Comment by theelous3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theelous3 | Hacker News Reader

So I did a little digging. This post is stolen? Word for word? lol

Original article by user matmaroon in 2009:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100824103317/http://mattmaroon...

Spurred by their own comment in the original thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586154

And first posted to hn by matmaroon also in 2009:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588752

Sort of unrelated to the digging - the comments in the original thread on warner / lessig are pretty well balanced. Very little to no prescriptive law talk, which is the only law talk worth attacking from the perspective of the authority and knowledge of law and its application. There's nothing at all wrong with speculation around the outcome of dmca notices, using whatever legal knowledge you can dig up. It's not legal advice to either party. This goes doubly so in 2009 when all of this was much less understood. Seems like a pretty bad example case for the OP (OP).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586100

All: please email hn@ycombinator.com if you see abuse like this. Protecting the quality of the site is our #1 priority and we can't address problems we don't know about!

The OP is a serial content thief who's been spamming Reddit for more than a decade and has been shadowbanned/suspended dozens of times. He rotates through Medium.com and Vocal.Media sub-sites like this and rehosts other people's work as his own. That's literally all he does all day for a living. Looks like he's set his sights on HN now, too.

I don't at all doubt it. Can you provide some evidence so we can point a mod over here and have him deadded?

More than happy to but I have many years worth of evidence I can show and I'd rather not spam this post with the info. Is there someone I can DM my evidence to? To start, I actually found this post via his current reddit account: https://redd.it/pnbi59 Deleted to hide, of course - that's his M.O. One can't prove he's a spammer from a casual glance since he covers his tracks and deletes stuff constantly. It's trivial to dig his posts out of archives and point to 20 variations of the same name that's been banned on medium or the same 20 accounts posting the same 50 or so stolen clickbait articles he regularly reposts year after year.

Edit: a plain account ban won't work, he'll just make more accounts. Mods/admins need to be creative here since he'll just rotate his IP and be back an hour later.

How do you think they're profiting from this? Does medium pay for impressions or something?

Medium has the "Claps" program and Vocal.Media has an ad-rev share program.

I was a court watcher then, too. Not much has changed wrt the public's understanding of law and legal proceedings than I can tell. The forums are still just as full of breathless techies extolling how they wish the law worked rather than observing what actually happens.

This is a non-sequitur. I can "extoll how I wish the law worked" all day, and that says nothing about observing what actually happens.

Attacking "breathless techies" for discussing how they would like something to be, because observed outcomes are not this way, makes no sense what-so-ever.

You can sit around on HN all day and say whatever you want. I think that was sorta the topic of the article.

The topic of the article was ragging on internet commentors in tech forums for not being subject matter experts in every topic they discuss. It's one of the worst takes I've read in a while to be honest.

As long as everyone is being reasonably descriptive, it's perfectly fine for anybody to discuss anything.

For example, "ip law is bullshit because of {my_differing_moral_base_presumption}" is an absolutely fine thing to say, and argue. You're not being prescriptive and nobody is ill-effected, or directed to be ill-effected, by your opinions stemming from your differing moral base.

Furthermore, claims about what you think the outcome of something might be - given your limited knowledge - are perfectly fine too. For example, "I think a reasonable court would find that the claim was bullshit because it's a 30 second segment of the song mixed over some anime, out of a 50 minute talk. It's clear the intent wasn't to republish the work for profit."

There's absolutely no problem with this from the perspective of healthy conversation. You're taking a good faith approach to the discussion and saying what you think might happen given your knowledge. You may ultimately be _wrong_ but you were never saying you were _more right_ than subject matter experts anyway.

Basically the only times it's a good idea to dump on people is when someone ignorant is being prescriptive. "When you're licensing your work you should add {some_clause} because of {bad_understanding_of_law}". That's when it's harmful. Or, if you're acting in plain old bad faith.

So if the article was complaining about this kind of harmful prescriptive talk, I'd agree, but that isn't at all what I'm getting from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com