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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

This is why we can't have nice things: greed.

In an ideal world, the DC agreement is substantially fair: it gives independent authors the chance to receive better exposure, access to limitless amounts of incredibly talented professionals to help them polish their work, and a steady flow of income - in exchange for exclusivity, a chunk of money, and a certain regard for DC's investment.

But at some point, greed kicks in. DC "forget" to send a royalty check or three. They start making plans to make more and more money (games! movies!), for which original authors are just annoying roadblocks. And it all goes to hell.

It's so sad, because it's all so unnecessary.

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This may seem like quibbling, but I think when large companies do this kind of thing, "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. Greed is an emotion, or moral failing if you will, humans have. A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. It doesn't have emotions, it has interlocking sets of incentives (sales bonus plans, executive compensation based on beating last quarter's numbers, etc) which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts. This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results. When those restraints don't apply strongly enough, this behavior kicks in. I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm reluctant to call it greed for the same reason that ChatGPT isn't "lying".

Not making excuses for DC, btw.

I would guess though that such arguably corrupt structures always emit from the leadership. The way to have a moral company is by having moral leadership. The issue is that there is no incentive for a company to have moral leadership (or not for that matter). It just gets the leadership it gets. If the leadership is into cutting corners, this will radiate out in the form of the mechanisms you mention, where in lower levels people WILL do immoral things not because they're greedy, but because of the compan structures put in place by the people who are.

Ultimately thoug I believe the market corrects for it. We're seeing that right now with Unity. It just takes a lot of time for a bit company like this.

> "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. [...] A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. [...] it has interlocking sets of incentives [...] which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts.

Institutionalised Greed is a form of Complicit Exploitation.

"I was just following orders," is one of the typical apologies.

> This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results.

These are checks on greed, dishonesty, and cruelty. All that stands between healthy social order and chaos is the social trustworthiness of people.

Nope. Companies don’t make decisions. Humans working for companies do.

The worst part is the perversion of justice of the author being provably right yet unable to enforce his legally binding contracts as an individual against a well resourced company. Hopefully this sparks a copyleft movement of public freedom.

In the 1970s Dutch lawyers, in the hippie spirit of the time, realised that only the rich could afford legal advice. So they decided to start doing pro bono work for the poor.

If only courts would award legal fees to the winner…

Who could afford the upfront costs of fighting this stuff for years, even if you claw it back at the end?

> This is why we can't have nice things: greed.

It sounds like this crossed the line into gluttony and premeditated long-term theft (defrauding? expropriation? ip annexation? I'm not sure what a good word is). Greed is Unity's problem, but it sounds like DC has intentionally and systematically attempted to steal from the author over many years and that is qualitatively different. Let's not let DC off with simple greed.

8kagine you're a creator who has just been accepting dc / marvel payments without auditing them until now. Maybe time to hire a professional to start working through all past payments and see how much they've been screwing you out of.

yeah, imagine being a millionaire and noticing missing pocket change

oh wait, you're still a millionaire..

Most comics creators are not millionaires, and if DC is screwing a highly visible, highly successful author, I have to wonder how well they're treating the less visible creators

Ya all those millionaires comic book artists - you're totally out of touch with what marvel and DC are paying.

Comics creators are famously exploited. Superman's creators died in poverty, and most work by Marvel and DC is performed as "work for hire", i.e. not generating royalties for actual authors. This is also why authors increasingly try to publish independently, but that also means working on brand new series that may or may not attract any popularity and actually generate profits. For one Mark Millar or Todd McFarlane there are hundreds faring worse than Joe Shuster.

todd mcfarlane and mark millar got rich going into business for themselves, rather than working for DC and Marvel.

If I understand correctly, it wouldn't be so bad if greed were kept in check by honesty.

Unfortunately, considering this exact sentence shows up in every discussion on forms of government and modes of economy it isn't a easy problem to solve.

Agreed – I don't claim it's simple. What I mean is roughly this: greed is bad, but it's even worse when combined with dishonesty.

Sorry, I never meant to imply you thought the solution was simple, just lamenting the fact that greed + dishonesty (+ stupidity if we're being thorough) is such a universal problem with untold amounts of time and energy dedicated to debatable mitigation but no real solution in sight.

I can tolerate, and even respect an honest cheat. But a lying cheat has a special place in hell.

Related: “It’s a miracle any of this works. People were involved.”

At a certain scale those who are dishonest have a competitive advantage over those who are not. So they win.

> It's so sad, because it's all so unnecessary.

That's a rather naive take. There's no point moralizing, or being wishful about it. Just embrace the game theory nature of reality.

Corporate and governmental power structures will always be susceptible to capture and exploitation. We need to set up structures that can not be co-opted by the psychopaths, or at least contain a poison pill that makes them much less attractive targets for such people.

The lesson from this example is that the author maintained ownership, and so in the end could do something meaningful to combat the company that has become corrupted.

I'm kind of more afraid there's no psychopath to pin the blame on. I haven't done my homework but I suspect the system and a bunch of normal type people exhibit the same outward behavior.

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