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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

> You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft.

Seriously? Do I need to explain why a song doesn’t enter the public domain when it is played on the radio?

Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century? Data is trivially copied and there's nothing you can do to fight that, no amount of laws will ever make it non-trivial again. Even if you successfully sue somebody for this, it won't stop them.

At some point people are gonna have to accept this.

>"Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century?"

This sentence added nothing substantive to your comment, and made it rude; could you please be a bit more polite in the future?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For what it's worth, I didn't think it was rude. And I do think it was a substantive aspect of his response. It's a valid perspective even if I personally think it's somewhat orthogonal and incomplete.

I was replying to a similar sentence, but it is true that in the end it did nothing but escalate the situation. I apologize and yes, I will try to be more polite.

I was responding to a question of whether it was theft, not whether such theft is morally grey or unstoppable in practice.

Yours is a somewhat orthogonal point and one I don’t entirely disagree with.

Well if you want to stick to the hard facts then it's even simpler: copyright infringement is not theft - those things are covered by entirely separate laws.

What are copyright strikes, then?

Not even a thing in my country. Likely easy to avoid in others.

OP was talking about price lists. IANAL but AFAIK you can't copyright a list of prices.

That may be true. A list of prices might not be copyrightable in your particular jurisdiction. However I was only responding to the raw assertion made without any such qualification.

On the opposite end of the spectrum might be a photographer's website containing a gallery of their sample work. The fact that the gallery is openly published doesn't represent a relinquishing of copyright over those images.

No but those are substantively different situations such that this exact thing is being argued in the highest courts of the US. It's not quite the cut and clear case you seem to believe it to be.

I'm not American. I'm interested to read about these cases. Can you point me towards some relevant material, or at least cite the case name(s)?

Ah yup, certainly. So this is the one I was mainly thinking of -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Interesting. From what I can gather, the material in HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn was not claimed to be under copyright and that the argument being fought over in court was with respect to mechanically subverting access to a competitor.

You appear to have claimed that rights over material is broadly relinquished if it's published in public:

> If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website

And your distinction was further clarified when you argued that placing barriers to access fundamentally changes the equation:

> Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly available information any longer and you can cover usage, again, in a license.

Perhaps you meant to speak only of material which is not subject to copyright? In which case I think your argument does track.

Mmm I’ll go with that, to be honest I saw that LinkedIn had initially made a complaint under DMCA (which HiQ then got an injunction for) as well and given how the case played out I was uncertain to the extent the case was signaling that you may be waving certain rights by making some content publicly available with no gating like a sign up.

No, but there is a legit philosophical argument about theft when it comes to copyright. There are two ways to look at theft: acquiring something you didn't earn vs. someone losing something they did earn. Generally, we tend to focus on the latter. From that perspective, "copying" is really not "theft", and arguably "copyright" does more net societal harm than any benefit it provides.

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