How I Killed A Startup In 4 Hours (And Why I Don’t Regret It)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
You’ve probably spotted the problem already: personalpaper.me represents copyright infringement, unauthorised republication and . In other words, its entire business model is predicated on theft.
Wrong on every count. If users submit text to the site, that's very different from personalpaper.me pre-emptively scraping it and then offering that to the user as if it were their own. The fact that the transaction is user-initiated is key. It could be a problem if personalpaper.me started pre-emptively fetching articles based on the user's past preferences, eg scraping all editorials published by the New York Times each week because a user had submitted a week's worth of editorials previously. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Unauthorized republication doesn't hold up either. When you're sending it to an individual customer, by definition you're not publishing it, which implies an offering to the public. Taking the user's submission, printing it out, and sending it to the user is no different from someone submitting a printing job to Kinkos or some other fast-print service and having the results delivered.
As for illicit distribution on an industrial scale, this just begs the question, depending on the same fallacy as the previous point. Sending one user's submissions back to the user that submitted them in a different form is a print job. The scale of the business is irrelevant because there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal about the basic model. By Milo Yiannopoulis's standards, photocopies are weapons of mass (commercial) destruction because they could be used to infringe, even if they're not.
Personalpaper.me: yes, of course, you should be running things past lawyers - I like to say that startups should be looking for a Chief Legal Officer long before looking for a CFO or possibly even a CTO. Any long-time HN reader has sen multiple startups fall apart at the first hurdle because nobody stopped to consider whether there might be any legal ramifications. Now, I'm not a lawyer, and you shouldn't treat this as legal advice, but I'm pretty confident of my argument above and would be happy to refer this to some copyright specialists at Stanford if that will help. I think this startup is on far firmer ground than services like AirBNB. Get your Is dotted and your Ts crossed, and then get back into business.
That would be relevant if copyright law concerned itself with publishing. It doesn't. It concerns itself with copying, and specifically with the distinction of authorized vs. unauthorized copying, mediated by certain exceptions and/or affirmative defenses, key among the latter, the affirmative defense to infringement (not an exception to copyright) of fair use.
As it's currently written in the US and throughout much of the world, there's little doubt that PersonalPaper.me's business model isn't based on wholesale copyright infringement. Not that this hasn't stopped other services (YouTube, imgur, etc.).
Mind: I don't necessarily agree with this -- I think copyright has been grossly overdeveloped to the point that it's a net drag on creativity, information distribution, and economic activity in general.
Interesting comparison, because Kinkos will not just let you pay them to reproduce copyrighted content. FedexKinkos' copyright policy requires written permission from the copyright holder:
“The FedEx Kinko's policy requires written permission from the copyright holder in order to reproduce any copyrighted works.
Our primary objective is to take care of your needs. We sincerely appreciate your understanding and cooperation in complying with the FedEx Kinko's copying policy. Thank you for your business.
Please see a FedEx Kinko's team member to obtain a Copyright Permission Request form.”
I was wondering more about the library letting you pay them 10 cents a page.
They're internet surrealists (just check out Rando). One of their leaders (https://twitter.com/millsustwo) is insane in the same way that Salvador Dali was.
This is most definitely they did for fun in their off hours (and surely not a "startup" - ustwo is an ad agency), and got caught up in the excitement. And when they realized that actually, the one entity artists can't fuck with are copyright, they backed down.
All the best to them! May the writer of this slightly arrogant TC piece have stale toast for breakfast tomorrow!
Law may differ with publications and citing sources however.
If it's legal to print a page your browser renders, then it should be legal to have someone else run the printer for you. "Removing ad breaks" is a simple browser function.
It's an interesting business (not that I have that much use for paper printouts of web pages) and this article does a poor job of explaining why it should be shut down. Terrible attitude, too.
Gee, you can't think of a technology business that has excelled in a completely different field that has nothing to do with it? Stop the presses!
Would I critique Beethoven because he doesn't know how to scale a ruby on rails website to thousands of concurrent users? It's completely incoherent.
Apple?
Remember watching Jurassic park and being blown away? Great claymation wasn't it?
It's almost too easy to go on, so I'll stop there.
And man, is this guy ever full of himself.
What if he was to only charge for 'pager, shipping & handling' while the service itself becomes free?
[edit: why do you think FedEx / Kinkos will not copy a book for you and makes you sign a sheet declaring your ownership of material before copying for you]
In Australia there are fairly clear suggestions for what consitutes personal use. A few guidelines are: - you have to do it yourself - you can make a single copy - you can share the copy with members of your household or family, but no one else - if it's a copy of a physical work such as a book or CD, you have to make the copy yourself (ie, you can't download a movie that you own on DVD)
I think no matter how you spin it or try to make it sound like fair use, this is a clear case of unauthorised distribution of someone else's work for a profit. If the matter ended up in court, their intent to follow the spirit of the law would be hard to argue.
Again, these grey areas are where the spirit of intent is going to matter. Is it illegal to pay a neighborhood kid to rip all your CDs to mp3? Technically yes (in Australia), but it seems reasonable to argue that it's within the spirit of format shifting provisions.
Is it illegal for a company to sell customised "newspapers" filled with ad free content taken from ad supported sites? Again, yes. But in this case it feels to me like it may be harder to convince a court that the service is the same as printing out pages from a website on your own printer.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't claim to be an expert. I do think this story has some parallels to the Aereo legal battle that's unfolding right now.
I also think the writer of the original article is a bit up himself.
Edit: maybe "illegal" isn't the right term to use, but rather, "in breach of copyright".
Furthermore, Kinko's solicited professors teaching classes to place orders on behalf of their students, offering a 10% discount to professors who got their orders in early (presumably in the slow weeks before classes start). But the discount was not offered on the production of the course packets - rather, it was a discount (in the form of a faculty discount card) on the professors' own use of Kinko's services. Students paid individually to buy the course packets designed by their professors and unilaterally produced and distributed by Kinko's, based on professors' advice of how many students were taking the class and would (presumably) require the course packets.
How do you get from this that distribution is not several? I see no such conclusion of law in the judgment. I wouldn't rely on on a law dictionary as the sole source, but it is of recent vintage and if distribution were not considered to be several that would be a pretty significant error.
I cannot really add to what you said, and I wasn't thinking of that case, but more the terms of service and training Kinko's has.
"Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena"[1] is the specific case that I thought made the rules that this service would fall under and how distribution doesn't require multiple receivers.
also: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...
That case has a quote that would seem to nuke this business model: "There is no dispute that Defendant Frena supplied a product containing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. It does not matter that Defendant Frena claims he did not make the copies itself." and "Intent or knowledge is not an element of infringement, and thus even an innocent infringer is liable for infringement".
1) http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9942897572725804...
Subscribers can upload...material onto the bulletin board so that any other subscriber, by accessing their computer, can see that material.
To me that's obviously distribution because a) multiple downloaders had access to uploaded material (severality), and b) when a subscriber logged into the BBS, the copyrighted material was already there, listed as available for download (pre-emption).
What I think is different about this new service is that (as far as I can tell) if I use it to generate printed copies of, say, a New Yorker article and 3 Techcrunch articles, the resulting document is sent only to me, is not offered for download or printing to others, and is not retained on the server after the hard copy has been printed and mailed out. Furthermore, I can't select these copyrighted works on the site itself, but must submit URLs of my own choice. So what's being offered here is a reformatting and printing service for an individual only. My use of the service as described above would not make the content in question accessible to you.
Now, if I collected 50 articles into a 'magazine' othat reflected my interests, and that was made available to other customers, then it would certainly be a case of distribution and blatant copyright infringement.
Incidentally, although this situation has superficial similarities to the Aereo case before the Supreme Court at present, I think a key difference is that Aereo pre-emptively stores broadcasted content for later download, and likewise has buolt an infrastructure of receiving antennae which they essentially rent out to customers. In my view Aereo is relying on a flawed post-hoc rationalization of their action, whereas personalpaper.me (as far as I know) didn't hit up any URL until someone requested it to be added to a print queue.
- he's very important and powerful,
- he (as a content creator) is making great cultural contribution, which no tech company can match,
- tech companies cannot exists without people like him.
On a side note. I really wonder weather he bought that gravestone photo, or just did Google image search. Hmmmm...
For comparison. I read that tech crunch article via hacker news... on an app called flipboard. I wouldn't have read it without hn or flipboard to "deliver" it to me. The paper delivery system is only minimally different.
Content creators. Please join 2014. Learn how content is consumed. change your business plan accordingly. Trying to hold on to pre internet mentality isnt going to work forever.
Uhm, Xerox? Apple? Commodore? Nintendo? Sony?