Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

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I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether your primary responsibility to protect the interests of your real users (the non-patent trolls) or to take a stand against people you don't like.

This would be a much easier decision if we sold a discrete product. A grocery store or Amazon.com can deny someone service and then they can go shop somewhere else. No big deal. Our users store their most important business data with us for years. How can our legitimate users trust us if they think they might wake up one day and be banned?

Thanks for the comment, this is definitely an interesting discussion.

By the way, I can tell you that I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone using the software for something illegal but not necessarily unethical (like selling drugs). The problem is that as soon as they tell you they're doing that, you're effectively assisting them in the illegal activity which makes me a criminal. That's the main reason why we have to take action when someone tells us they're using the CRM to do something illegal (not that it's ever happened).

> I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether your primary responsibility to protect the interests of your real users (the non-patent trolls) or to take a stand against people you don't like.

Using the phrase "primary responsibility" doesn't change the fact that helping unethical people do unethical things puts evil into the world. It sounds like you (and Less Annoying) are subconsciously reasoning with the goal of never being held responsible for evil. That's different from minimizing evil.

A clearer way to make your case would be to say that taking a stand is too expensive (vs not-my-problem.) Maybe the company's resources are better spent assisting ethical customers. Maybe this assistance yields more revenue, further increasing the ability to assist ethical customers. Now you have an exponential growth rate of net good, so you have a big-O notation argument for not policing evil. (... actually, exponential growth rates of small business revenue are really sigmoidal, not exponential, so it will probably be better to switch back to thinking about ethics when you approach market saturation)

I don't feel like I owe sympathy to people who are concerned with culpability rather than with utility, and I doubt you do either.

Utilitarianism 102: having firm written rules, even subobtimal ones, can often have better consequences than evaluating each action on its merits. I've seen it recommended on this very site to avoid any hosting provider with a "morality clause" in their T&Cs. A service that will host "any legal content", while it will aid a certain proportion of unethical actions, ultimately contributes more benefit to society than one that hosts "any legal content, except that we morally object to".

You know, you're right (about the dangers of morality clauses). Consider my original content 70% retracted or at least flagged for requiring modification.

Maybe you could have a list up-front of who you don't deal with (Scientology, patent trolls, KKK, etc.) and remark that anyone not on this list who signs up will be grandfathered in forever, even if their category is added later - this gives existing customers peace of mind, and tells your browsers exactly what you consider morality?

But if lots of people did this, I'm not sure the world would be a better place, now that I think about it. Pick a previous decade, and gays would've been the ones most often targeted - of course, then I could meta-boycott, but...

This is a deeper issue than my original comment acknowledged, so on further consideration, please consider it entirely retracted until I can give this more thought.

What sort of business policy should one go around advocating on a planet where most people think "morality" is about disapproving of sex acts, and so anything that strengthens the force of what other people believe to be "morality" within economic business, tends to make things that much worse? I don't know.

Fully agree. Since maybe it wasn't clear, I wasn't objecting to the approach of "let's decide what our firmly written rule is" but to the seemingly-implied rationale given in support. "Let's decide our primary responsibility" sounds like it's more concerned with responsibility than utility. Having those priorities is the thing with which I disagree.

As a software company, I would be wary of doing anything, whether legal or otherwise, to support a software patent troll. Having access to your software is clearly in the interest of your real users, and this access is threatened by the practice of patent trolling.

I understand your reluctance, of course, but a company whose business model that abuses the legal system at the expense of companies that produce software seems like a reasonable thing for a software company to avoid dealings with. How can your users trust you if they think they might wake up one day and your product is gone because of spurious patent litigation?

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