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Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

i can't even see the problem here if they were selling them for $0 profit. let's assume for a second they sold them for $5 each and that is the actual cost of production. would ben show the same hostility to individuals who spent $5 to make the poster for themselves?

that said, i'd think it was a silly response even if they were selling it for profit. do you really want to focus your creative energy defending your authorship of a white poster board with red lettering?

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Even at 0 profit, you could say they were stealing profits away from the original author. However, they are not for sale anywhere in their original form. I'd like them to either actually put them up for sale, or encourage others to print them out, but I'd have to respect the original designer's decision not to see his work being duplicated elsewhere.

from where did you extrapolate his "decision not to see his work being duplicated elsewhere"? as far as i was able to tell he simply requested the profits were given to charity- of which there were none.

moreso, and i recognize this is a touchy subject, i'm not sure it's even fair to suggest he conceived these designs.

I based it on his reaction, which as you just said, was to request that any profit be given to charity.

Promoting their own event is not without self-interest, even if the poster sales aren't directly profitable.

Also, it's not authorship over "red on white" as a concept, it's authorship over this specific combination of type, size, layout, & copy that implies association with Facebook. If they just wanted to maintain the message, and not the association, they wouldn't have kept the visual style. Implying an association (with Facebook, or Ben) that isn't really there is the dishonest part.

no one, for all intents and purposes, would associate these signs with facebook.

And why wouldn't they? They're explicitly an homage to a photo that hundreds of thousands of people (especially those in the startup scene) saw.

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