A similar thing is happening to me. I worked on something for 3 years which I give away for free to help people and a thief took my software, ran it through ai to rebrand everything and relaunched as their own app. Unfortunately the ai missed a few Easter eggs I had hidden so the theft is undeniable. Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. They refuse to look at or arbitrate. So now I'm on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.
Theft is only going to become worse. It's already so easy and it's going to become even easier. We aren't prepared for what's ahead.
> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order.
This is especially egregious in Google's case given how trigger happy they are with pulling YouTube videos with a simple claim that something is infringing. I guess unless you can lobby them at the level of the music industry, their default policy is to do nothing.
Let's consider an independent dev making claims vs the army of lawyers from RIAA/MPAA type claimants. Which one do you think evilCorps will pay attention to?
This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant. If little guy beats the big guy defendant, little guy should walk away with millions or billions. If big guy wins against the little guy defendant, it's just hundreds or thousands. It makes relatively poor individuals who can't afford a team of effective lawyers lawsuit proof, while making those who can wage effective lawfare juicy targets if they so much as fudge the line with the outside of their shoes!
> with the outside of their shoes!
But it's the outside of the boot that lets you bend it. (yeah, I'm watching a World Cup match as I type this)
Sadly, I fear that even if we were to do something like that, any time a company is sued for infringement they'd find a way to ensure that the entity being sued just doesn't have any assets, sorry, you'll just have to be content with knowing you won.
>This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant.
yes! and we need to add the death penalty to the list of punishments for children, because what matters is not the size of the crime, but the harshness of enforcement, that's the real deterrent, arewerite!?
> yes! and we need to add the death penalty to the list of punishments for children, because what matters is not the size of the crime, but the harshness of enforcement, that's the real deterrent, arewerite!?
Child death penalties probably aren't something that you actually want, right? You NEED them. Nothing gets people to take a step back like capital punishment for misdemeanor crimes. And with great power comes great responsibility.
However, I get where you're coming from. A thought: Speeding is a pretty tiny crime but it needs to be punishable by the death penalty on the first offense. We'd never have to worry about that criminal driving dangerously again. It actually stones 2 birds with 1 kill. That speeder might actually be a serial speeder. Serial offenders sometimes escalate their crimes over time and they never, ever stop until they're not just dead, but also decapitated. The serial speeder that drove 5 over yesterday might drive 7 over today. Tomorrow may even get all the way to 8 over the limit. Eventually they'll get to ramming speed. After a serial speeder gets to ramming speed, they will never accept a slower speed; they will ram other cars and die first. This would have been prevented by simply taking advantage of the power of 1st offense: death penalty.
For both time efficiency purposes and the perception it would bring, judges should be walking around with 2 fully automatic assault rifles tucked under their robes. They already line up before the verdict is read, then dump both mags as soon as the jury says "guilty."
There's an overly lax legal system and no signs of a "Death Row Children's Fun Zone". The reality of that approach is that kids have the freedom ( and enough tokens) for basic white collar crimes. If enough of that happens, money will get canceled forever. Then by the time next Tuesday comes around we'll wake up on an Earth with everything regressed all the way back to a pure barter economy. This is why we can't have nice things.
Ridiculous. The initial proposal was to improve proportionality, what are you on about here?
It's obviously to point out that you have no clothes on
Weird comment!
I'm not I understand why you're asking me whether I think the phenomenon of intellectual property laws being enforced in a way that unfairly benefits the wealthy exists. Of course I do, that's why I brought it up in the first place. That doesn't mean it's defensible though.
The lawyers from evilCorps are on a first-name basis with the key lawyers from the copyright lobby, because their fates are fully intertwined
YouTube's take down infrastructure exists to prop up ad revenue. It was created by the industry and imposed on YouTube. There is no ad revenue on an App Store (to speak of) to protect so Google has no incentive to impose restrictions there that are purely DMCA-based. The incentives are misaligned between the app makers and the app distributors...structurally so.
reminds me of this woman who had copyright filed against her for playing moonlight sonata. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 if not for the complete hassle and threat to her livelihood, it might be laughable.
Rick Beato[0] is famous for some of his rants on the topic.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/RickBeato
There's been a plague recently of people taking videogame songs from classic games and rapping over them, putting them on Soundcloud or other services, and then automating the copyright process. So people who are playing through Donkey Kong Country or Dynamite Heddy are getting videos copyright claimed by someone who likely wasn't even born when the games came out and has no legal right to.
If you released it under a free software license, then all they seem to have not done properly is putting an attribution text in their software. But you did not specify what license you used which already makes me doubt if you have the correct mental model around free software and it's ethos. Who makes money on what is not the main concern in free software ideology. It's a side question. It's the four freedoms that are the main points. Then there is the question of copyleft but you didn't specify your license so I won't elaborate on that. But even that doesn't block a rebranded release for sale.
"Gave away for free" does not mean they did so under a Free Software license. One could just put a copyright notice with NO license and they'd be in violation of the copyright.
They would be in violation even if there were no copyright notice. You own the copyright to anything you create; no notice required.
> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order.
They deserve to also be sued too for the infringement. I don't think safe-harbor applies if they don't act on a valid notice.
Usually they do act, I believe. If they are following the DMCA they take the alleged infringing content down and notify the party that uploaded that content.
If that party files a claim stating that it is not infringing the host is required to forward that claim you, and then wait a short time (something like 10 business days, but I don't remember the exact time).
At the end of that wait if you have not provided proof that you filed a lawsuit against the alleged infringer the host restores the content. If you do provide such proof the content stays down until the court resolves the matter.
If you do not provide proof that you have sued and the content goes back up and then later you do so, you would need to get a preliminary injunction or similar from the court ordering the host to take it down.
Some big platforms (Google definitely) use their own systems in parallel to DMCA, so your experience with them (on both the copyright owner side and the copyright infringer side) can be quite a bit different if you are trying to deal with an infringement through that, but if you go through the DMCA channel that will work.
If you aren't ready to sue though and the infringer counter claims the material will go back up. You can think of the purpose of the DMCA in the case user content hosting as being to get the host out of the loop.
The advantages for the copyright owner of going through DMCA first instead of just suing right off the bat are that (1) in the case of accidental infringement the infringer probably will not counter claim and so one simple DMCA claim by you gets the content taken down and resolves the matter, (2) if they do counter claim, you get a copy of that which includes contact information which lets you know who to sue, and (3) the content will stay down until the suit is resolved whereas if you sued first it would likely stay up until you could get the court to issue a preliminary injunction.
Crazy shit. You should absolutely write about it, though. Stories like these need publicity to actually have people realize all type of IP will get affected.
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Name and shame. I'd be furious if I were one of the thief's tricked customers.
I doubt people that are already systematically stealing material can't hide, or forge arbitrary identities.
Naming and shaming doesn't work for such attack vectors, it's a social strategy for people that have a real identity established and are making money out of that, not for ephemeral identities of such scammers.
You would, most consumers wouldn't.
Mail the EFF
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You can't steal something which is free. This is what you should expect if you give away stuff for free to anybody who happens on it. To me it seems that FOSS people take perverse pleasure in these kind of things.
It's easy to prepare for what is ahead: Get yourself out of the filthy FOSS swamp and start charging a fair price for your work from real customers. That is something everybody benefits from and it is also dignified for everybody involved.
"FOSS" doesn't mean that you cannot monetize your program.
It's just that people have taken different routes historically.
Sell the program or give it away for free, to me both is fine. But to release the source code for free, then complain that other people take it and sell it - that's ridiculous.
If I give away my secret sauce recipe, I have no right to complain if somebody puts it in a bottle and sells it. Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.
> Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.
Governments have presented us with a third option, intellectual property, which allows a creator to release their intellectual contributions publicly while preventing someone else from reproducing it. Violating the terms of an open source license are generally considered intellectual property violations and allow the creator to seek damages.
Good luck with that. If you throw your wallet onto a busy street corner, then by the law nobody is allowed to take it either. But cops will tell you that they have more important things to take care of than victims who take every measurable action at hand to make themselves victims.
Thankfully, you don’t need cops to pursue a civil case.
I don’t know why you’re pretending as if this is some Herculean effort. This is pretty well tread territory at this point, see Jacobsen v. Katzer. Katzer was forced to settle for $100k in 2010 for violating the license on Jacobsen’s model train software that had been uploaded to SourceForge.
There are a lot of things that are immoral (or just rude) to do but not explicitly illegal
Personally I would prefer to live in a society filled with people who are better than thinking "well there's no law against it so it's 100% fine"
Edit: I also don't want to live in a society where every tiny piece of social decency must be encoded in laws to get people to actually be decent
Every book contains all of its content. It's "open source" by necessity. Are you saying that if you buy a book, you can do with the contents of the book whatever you want?
Computer code is not comparable to a book. A better comparison would be a blueprint or a recipe. If Coca-Cola publishes their recipe wide and far for anybody to read, would you rage together with them when another beverage company starts selling drinks together with them?
Computer code is also not comparable with a wallet thrown onto a busy street corner.
Can you decide, whether you are OK with unfit comparisons or not, instead of trying to have it both ways?
Good point! However, a book is nothing more and nothing less than its content. Code you can copy and implement wherever you want, and nobody necessarily would know it, unless you also publish it as open source.
Let me make a music comparison. If Metallica or Michael Jackson uploaded all their raw recording tracks to Napster and The Pirate Bay. The DAW files, or the separate instrument and voice tapes. Do they have a right to then get mad if people use those files to make remixes and edits?
There is a way to give away your software for free without any risk of people stealing your work: Just give the compiled binaries.
If you upload your source code to a public website explicitly created for source code sharing, which even has a one button press to copy the source code, then you have no right to be mad that somebody copied your source code. You then did everything in your might to facilitate that behaviour.
Okay, not everything. I guess FOSS people could also start hacking in to other people's computers and install their software there, so that they can turn around and be outraged that their code was stolen. That's probably the next step being prepared in the FOSS swamp right now.
> Computer code is not comparable to a book
Counterpoint: Yes, it is. Both are copyrighted under the same legal system.
> the filthy FOSS swamp
Now, be nice. This isn't Reddit, and I don't think the HN mods are really into "engagement"*
I tend to release a lot of stuff MIT. I don't give a shit, if anyone takes it and gets rich (which I seriously doubt will happen). It's just that I don't want people coming after me, if they misuse it.
If, however, someone rereleases my stuff with a "gift," and makes it appear that I was behind it, then that's a Bozo no-no. I think that kind of thing is going on at GitHub, right now.
*Mud-wrestling in a cesspool
I agree with you that taking somebody else's name or brand is foul play. I the case I was replying to, somebody had copied the code and put their brand on the author's FOSS project.
Which is the same as some very popular software, including the Safari browser, Android, and much more. That's FOSS, if you give it away you have to expect people to take it. Just as you say.
It looked to me, like they actually took his name and brand, as well as his work, and republished it.
I guess it was sort of a "fan art" way, which isn't too bad, but they showed pretty callous disregard for the niceties of copyright, which is pretty important, for the type of work they are advertising.
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