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Comment by poolpool | Hacker News Reader

Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I'm surprised at some of the responses here.

So you have never shared a joke a work, got home and repeated the joke to friends or family?

People like to have a laugh. Most people repeating the joke are not claiming credit for creating it. They found it funny and shared it so others could find it funny to.

Twitter gives you an easy way to share the joke while retaining attribution - the retweet.

I agree that most of the people are just sharing the joke, but a sizable lump of them are trying to create some kind of online brand which they use to get money.

So if we legislate against those people, we also legislate against anyone who tells a joke online.

>Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I'm surprised at some of the responses here

Source code isn't written to be shared or to entertain others with. Quite the opposite, in fact, as we strive to protect source while still releasing the products built from it.

A bit of an idiotic comparison really.

I couldn't give a crap if someone "steals" a small snippet of my code equal in significance to a single joke. Anyone who claims to have learned programming without doing that is lying or delusional.

Stealing from a comedian would be horrible, if it was done to a comedian who only used their own material.

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