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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

He posted it to 4chan.

"The next day, though, Ramirez was merely pleased to see others sharing his one-off doodle. In the anonymous world of 4chan, having other people recognize your contribution felt good."

He clearly didn't have any issue with that, and without any license posted, that was already a violation wasn't it? They shared his work without stating the author and without his permission. Yet he was happy about that, until he smelled some money.

It's like if you would put a basket of candies, some people approach you and try to take it, and you're like "sure, take it, I'm glad you like it". And this keeps on for a while. And then some guy in a suite comes in and takes one candy like so many others. At which point you start running after him shouting "THIEF! He stole my candy!"

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Presuming a basket of infinite depth (since physical goods are otherwise a poor analogy for copyright infringement), a more accurate version would be the suited figure repackaging and selling a decorative basket of your free candy.

Can you clarify why you think the person repackaging the candy in this situation has a moral highground? Why are they not also "smelling some money"?

> Can you clarify why you think the person repackaging the candy in this situation has a moral highground? Why are they not also "smelling some money"?

Well to me the person that got the candy for free, owns that candy now and can do whatever she wants with it (throw it away, eat it, give it, sell it). She owns that candy and can make a decision. Earlier the person giving away those candies owned them and he decided to give them away for free.

So yeah it seems to me like a similar situation. Person later coming after you saying "Hey I gave you this candy for free, you cannot sell it".

I know that with copyrights it's different and yes you really cannot sell that free candy. It just subjectively feels wrong to me because of him changing his opinion only after it become part of the internet (based on the fact that it was assumed to be public domain, free to share and include anywhere)

>Well to me the person that got the candy for free, owns that candy now and can do whatever she wants with it (throw it away, eat it, give it, sell it). She owns that candy and can make a decision. Earlier the person giving away those candies owned them and he decided to give them away for free.

Don't really understand this logic.

Whatever he decided back then, he has all the rights in the world, including the legal right, to change his mind.

You might it sound like giving something away at first and then deciding to charge for it is immoral or something.

Of course its even more likely that he didn't really "decide" anything at the start, in the sense that he hadn't had in his mind the impossible to him at the time scenario of companies using his sketch et al. Only after it happened he decided he should get some money off of it, it's not like he had a bait and switch plan all along.

This seems like a similar situation to "submarine patents."[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent

As I already said, by publishing your own work you don't give your rights for the work away.

Yes, he's suing people who are using his artwork to make money for themselves. Why do you think that is a problem and why do you think they shouldn't pay him a cut for using his artwork?

It goes along with how trademark laws in US work (I think), if you don't defend them, you lose rights. IANAL so this could be a bad example.

Law is on his side, so they should pay. My problem is just with him changing his mind at some point. Not defending his rights from the start and even being happy about them being broken could suggest that he meant it to be free. And as others mentioned, there's no chance that it would have any value whatsoever if it wasn't.

E.g. company X puts some small open source code online (yes, nowadays nobody would touch it without a license). People modify it, improve it, share it, build on top of it. Company X often tweets "awesome to see how our code spreads and all fantastic usages of it". And then after some time it sues.

i.e. as others mentioned, this picture would have no value if it would not (assumed to) be in public domain and without all thousands comics and memes done on top of it.

Why would you make legal arguments about an area of the law you don't know anything about?

What is at issue here is the copyright, not the trademark. Trademarks must be actively enforced or they are lost. Copyrights must merely be registered (which was done in this case) and can be enforced essentially whenever the rights owner chooses to enforce.

The purpose of copyright is to protect the creator's right to profit from his creation. It's fine that he didn't go after the initial copiers on 4chan--they weren't profiting from copying the troll face. If you had RTFA, you would know that he's only going after those that are earning income (i.e., charging money) from using his creation, which is perfectly fine, legally and morally.

Wanting people to stop outright selling a meme, more so selling something invented more or less for 4chan, is very in line with what you could call a "community ideal" at the time.

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