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Comment by milesrout | Hacker News Reader

>Feel free to make a version of the page for your own product, but please don’t copy the exact wording. That would be copyright infringement. ;0)

To be honest this sort of attitude is why many people have little or no respect for copyright. They see people being sticklers for copyright about things that are completely unreasonable to be copyrighted and extrapolate that essentially copyright is stupid and should be ignored. Same thing for patents.

Yeah in reality patents and copyright have their place, but every time someone uses a ridiculous patent or an overly aggressive interpretation of copyright, it turns people off from the entire concept.

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Ironically, he seems to have pirated it himself, which makes the copyright claim even more insulting.

PerfectTablePlan: "If you like PerfectTablePlan enough to go searching for a crack for it then why not just buy it? It's a lot less hassle and you won't risk infecting your computer with viruses, spyware and other malware commonly disguised as software cracks."

Dplot: "If you like DPlot enough to go searching for a crack for it then why not just buy it? It is a lot less hassle and you won't risk infecting your computer with viruses, spyware and other malware commonly disguised as software cracks."

There's a bit of rewording in the middle but it's mostly copy and pasted from the other guy's or the common source.

A google search for "enough to go searching for a crack for it then why not just buy it?" (in quotes) fetches a few results, mostly of businesses with their own "warez honeypot" for the software they sell.

The person who created Dplot seems to have left a comment on that page clearing the air a bit:

"Mine is a mostly word-for-word copy and dates Aug 2015. But as I recall the original was Dexter Bell, who offered this up on the ASP newsgroups and encouraged copying. But as with many other things I may be wrong!"

> They see people being sticklers for copyright about things that are completely unreasonable to be copyrighted

There's at least one good reason in this case - duplicating the wording exactly is likely to result in a Google Duplicate Content penalty for everyone involved, which defeats the purpose of trying to get a high ranking on that keyphrase.

I'm not sure the page is a good idea in general, the kind of people who look for cracks are probably not good customers (high support load, unwilling to spend money). I think I tried something similar years ago without success. But it's probably worth an experiment.

Well when I was a poor student with not much money and pirated software, I've been shamed once to buy a software (I think it was from Panic) when I got a message after entering a blacklisted serial number. So, anecdotally, it does seem to work on some people.

But then, as soon as I started working and had money I stopped pirating software so my pirating was mostly due to circumstances.

Yes, his attitude is also quite stiff in the writing. I don't feel any emotion. He could have easily turned this into a friendly "I worked hard on this and make a living from it", instead he just rambles on about the dangers of malware in a cant-help-but-feel-quite-passive-aggressive tone.

correct. the idea is interesting though

See this comment:

> Mine is a mostly word-for-word copy and dates Aug 2015. But as I recall the original was Dexter Bell, who offered this up on the ASP newsgroups and encouraged copying. But as with many other things I may be wrong!

And then the author's response:

> I think I copied the idea, not the wording. But it was 10 years ago and I don’t recall exactly. Your page is different enough to mine that it isn’t a problem.

Every creative work is subject to copyright. That isn't being overly aggressive. It's how the law works. It's only you who wants to have some vaguely less restrictive form of copyright defined by some arbitrary measuring stick that can't actually be constructed to satisfy everyone. The only thing wrong with copyright is how long they last these days.

s/the only thing/one of the chief things/

DMCA takedown and anti-circ would be two other major flaws. Failure to require copyright holders to be accessible and identifiable, orphan works, and the impunity with which rights that don't exist can be asserted ("Happy Birthday" song, f'rex), would be high up my list.

Did you notice the smiley at the end of the sentence?

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