Congrats, Self-Righteous Internet Mob. You Killed a Magazine. | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, Self-Righteous Internet Mob. You Killed a Magazine.

techcrunch.com

13 pointsduck17 comments

From the TC post:

> Was Griggs a total jerk who deserved to be called out? Yes. Plagiarism is obviously never OK and when called on it, even if you’ve had a bad day, you don’t ask for money. It was just mind-bogglingly stupid.

Given the Cooks Source editor's utter insincerity and refusal to admit that she did anything wrong, I'm not surprised they're going under. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another not to learn from it.

I can't say I have much sympathy for either the editor who took the work or Sarah Lacy. The editor shouldn't have done that, nor should she have replied to the original person in the way she did.

Equally, Sarah Lacy should STFU.

"If you don’t experience an ounce of empathy there’s something wrong with you".

Really? Like stealing content should be forgiven as long as you're "sorry" for it and, especially, if you're not the target.

I remember TC's reaction against the company that "stole" them the CrunchPad idea or something like that. Isn't stealing content the same thing, after all? Maybe the dimensions are different, but the underlying truth is the same. Stealing is bad. Bad in general and bad for the Internet.

This is not the first time Cooks Source has copied something without permission. Check this out: http://www.edrants.com/the-cooks-source-scandal-how-a-magazi...

For what it's worth, recipes (lists of ingredients) are not subject to copyright. Nevertheless, the accompanying prose and images obviously are.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

The "woe is mob" TechCrunch author really should have highlighted this piece.

The mob didn't kill a magazine, it killed an ongoing content theft mill.

Relating this to web startups, imagine the damage that would be done to a startup if private data being held on behalf of a customer were made public, accidentally or otherwise. Then a response stating the customer should be happy they are storing their data at all was given.

I've seen plenty of startup scandals on HN in the past where the founder has come out and defended what they did or admitted they did the wrong thing, but none as bad as the response for this magazine editor.

I'm not really sure I understand your analogy, copyright infringement and privacy violations are very different mistakes. Can you explain?

I mean more generally, a public outcry about something, either deliberately or inadvertently does. If a startup responded to one of these events in a similar way it would put people way offside and bring their credibility into question, as has happened in this situation.

I wholeheartedly agree that what the editor, Ms. Griggs, did was unethical and copyright infringement. I believe she should, and tried to, make it right. However, after watching the whole debacle through Facebook and Twitter and reading some of the reprehensible things, I was disgusted. The things that were said or written about were very often irrelevant from people who had no dog in the fight. And, there were some things that were written that would never have been spoken. I fear this event goes beyond copyright infringement.

Douglas Rushkoff, in his book 'Program or Be Programmed' has an entire chapter about the social aspect of the web and the mob it/we produce; it's quite a good read: http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/program/

Self-righteous internet mob seems like a better idea than DCMA and government action.

Indeed, they can't throw you in prison.

I wonder how many of the people involved have opinions on pirating movies/songs/other forms of IP, and what those opinions might be.

Somehow I can't see an internet mob ganging up on someone who remixed a song (of an indie artist) and refused to see anything wrong with it.

This also shows that there are very, very weird people out there on the Internet. Who would bother to send the editor personal hate mail?

> Somehow I can't see an internet mob ganging up on someone who remixed a song (of an indie artist) and refused to see anything wrong with it.

It is a blend of the fact that the remixer was trying to make money off of the stolen content, and that the original writer had specifically told them to stop (which the remixer refused). I think it also sort of plays into people's underdog complex a bit, or wanting to stick up for the 'little guy'.

I wonder how many of the people involved have opinions on pirating movies/songs/other forms of IP, and what those opinions might be.

I wonder why anyone would use such a passive-aggressive construction in their writing.

Somehow I can't see an internet mob ganging up on someone who remixed a song (of an indie artist) and refused to see anything wrong with it.

See, I can explain this. Believe it or not, most people do not study copyright law for years in order to develop opinions about what activity should be infringing. Instead, they develop an ad-hoc set of intuitions about what sorts of activity copyright should regulate. Sometimes those norms happen to line up well with what copyright law actually says and sometimes they're in complete disagreement. In this case, the norms line up. In other cases, like a poor artist who earns basically zero dollars remixing, they don't.

In other words, what is legal often differs from what most people's intuitions about what is legal, and this difference is especially large in area of law that are complex and divorced from popular debate. The truth is that if you tried to explain copyright law to the average person, they simply wouldn't believe you because so much of it is so absurd. This is all explained in any of a number of good books, starting with Jessica Littman's Digital Copyright, which I highly recommend.

I wonder why anyone would use such a passive-aggressive construction in their writing.

Believe it or not, most people do not study copyright law for years in order to develop opinions about what activity should be infringing.

Really?

Anyway, I don't think you can disregard the point by pointing out (quite correctly IMO) that copyright law is a pile of crap. I think in general, Internet mobs are pro-piracy of songs/movies, but in this case these people saw something massively wrong with what is basically piracy of someone's article. Staying away from the legal side, what moral/ad-hoc/intuitive basis do you think the people had for making this distinction?

Good.

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