, and it is adversely affecting its ability to tackle current and future problems. I don't know what copyright was like before the RIAA and MPAA, but I do know that the nature of copyright per se has changed relative to the advancement of technology. Whether or not the old laws used to be Ok does not matter because the environment is completely different.
Your argument holds some ground against Communism, where ALL property is considered common. The mathematics of human motivation, human needs, and natural resource limitations do not appear to add up. But when it comes to resources of information, I dare to think that sharing as much as possible is better and more efficient overall, even considering game theoretic dynamics in our capitalistic system.
I understand the beauty of the system of capitalism where those who create are rewarded by their toil and the virtue of voluntary transactions, but "intellectual property" goes against free trade by creating an artificial scarcity where the consumer is barred from certain voluntary transactions for the sake of "protection". As far as I can tell these IP laws only serve to protect existing established IP right holders, who are but a tiny portion compared to the magnitude of potential creators if only everybody else had the freedom to improve upon existing works unencumbered by patents or copyright.
I don't believe that ALL information should be shared. I believe in the right to privacy (for individuals and organizations) as long as you can reasonably keep the information secret to yourself. But when it comes to information that is easily copyable by virtue of technology, I believe it should be allowed to be copied freely. That is, Bradley Manning may have committed a crime by transferring information outside the bounds of the military complex, but once the information is leaked, it is anybody's data. The military has the right to secure its information borders, but it doesn't get to change the nature of the internet to censor sensitive information. Likewise, I believe consumers have the right to distribute files however they want regardless of what the content "creator" wishes.
I should also mention that my "common sense" often rejects what I said above, but after some deliberation it becomes clear that my sense are misleading when it comes to judging a system that is so different from the one that I am already used to. I did ...
You seem to be talking about lawyers, not creators. I send a simple email if someone is using my creations in an unreasonable way, and a DMCA request if it's serious. I don't use DRM on most of my ebooks since I'm fine with fair use, and I don't agree with the RIAA/MPAA's idea of "piracy."
I get that sharing creative works is like a tax. I pay it back to the society that made it possible so others have the same chance, and I'm fine with that. I don't support the infinite copyright extensions companies like Disney push for.
But handing my creations out to people for free won't solve poverty. As I said, you can't eat bits. It'll just force me to go do something I enjoy less, and keep me from having as much time to create.
What follows is my 2 cents, all my unsolicited yet thought-out opinion & advice tailored for you. I hope it makes a positive impact.
I see what you're doing. I don't know how successful you are, but it has to be suboptimal. You're publishing books in such a way that you mistakenly believe is optimized for monetary gain -- reusing content, publishing many small books for cheap etc.
Your last book is about how to gain blog viewers, yet you're not doing the right things in order to achieve real success. Market research is the old way. What you need to do today is say something new, talk-worthy, & something that really worked for you.
Make your webpage more navigable, polish your books and give them away for free (and have a paid donation option), market your books effectively, read what Cory Doctorow has to say about publishing success at craphound.com. I would love to read about future experiments with giving polished content away for free.
That you even used a DMCA takedown request tells me that what you write is not interesting. The DMCA is not really there to protect your works, friend. It exists to serve established publishers. You're not one of "them", and you're not going to become one of "them", because "they" don't want you. But no doubt you can be a wildly successful publisher on your own if you do the right things, but first you need to think outside the box.
ps I appreciate this thread we've been building up. I didn't know that you are a publisher yourself. I give you "legal" permission to use my words here on HN for your benefit as long as you give me attribution.
> 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.
True, but you're implying that if someone offers a product that's not inherently and nearly universally valuable (like food), then the government should step in and enforce a monopoly for them to distribute their product. Why should manufacturers of scarce goods have to come up with their own ways to differentiate their product to prevent people from turning to competing firms, but artists get a free government-enforced monopoly on distribution?
> the right to control licensing is the simplest and most fair way for a creative professional to convert their efforts into scarce resources.
I'm not saying that it is simple, but artists need to realize that digital works are inherently almost completely free (libre and gratis), and figure out ways to offer scarce products that have value. The obvious example is concerts and merchandise. Another example is dead simple digital downloads that can compete with pirated content. There are problably more examples I can't think of, and even more that no one has figured out yet.
In a world where anyone can copy a design, there is very little incentive for people to be creative. Why would I do the hard work of creating something if someone else can just appropriate my work for free?
In short, there would be no designs to worth copying in the first place. Incentive to work is fundamental problem in any communal property system.
Having seen the shenanigans of a bunch of Bay Area startups, and based on the tone of the responses in this thread, I'd gather that this quote from the article is a bit off base:
> "Your conversion rates or, you know, your credibility and integrity and the ability to have lunch in Silicon Valley ever again."
It would seem that, based on the tone here on HN, that these people will be able to have many, many more lunches in Silicon Valley. Hopefully they won't dine and dash.
>"It is frankly scary that a company can get $1M+ in funding and not realise they cannot just rip other peoples work..."
And more to come. This is an inevitably when your business model revolves around getting as many start ups money as you can in the hopes that some hit it big. It's inherent when you don't (and can't) vet all the people and ideas; you'll eventually end up with "people of poor moral character" in your system.
And there's no excuse for it. I wonder how it will be dealt with. I bet everyone involved was anti-PIPA.
242 comments
[ 577 ms ] story [ 4977 ms ] thread"have spoken to Curebit founder Allan Grant, he has taken down the pages with Highrise assets. he's also now drafting a public response. needless to say, he is re-thinking recent behavior.
although i'm sure DHH will not forget the transgression, but hope he may allow them opportunity to show they can learn from their mistakes & change."
WTF? How does "lean startup" factor into this? That seems like an odd little digression there at the end of the article.
The implication is that a slightly less lean startup would have had more design resources and wouldn't have done something so stupid.
BUT... I still believe that "lean principles" and "doing stupid things" are orthogonal ideas. Nothing about embracing lean mandates (or even suggests) doing something this lame-brained. I think it was a bit of an unreasonable jab at lean startup advocates, by the author of this piece.
But at what point does this become unacceptable? For example, if Curebit merely used the same design, except hosting the assets on their own server, would that be okay? What if they just copied the layout but used their own styles, images, and fonts? Or if they just copied the button?
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.
But I think the bigger story here is how Curebit handled their reaction to DHH. This could have all been avoided if Allan replied with a more humble stance.
Personally, I think DHH's initial reaction was on the strong side. If Allan had realized that, he wouldn't have tried to rationalize their actions. I suspect if he humbly apologized, then stayed quiet, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache.
And if was really troubled by DHH's reaction, he could have just emailed him privately. Getting into a pissing match in a public forum can sometimes backfire (even if you think that negative press can be good press).
Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same.
Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted.
Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars.
Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ.
Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more.
Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much.
In terms of what is acceptable, I tend to lean towards the notion that it's fine for someone to be inspired, or imitate as long as they've added their own artistic flare/soul to the piece and it's not just a forgery. As in they've only imitated a part of the piece, and not it's entirety. The issue with this whole process though is, art is subjective.
This isn't exactly like Zynga copying other small studios games, it's just a bit of design rip off, which incidentally, I'm not a designer, but if I see something that I think looks good on another site, I'm happy to copy the css styles for it. I've often thought if I'm just kidding myself, and what I'm doing should be considered totally wrong, but ultimately, it's just some styles. I've still coded everything myself.
While linking directly to assets you are using for your site, is clearly ridicuslously stupid, I don't think we should call the lynch mob out on them just yet. (Thoughts?)
Shit happens and hopefully this doesn't damage curebits business long term, but Allan really needs to understand what he did wrong, he seems to think the problem was he didn't credit and it's perfectly okay to take someone elses work, pass it off as your own and then hide behind silly phrases. No matter what your business is or how old you are stealing is wrong.
If I was in David's shoes, I'd be shocked to see how much they directly copied and simply ask them to take it down, and possibly notify their investors. I'd also be proud that they used my design.
Why this? Having their business affected is precisely what needs to happen to demonstrate that doing this is unacceptable.
The part of the apology is realizing that a mistake was made in the first place. Failure to do that does not make you look good.
I'm surprised that some people don't even understand what is being discussed here. Hint: it's not the hot-linking, it's not the borrowing of html, css or anything else. It's the brazen theft of someone else's work that @allangrant has engaged in and his apparent inability to see why this is an incorrect attitude. Not being a designer is not an excuse for being an apologist, either.
No, you haven't.
Seeing a website look that you like and emulating it by creating a blackbox version of it is fine, seeing a website look that you like and grabbing the css styling for it is breaching copyright. Its also ridiculously lazy in a bad way, getting someone else's css to work with your html is going to be way more painful than simply writing your own. Unless you also copy the html for it?
Seriously. As a professional you do not get to take other people's work without their permission. As a civilian you can do what you like, but if you want people to think of you as a professional, you need to act professionally.
"I'm happy to copy the colour code for it." vs " I've still coded everything myself."
There are a couple of points to consider though. the first and most obvious is that generally a background color by itself will not work well with the other colors on your site - choosing items in isolation like that is generally a fantastic way to end up with coder art (believe me, I know something about how to produce coder art).
The thing that good designers do, and do well, is make all the elements work together, generally if you simply take a single element (background color, font sizes, etc) from someone else's site and dump it on your own site without considering the overall effect, you are doing a stupid thing.
I don't think anyone here is worried about the sharing of ideas - uses of color, general placement of elements and so forth, taking those things and merging them with your own needs and messages is how new art is made. The problem with copyright usually comes when someone simply does wholesale copying without the process of considering each element in terms of its effect, the message you want to get across and so forth.
IMO A 'good faith' copying of highrise done competently would produce something new, something where the source of inspiration can be clear, but where there is sufficient change and obvious consideration of the factors that made your own product unique that there is no question of direct copying.
The damage done by straight copying is always twofold, the first is the obvious - the breach of copyright, the second is also clear but many people miss it - a design produced that speaks to a specific product, specific website goals and specific messages is very unlikely to have the same positive effect if transplanted wholesale.
That is why wholesale copying is not just a sign of a lack of ethics, it is also a clear indication of a total lack of competence. The person doing the copying entirely lacks knowledge of the process that is required to produce good work, and has no idea why the site they admire so much works so well. Even putting copyright and ethical concerns aside, I would have no interest in working with someone who lacks the competence to understand why wholesale copying is usually a stupid idea. They will not produce good work targeted at my needs, they will produce good work targeted at something entirely unrelated.
What would you call that person? I call those people scumbags.
That, more than anything, pisses me off about this. That somehow the RIAA is wrong when it calls people infringing it's copyright thieves, but when it's one of our own getting hurt, we hang the culprits out to dry.
Call them scumbags. Get all indignant and tweet about it to your followers and whine to the 'interwebz.' But at least have the courtesy to be truthful and accurate. Otherwise, your just a scummy.
Or maybe I just choose to ignore your pathetic misdirection and call things as I see them, which couldn't be more obvious to the eye. Because that's what a retraction of the work and the (forced) composition of a public apology are all about.
I'm sorry. Maybe you could point to me where 37Signals no longer has what was stolen?
I also applaud your open commitment in support of redefining copyright infringement as thievery. Let me know how that works out for you.
Finally, you should avoid baseless insults. It makes you appear stupid and detracts from what you are attempting to say. Throwing around insults like you do hurts the quality of HN. Maybe that's what you want, but I'd prefer to keep things accurate and intelligent.
Case closed. No need for lawyering, they know what they did and they know it's wrong.
> No need for lawyering.
No, there is every need to be accurate. Maybe you aren't aware of how long the fight has been going on, but the use of the term pirate and stealing isn't a new thing. Allowing it's use frames the argument in a light that isn't accurate.
Words have power.
Don't agree with me? A criminal like you would.
You say that. It's fairly rude. You can disagree with me, but trying to belittle my argument with insults is rude. I don't think my original comment went over the line at any point to warrant such a reaction. Be honest, your comment from the first word, was fairly facetious.
Disagree with me, but do so on the merits of intelligence, not insults.
I'm in full agreement that copyright infringement is not theft.
However, I think this part of the argument is weaker. Things can have value through scarcity, and even more so through uniqueness. To copy something, in such cases, can lead to a reduction in value of the original. If what you had was "the only <whatever> in the world" someone copying it takes that away from you without ever taking the item away.
Whether that's true in this specific case, is a somewhat different argument, of course.
What I don't see everyday is this kind of immature responses from the copied companies. Usually they just brush it off, because they know that in the end of the day, they are the better company. I say this without any other knowledge of the situation apart from the article though.
This is wholesale ripping off (in particular, indicated by the direct linking to 37signals site assets). I would be pissed off too if I found that my bandwidth was being used to serve another company's site. Especially if the site was for a competitor. This is more than just design copying
Calling them out in no uncertain terms was a community service. Let's not quibble over vocabulary.
Have you not heard of 37signals before this?
Is DHH as pissed off at Elance for the blatant copy?
https://www.elance.com/
There's a difference between eLance's "inspiration" and actually referencing hosted images & code that CureBit did, but it's not a night and day difference.
Murky territory with us all copying eachother's moments of brilliance, but I don't think curebit deserves the full bodyslam, "scumbag" treatment.
What Curebit did DEFINITELY qualifies as scumbag. There's some unknown tangible cost for 37signals (in the form of bandwidth, hosting assets for a competitor's site). There are small claims court cases considering similar situations nearly every day.
These things are over the line (and illegal):
Gray area:This is not illegal, merely poor form and also a bad technical decision because the other site can then control you.
If this were illegal, you would have to get permission from other sites to use iframes. Things like stumbleupon's web version couldn't exist.
Or, they should spell out the degree to which something has to be changed before they'll be okay with it. Such as "you can put a big customer image on the page because, well, we didn't invent that. You can also put screenshots on the page because, well, we didn't invent that either. And same goes for customer quotes, checklists, and company logos. But we'll take you down if you put checklists with green checks to the right of the giant customer image, a quote to the right of the client's head, and two screenshots below the checklist, etc., etc."
That said, it is an unfortunate that Curebit linked to 37's assets instead of creating their own. And it is clearly a copy beyond just the linked assets. But I don't think it's an international incident on the order of Wikileaks or such. But that's how it's being treated for some reason.
Personally, I would have emailed Curebit privately and asked them to change it instead of trying to tarnish an individual's and company's reputation. That's called "being civil," but that's not how 37Signals works. Remember the time Google created something that resembled Campfire as a demonstration of what Google App Engine could do? It was a 3-pane window with a chat log on the left, the name of the room and a list of people in the room on the right, and a text entry area across the bottom. 37Signals treated it as if they were the first and only company to develop a chat client that worked that way. Here's a link to that incident: http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/08/google-to-close-huddlechat/
Here's the choice (dangling) quote: "we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout…We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for."
Really?
Also interesting: https://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/163190258593304576
I think this cooled down a lot quicker if Grant had made a better reply. DHH didn't start out by calling them scumbags. (See his twitter feed)
I learned an important lesson a few years ago: sometimes you can't make something better, and trying to make it better only makes it worse.
Stop, regroup with others and get a proper plan together.
My suggestion would be to acknowledge the issue, let people know you will address it shortly but you need time to talk with your partners so you could get a proper response together.
Perhaps some version of "we're going to get to the bottom of this." Sure, it could be deemed a short term cop-out but it's better than sticking your foot in your over and over.
I'm curious how public relations experts recommend people handle a situation like this.
Let's not pretend that we're dealing with a couple of noobs here, people.
If it weren't for the cumulative years of technology-related experience of everyone involved, a case could be made for excusing a blatant misstep with an admonishment, but for outright copy/paste theft? Allan Grant knew better and decided to steal anyway.
Some of the reactions here are fascinating. As a group, HNers prize the freedom to copy from others and the ethic of helping others --- but for some, it seems to be "I get to copy from others, but no one else is allowed to copy from me."
EDIT 1: That said, from a purely-practical perspective it's usually better and cheaper to steer clear of controversy (depending on how you think the PR scales will tip). Curebit might have been better off had it not copied what it did, not least because this controversy is sucking up management time that could probably be put to better use.
EDIT 2: Plus, stealing someone else's bandwidth by linking directly to their copies of images, etc., without permission does cross the line, if that's what Curebit did.
EDIT 3: Even copying HTML and CSS might not constitute copyright infringement if there are only a limited number of ways to express the same idea(s). This is even more the case if there's an optimal way to code a given set of ideas.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet
It's legal to be an a-hole, but I usually try not to be one.
In this case, Curebit was only copying the design of a landing page, so it was probably not worth pissing off DHH even if that landing page was legally usable and worked better. Although it really seems that DHH was more pissed off by Allan's tweets and posts about it than by the design itself.
I also believe strongly that people should not have their lives ruined, and citizens should not have their freedoms curtailed to protect it on a large scale.
I do believe that businesses who take a relaxed attitude to using copyrighted material that belongs to someone else are displaying a lack of ethics that is worrying and deserve to be taken down pretty hard.
There is a world of difference between some random person downloading a movie for viewing, copying a website for their personal blog etc and a company doing it.
These guys have made a really unfortunate decision here. To be fair, based on their response so far I expect its because they dont have a clue what copyright even means, so its about ignorance rather than malice, and it will soon be rectified.
Yes, seemingly bad PR can cause unexpected good things, and bad PR can sometimes be turned into a good thing when handled skillfully (even then, not always). The idea that all PR is good PR is just naive.
If Allan Grant hadn't dug himself deeper into his hole, but instead come back with modesty, apologies and flattery to DHH at the very least (perhaps something outside the box as well, "Hey @DHH, to show we're sorry we'll donate $10k to a charity of your choice"?) then the bad PR would have got their name out there and their response might have prevented people from thinking badly of them, and even made people like them. But even then, there's never a guarantee that any response can turn bad PR to good.
They lost me when they started copying the HTML VERBATIM. Apparently they don't have capable developers either. The layout in question is not that complicated, and I'm struck on why they decided to do what they did. Even in A/B testing you could've mocked this thing up in a few hours and had it ready to go.
Inexcusable.
If you are testing 10 variations, getting "inspiration" is faster than come up with your own design and doesn't hurt 37Signals during the short length of the test.
Why did people get so angry so fast?
The only people who got really hurt in this story are Curebit, not 37 Signals.
The whole point of technical blogging is to help other people solve a problem the author has already solved. In this case, it was how to improve conversions on landing pages. If you put that content out there, don't be surprised when people use that content to help them solve a problem. You loose the right to whine and complain about someone using that information as soon as you blog about it. In return, you get more credibility (people treat you as a thought leader) and more page views.
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 seems so archaic to me.
Like building images with text, rather than using photoshop.
I write code on the backend, that lives on servers, I don't write HTML for a living, so maybe I'm missing some necessary requirement that forces people to work in text editors.... but a straightforward page like that should be much faster to create by dragging a button element onto it, even a generic one and picking the image, and then putting text boxes in there and setting their style, etc, should take maybe 2 minutes if the assets are already created. Not being able to do so seems like such a time sync.
I remember once not too long ago tweaking a landing page, by going back and changing absolute pixel offsets 2-3 pixels at a time in text. I've done this with iOS code as well. Change the text, compile, run, how does it look? ok, need to go farther, back into the editor, bump it up 2 more pixels. etc.
FWIW, if anyone knows of visual tools from startups or open source that are trying to solve this problem, I'd be keen to hear about them. (I'm building a web platform, and rather than create my own design tool would rather support existing ones with my platform.)
The closest I'm aware of is Cappucino which supports using Apple's Interface Builder to layout UI for Webapps, and then export the IB files to the Cappucino format. Sproutcore had Greenhouse which looked even better, but seems to have been abandoned.
A better tool would mean easier AB testing, maybe even ABC testing... faster development and more iterative design. I see no reason that such a tool couldn't be made, or would have to necessarily impose restrictions that limited its functionality... and I think that boosting web designer productivity would be hugely valuable. On the other hand, I can't imagine why nobody has tackled this.
PS-- on the mac there's Flux, which sorta does this, but it doesn't integrate with a common web framework like rails, etc. I mean, you can, but it seems more suited to static pages. http://theescapers.com/flux/
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 proceed long term.
I don't do everything in it, and the code that comes out isn't quite production ready, but it's damn close.
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.
I'd argue that landing pages are the most important and most complex pages to get right.
You can use Firebug/Web Inspector to adjust your layouts in real-time without needing to go back, modify code in your editor, save, and reload the page. There are some new tools (backfire) out that will even let Firebug/Web Inspector automatically update your CSS file so you don't have to go back after tweaking it in browser. Hopefully, browser vendors will one day bake this functionality in to their browsers.
The biggest time sink is not being able to drag and drop it's cross browser support. I can spit out a page from a design pretty quick, but getting it to look consistent across four or five different browsers takes forever.
1) It's hard to share components of WYSIWYG design across different projects.
2) It's hard to see what differences are between two versions in source control system. In order to do that you still need look at underlying code.
Problem 1 can be solved by designing your WYSIWYG editor UI around modular page components and templates, kind of like desktop software designers like QtCreator.
Problem 2 is a matter of designing a good visual diff tool for the DOM. You could combine the Tilt Firefox addon with other visual difference tools like A/B overlays and highlighting changed attributes (e.g. if the text color or border size is changed on a particular element between two versions being compared, set the text or border color or size of that element to some highly-contrasting or even animated value when the element is hovered in the diff view).
If your only mission is to adjust one asset by 2 pixels, they're similar. If you want to see how those 2 pixels affect the design in its entirety, then photoshop is a much better option.
It looks like this account was auto-killed ~570 days ago, but it's not clear why, as there's no obvious massively downvoted comment or OT submission.
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.
We had all that in tools like Powerbuilder, back in the 1990s. AFAIK you still have that if you build your site using Flash (though I've never used Flash to build anything, so I don't know).
The world decided that browser-based apps were better, warts and all. In a way it's a shame that plugin vendors didn't take seriously the concepts of security, performance, and openness, the web could have ended up a very different place.
Likewise, more developers would probably be happy to use WYSIWYG layout tools if they did not generate hideously formatted, immensely verbose and complex markup that is nearly impossible to hand-tweak when needed, or if the tools themselves were not so complex that mastering them was just as much work as mastering HTML/CSS.
I would be interested in a tool that lets me visually build a basic page layout, something like a wireframe, and generates clean markup and CSS that I then easily enhance/fine tune by hand. I'll check out this Lean Designs tool that's been mentioned a few time here...
Let me explain better: the file at `http://example.com/background.jpeg` is a wonderful image and indeed it is used on `http://example.com/index.html`. I run another site, example.net. I have my own `http://example.net/index.html` page and I decide to add a `<img src="http://example.com/background.jpeg alt="A wonderful landscape">` to it. Is this an infringement?
If it is, why? Because it has been "contextualised" in another site? Please note that I did not copy the file, nor I distributed it, I just made a reference to it. You did use it, you did download it, your browser on your computer did all the composition.
If hot-linking an is an infringement, then also distributing a bittorrent file is, the mechanism is very similar, just with one more level of indirection. And it is common option (mine as well) that the distribution of a bittorrent file does not constitute any kind of infringement by itself.
Do you know how US copyright law deals with this?
Alternative 1: By making your file available via the Web, you implicitly consented to having anyone download it who wants to do so, even via hot-linking, therefore there's no infringement.
Alternative 2: It's established custom that the implicit consent applies only to people who are downloading the whole page, not individual images --- therefore you didn't implicitly consent to hot-linking, therefore whoever downloads your content that way is an infringer, therefore the hot-linker is liable for contributory infringement or perhaps inducement of infringement.
Alternative 3: The person who created a page including hot-linked images, etc., has thereby created an unauthorized, and therefore infringing, derivative work [1]. (This assumes the hot-linked content is copyrightable.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Definition
"The court held that Google's framing and hyperlinking as part of an image search engine constituted a fair use of Perfect 10's images because the use was highly transformative"
When something is stolen, the original owner no longer has posession of the stolen object. If the story were about money or physical property, "stealing" would be appropriate. It is not.
The word "copying" is quite adequate. In this case, direct copying is obviously poor behaviour. It betrays a lack of capability on the part of the copyer. This story would have had the same emotional impact, had it used the correct term.
Using the word "stealing" mires the story in the intricacies of digital copyright debate, which is not what this is about. It is about a startup not doing its own work, and thus demonstrating inability.
1. You come home from work, and find that while you were gone someone came into your garage and stole your motorcycle.
It would be quite normal to exclaim "I've been robbed!". Yet you in fact have been burgled, not robbed. Nevertheless in common English usage people use "robbed" in a more expansive sense than it is use in law. If writing a police report, or an indictment, one must make the distinction, but not in regular conversation.
2. You are in a bar, in a tuxedo, obviously trying to drink yourself into oblivion. I ask you what is wrong. You tell me "my best friend stole my fiancé...on our wedding day!".
Technically, he did not steal her, as she is not property. He perhaps committed tortious interference with contract, or maybe alienation of affection. However, if you are not writing the pleadings for a lawsuit, it is in fact perfectly acceptable to say the bastard stole your fiancé.
3. You are the quarterback for your high school football team. The big game is coming up with your most hated rival high school. Your sister starts dating the quarterback of their time. While he is at your house visiting your system, he sneaks into your room, where you have your team's confidential playbook. He quickly uses his cell phone camera to take photos of each page.
This would generally be described as him stealing your plays, even though it is not legally stealing (and probably isn't even legally a crime).
The use of terms like stealing, theft, robbery, and so on to describe situations where they do not literally apply in the legal sense goes back a long way. E.g., from Shakespeare: "Who steals my purse, steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed." Note that he is using both filching (a synonym for stealing) and robbery to describe damaging a reputation.
Copyright law's mechanism is to create a property interest in the right to make and distribute copies of a given work. Exercising someone else's property interests without there permission is acceptably called "theft" in ordinary English.
http://www.curebit.com/pricing
> 37signals is a bit hypocritical
There's a difference between leveraging the lessons learned/data gathered from a particular design and copying the design itself nearly verbatim. A big one.
I am just struck by the fact that they thought no one would notice. It just seems like one of those judgement things that could be a red flag for future direction.
I don't know a designer who hasn't or doesn't draw inspiration from other websites. However, that process goes something like this...
1) Look at website. || 2) Assess what is good about the design || 3) Mock up own version.
What a decent person doesn't do is rip the existing site. HTML + all. Tweak it slightly then publish it.
What Curebit did is indefensible. This is something some 2-bit web designer fob's off to a client paying $200 for a website... the fact Curebit is a start up is not a defense. It is frankly scary that a company can get $1M+ in funding and not realise they cannot just rip other peoples work...
Sounds like the latter world will free up a lot of resources for more useful creative work.
Creatives work on design to be creative; they don't outright steal it to save time and resources. It's what thy do and witness what happens when you cross them.
I don't think the world has much to benefit from plagiarism, but I think the benefits of copying others' work and building upon them freely far outweigh the downsides.
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 dont have much to offer, to accept that you do not have a right to take from those who do, but accepting that and learning to work within those constraints will make you both a better person and a better developer.
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.
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.
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?
Even disregarding the profit motive for a second here - if I created a successful web page, should, say, the Westboro Baptist Church be free to take my web page and use it to support their (IMO vile) efforts, so long as they gave credit?
heh, good thing this crowd sincerely applies that ethic to music and visual art/entertainment.
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.
Yes, the WBC should be allowed to copy if everyone else is.
The benefits seem to me to dwarf the downsides.
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?
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?
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.
Likewise when you put your creative content on the internet, you are implicitly granting some license to people who view that content. They can view the source, study your CSS and javascript, save it for offline viewing if they want.
But when you take someone else's content, be it a book, a TV broadcast or a web site design, copy it either completely or substantially, and then proceed to personally profit from that work without the permission of the creator, you've crossed the line. Granted the distinction between copying (bad) and imitation (flattery?) can be fuzzy, but in this case it seems very clear.
If we simply say that with regards to information, no laws except the laws of nature are necessary, then some lawyers will lose their jobs, but there will be less friction and eddy currents in the system. Overall our endeavors will be more productive and quality of life will generally improve.
If you do not do anything new and worthy of my attention tomorrow, I do not want you to have my bread.
I prefer not to consume your copyrighted work. The nature of copyright is such that it becomes abusive. If you are the creative type whose bread depends on your ability to restrict others from copying or modifying your work, you inevitably become abusive.
I encourage the kind of positive creation that breaks out of or transcends such a system.
Let me paint a picture for you. A bunch of people on earth need bread, and there isn't enough to go around to satisfy all the demand for bread. In order to feed the "creators" the people made up some notion of "intellectual property" so that these "creators" can be guaranteed their daily bread. Since it costs next to nothing in today's technological world to copy information, the "creators" have devised a legal system and an army of lawyers whose job it is to interpret the written law such that the "creators" are paid their due in accordance to "intellectual property" law. The people spend a significant portion of their time either (1) recreating works that already had been created (to abide by these laws), (2) paying lawyers to sue other "infringers", (3) devising new methods of DRM or anti-DRM hacking measures or (4) lobbying the lawmakers to change the law in their favor, all the while (5) complicating the system even further, and (6) leaving the real problem of natural scarcity (bread) unsolved because the "intellectual property" required to innovate in bread-making is locked away and controlled by the existing bread making industry.
This society is diseased with the obsessive dwelling upon past memories, and it is adversely affecting its ability to tackle current and future problems. I don't know what copyright was like before the RIAA and MPAA, but I do know that the nature of copyright per se has changed relative to the advancement of technology. Whether or not the old laws used to be Ok does not matter because the environment is completely different.
Your argument holds some ground against Communism, where ALL property is considered common. The mathematics of human motivation, human needs, and natural resource limitations do not appear to add up. But when it comes to resources of information, I dare to think that sharing as much as possible is better and more efficient overall, even considering game theoretic dynamics in our capitalistic system.
I understand the beauty of the system of capitalism where those who create are rewarded by their toil and the virtue of voluntary transactions, but "intellectual property" goes against free trade by creating an artificial scarcity where the consumer is barred from certain voluntary transactions for the sake of "protection". As far as I can tell these IP laws only serve to protect existing established IP right holders, who are but a tiny portion compared to the magnitude of potential creators if only everybody else had the freedom to improve upon existing works unencumbered by patents or copyright.
I don't believe that ALL information should be shared. I believe in the right to privacy (for individuals and organizations) as long as you can reasonably keep the information secret to yourself. But when it comes to information that is easily copyable by virtue of technology, I believe it should be allowed to be copied freely. That is, Bradley Manning may have committed a crime by transferring information outside the bounds of the military complex, but once the information is leaked, it is anybody's data. The military has the right to secure its information borders, but it doesn't get to change the nature of the internet to censor sensitive information. Likewise, I believe consumers have the right to distribute files however they want regardless of what the content "creator" wishes.
I should also mention that my "common sense" often rejects what I said above, but after some deliberation it becomes clear that my sense are misleading when it comes to judging a system that is so different from the one that I am already used to. I did ...
I get that sharing creative works is like a tax. I pay it back to the society that made it possible so others have the same chance, and I'm fine with that. I don't support the infinite copyright extensions companies like Disney push for.
But handing my creations out to people for free won't solve poverty. As I said, you can't eat bits. It'll just force me to go do something I enjoy less, and keep me from having as much time to create.
I see what you're doing. I don't know how successful you are, but it has to be suboptimal. You're publishing books in such a way that you mistakenly believe is optimized for monetary gain -- reusing content, publishing many small books for cheap etc.
Your last book is about how to gain blog viewers, yet you're not doing the right things in order to achieve real success. Market research is the old way. What you need to do today is say something new, talk-worthy, & something that really worked for you.
Make your webpage more navigable, polish your books and give them away for free (and have a paid donation option), market your books effectively, read what Cory Doctorow has to say about publishing success at craphound.com. I would love to read about future experiments with giving polished content away for free.
That you even used a DMCA takedown request tells me that what you write is not interesting. The DMCA is not really there to protect your works, friend. It exists to serve established publishers. You're not one of "them", and you're not going to become one of "them", because "they" don't want you. But no doubt you can be a wildly successful publisher on your own if you do the right things, but first you need to think outside the box.
ps I appreciate this thread we've been building up. I didn't know that you are a publisher yourself. I give you "legal" permission to use my words here on HN for your benefit as long as you give me attribution.
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.
True, but you're implying that if someone offers a product that's not inherently and nearly universally valuable (like food), then the government should step in and enforce a monopoly for them to distribute their product. Why should manufacturers of scarce goods have to come up with their own ways to differentiate their product to prevent people from turning to competing firms, but artists get a free government-enforced monopoly on distribution?
> the right to control licensing is the simplest and most fair way for a creative professional to convert their efforts into scarce resources.
I'm not saying that it is simple, but artists need to realize that digital works are inherently almost completely free (libre and gratis), and figure out ways to offer scarce products that have value. The obvious example is concerts and merchandise. Another example is dead simple digital downloads that can compete with pirated content. There are problably more examples I can't think of, and even more that no one has figured out yet.
In short, there would be no designs to worth copying in the first place. Incentive to work is fundamental problem in any communal property system.
Having seen the shenanigans of a bunch of Bay Area startups, and based on the tone of the responses in this thread, I'd gather that this quote from the article is a bit off base:
> "Your conversion rates or, you know, your credibility and integrity and the ability to have lunch in Silicon Valley ever again."
It would seem that, based on the tone here on HN, that these people will be able to have many, many more lunches in Silicon Valley. Hopefully they won't dine and dash.
And more to come. This is an inevitably when your business model revolves around getting as many start ups money as you can in the hopes that some hit it big. It's inherent when you don't (and can't) vet all the people and ideas; you'll eventually end up with "people of poor moral character" in your system.
And there's no excuse for it. I wonder how it will be dealt with. I bet everyone involved was anti-PIPA.