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Comment by ewillbefull | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hate the DMCA, when this happens and a U.S. host starts ignoring legitimate DMCA notices, start emailing their upstreams. Softlayer is probably doing this because they have an inexperienced tech handling your request.

Email ATDN, Global Crossing, Cogent Communications, and many of the other companies they peer with and say the website has not been shut down despite emails sent to Softlayer. Those companies may threaten to nullroute the website's IP.

If they don't do anything (unlikely) get an injunction.

It's trivial for this guy to get it hosted elsewhere, however. This is just me, but I wouldn't expect to build anything in HTML5 that couldn't be copied-- the platform is inherently open. If the only creative and useful properties of your work is built in the open, there does not seem to be a compelling reason why you would be protected by copyright. This person could build a website around your "copyrights" in little time.

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If Softlayer ignores the DMCA complaint, thats good news from a monetary standpoint, because now they have fallen out of the safe harbor and there is someone to collect money from. Then they get to do the hard work of collecting from "Long Yang."

The OP wrote that "I prepared a DMCA and sent it via fax to Softlayer. I never heard back and finally gave up on the whole thing."

This is probably not the most effective way to handle a DMCA notice. While it would be nice if every company's compliance team was responsive and open, this task is often outsourced and because the DMCA is fundamentally a legal process, review and action can be very conservative. If you want to fast-track action, certified or registered mail beats facsimile every time. A follow-up letter including a copy the certified delivery receipt is very effective. This is even more true if it's on law firm letterhead or company letterhead and professional in tone.

Presumably, if this is a big enough issue to post on HN and if there's some lost revenue, it's probably worth the time to follow up on the DMCA takedown request(s). It may also be worth the time to ask an attorney to prepare a sample letter you can use for this and future takedown procedures.

I'd encourage the OP to not give up on the DMCA process, as it can be very effective with a little bit of followup.

Just because a product uses open technology, it doesn't necessarily undermine the labour and creative skill that a person puts into creating a product from the open technology available. This could be the same skill put into a non-open source piece of software, just that the opportunity to copy isn't so readily available.

Also, saying that the person who copied the website could build around the website in no time at all rather assumes that they have the skill to do so.

> Just because a product uses open technology, it doesn't necessarily undermine the labour and creative skill that a person puts into creating a product from the open technology available.

I never said it did, and that's what's unfortunate about this situation. His service has no backend that could not be easily replicated, and the frontend is portable. You cannot build software like this without being copied... by nature it is not practical to expect to limit others' behavior with open platform code. There are no laws that will protect you from sufficient copying effort.

Whether the person is skilled or not is another issue. The OP would still be mad if somebody ripped off his website and made it just different enough.

Ah I see - yes, I take your point. I agree that if it is easily available, it is likely to be copied, such is the reality of human nature. Unfortunately, it does rather incentivise keeping things locked up which is a shame in some respects in terms of increasing knowledge. Some times the best way of protecting your innovation is simply not to disclose.

I agree that most people have an emotional connection to their product and if someone designed around it, it would still hurt. However, this process would take time and is the nature of competition. As such, the impact can't be as great as in the instant case where the infringer has just ported the whole platform.

> non-open source

"Open source" does not mean "you can view the source". It means software that is freely usable and redistributable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines...

Thank you for the correction. Is there a term to describe code which although freely viewable is not open-source?

Proprietary.

But that for me doesn't capture the aspect of it being freely available to examine/read - perhaps such a term doesn't exist!

I don't think there's one term. "An application with exposed/visible source code", maybe.

The term "shared source" exists, and sort-of covers this scenario:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reciprocal_License#Mi...

Minified JavaScript is only marginally easier to read than disassembled/decompiled binaries.

"Source-available"

The link has a section that says "Inclusion of source code".

I am not an open source expert but I always understood that open source software comes with source code for anyone to view. I could be wrong but would like to confirm this.

All open source software has the source code available. But the availability of source code does not mean that it's open source. You can put a very restrictive license on software with the source code available.

No, that's free software. Open source just means that the source code is freely usable. It doesn't mean that it has a copyleft license.

The definitions are quite similar, actually:

http://opensource.org/osd.html

As you can see, it's based on Debian's guidelines.

Open Source includes copyleft (GPL) licenses, but also BSD/MIT/Apache and others as well.

I would consider those very different, actually. When you only allow copyleft licenses you become a social movement, whereas open source is a software development methodology.

Edit: I must be way out of date, or something. I was under the impression that all Free Software had to have a requirement that derivative works also be published under a Free Software license. This doesn't seem to be true. I would agree, then, that they are basically the same.

Yes, but in practical terms, the amount of code that is one, but not the other is either small or nonexistant.

The original poster thought that open source simply meant 'source code available', which I corrected. You are going off on a tangent.

That's like saying a book is not copyrightable because anybody who understands that language can easily copy it. Of course things built on the web in HTML5 can be copyrighted, regardless of how easy one can copy them.

Protecting them is another matter and I agree with you on that. You can go to great lengths to obfuscate the code or whatever but in the end anybody with enough skill and motivation will be able to copy your work.

People can write ripoff books that are different enough to be free from recourse. In HTML5, the platform is even more narrow than natural language. A "thief" has available to them all of the approaches, quirks and libraries of the original author -- none of which is exclusive.

Together with the lack of practical enforcement, there doesn't appear to be any utility in the law. Saying an HTML5 web app should be protected by copyright is a bad joke at this point.

It's not a bad joke, and what he is selling is not a web app either. There is a lot of open source projects that you have to buy commercial licence in other more closed languages.

What he is selling is a programming framework to do games and it is not licenced to be resold, simple as that.

If the guy would be in the US, it's clear that action would be easily enforceable. Softlayer should atleast take down the website.

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