[HN Gopher] Consider Negotiating with Infringers
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Consider Negotiating with Infringers
Author : chmaynard
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-12-12 14:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thelegalartist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thelegalartist.com)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Someone should forward this article to the C-suite at Nintendo.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Except that Nintendo is huge. Nintendo doesn't need an
| influence with 300 followers.
|
| This works, sort of kind of, for mid-level creatives who aren't
| struggling to make rent (and thus need the money) and aren't
| huge (so don't need the exposure).
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'm not saying this is the same thing the author is proposing,
| but... I'm reminded of a quote from one of my favorite book-
| series:
|
| > One of the Patrician's greatest contributions to the reliable
| operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his
| administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves.
| Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were
| going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime.
|
| > And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows
| and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets,
| and set up their training college with day-release courses and
| City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the
| winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep
| their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be
| determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said
| Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from
| the chaos that is life.
|
| > And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the
| leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was
| something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes... I know who you are,
| he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you
| ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your
| lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn't time fly, I
| know where they play. So you won't forget about what we agreed,
| will you?
|
| -- _Guards! Guards!_ by Terry Pratchett
| pavlov wrote:
| This is also the story of cryptocurrencies. From Silk Road to
| ETF-wrapped investment products where no actual crypto ever
| moves when you trade it. For 99.9% of crypto investors, the
| Patrician knows exactly what kind of horse they ride.
|
| Soon the deal will be complete. Starting next year there will
| be an acceptable level of securities fraud and pump-and-dumps
| in the US, with the SEC looking the other way while crypto
| banksters and their political allies con the public.
| k__ wrote:
| I started in crypto just three years ago, and while it's a
| bit more alternative, overall it's just business.
|
| Sure, I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see
| some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work
| feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being and employee with stock.
|
| But it's just a job like any other. I write articles, I write
| code, I talk with clients, investors, users... And at the end
| of the day I get paid.
| staunton wrote:
| There's ransomware hackers in some countries who also write
| reports while getting health insurance and paid parental
| leave...
| k__ wrote:
| Fair.
| bbarnett wrote:
| You could say the same about anything, let's pick cars.
|
| "There are people driving cars to commit crimes, like
| bank robbery!"
|
| Oh no! Now all cars and their drivers are criminals, I
| suppose? Grandma driving to the grocery store surely is
| up to no good?
|
| I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is
| mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? How many
| transactions happened yesterday? And how many were
| nefarious?
| danielheath wrote:
| > I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is
| mostly used for crime. Yet is that true?
|
| I mean... whether it's true or not, it sure _looks true
| from the outside_.
|
| What it looks like from the outside has little bearing on
| the underlying reality, but it's extremely relevant to
| questions like "will I be viewed with suspicion for
| having worked with this" or "is my company likely to end
| up subject to restrictive regulation".
|
| Assuming (I genuinely do not know) that the crypto
| industry has got legitimate uses which are not dwarfed by
| illegitimate ones, it has got a _massive_ image problem -
| because "everyone knows" it's for crime.
| staunton wrote:
| I made no specific claim about "crypto" one way or the
| other. My point is that to decide if some activity is
| legal, or moral, etc., you have to look at what is
| actually done.
|
| It's not enough to look at whether the day-to-day work
| "feels like a normal job", or "looks like a normal job"
| from the outside. You can have a highly respectable job
| while interacting with people who all look like
| stereotypical movie mobsters (e.g. prison social worker).
| You can also sit in a respectable office all day wearing
| a nice suit while committing genocide.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned
| craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable
| acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk
| rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without
| lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to
| excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But
| the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are
| imaginary. The ones they commit in the present-they are
| real."
|
| -- _Shards of Honor_ by Lois McMaster Bujold
| ElFitz wrote:
| Totally unrelated. But first Discworld, now this?
|
| I need your book recommendations, or reading list :)
| wiredfool wrote:
| I can definitely recommend the Vorkosigan series by
| Bujold. That quote is from the first one, and echoes here
| and there throughout.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Thank you!
| Terr_ wrote:
| Pratchett and Bujold are pretty much my top-two, which
| extends the the degree to which I feel compelled to share
| quotes. Both are rather character-oriented and often I
| find things (jokes, references, turns of phrase) on a re-
| read that I didn't catch the first time.
|
| My main caution is that I wouldn't start with Pratchett's
| earliest works--there are already bunch of suggested
| reading-order guides out there. I spent a decade thinking
| Pratchett was overrated because I started with the wrong
| book. (IIRC _The Colour of Magic_ seemed just too much of
| a parade of absurd situations for their own sake.) I like
| the City Watch books (starting in _Guards! Guards!_ ) and
| _Small Gods_ is a decent stand-alone.
|
| For Bujold, the Vorkosigan series is the flagship, where
| I'd put the _Curse of Chalion_ (fantasy) as a second.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Thanks!
| wpietri wrote:
| That's not the right question. There are three buckets.
|
| The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial
| trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or
| copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can
| make a dime but doesn't actually want any of the
| underlying is here.
|
| Then of the rest, you split by social value. For the
| traditional markets, most of these trades will be
| socially positive. Wheat buyers and wheat sellers are
| mostly making things that people actually want and
| benefit from. Anything like that is in the "positive
| social value" bucket.
|
| The third bucket is socially negative. In the traditional
| commodities, this includes the people who were trading
| nickel but just swapped in rocks, and other kinds of
| fraud. Or if you were a terrorist who was buying oil to
| dump it on the Great Barrier Reef, that'd be there too.
|
| Most crypto trading is in the first bucket, because
| that's true of almost any financial market. People who
| need the underlying don't trade much compared with people
| who are seeking financial advantage. But of the rest,
| unlike traditional markets, most of the non-financial
| trades are socially negative. Cryptocurrencies main non-
| trading uses are things like ransomware, scams, pump-and-
| dumps, rug pulls, and money laundering, plus other
| efforts to evade the controls of the traditional
| financial system.
|
| So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial
| traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive
| and socially negative uses of the underlying?
| spencerflem wrote:
| This is a great way of looking at it imo
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it 's nice to
| see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes
| freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being an
| employee with stock."_
|
| This is the very definition of a security in US law. These
| tokens are unregulated penny stocks. (Of course you and
| your employers may be in another country and this doesn't
| apply.)
|
| It certainly doesn't seem like a big crime. And maybe your
| employers are the good guys. But everyone knows there are
| also tons of bad actors in crypto who sell junk tokens to
| retail investors who lose their savings.
|
| This happens all over the world: millions of Nigerians have
| invested in crypto, but it's almost exclusively into tokens
| created by local influencers that end up being worthless in
| a few years. That's the overwhelming global reality of
| crypto, not the stories of noble dissidents receiving
| Bitcoin.
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, it's mostly a shit show.
|
| NFTs, meme coins, etc.
|
| I don't understand most of that.
|
| I keep to my niche, build with stuff I think is
| interesting, and keep away from most of it.
| wpietri wrote:
| Does it bother you that there's no actual value creation at
| the bottom of it?
|
| I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there
| I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the
| traditional commodities markets increase liquidity and keep
| prices low for people doing actually socially valuable
| things, like growing wheat or turning it into food.
|
| But honestly, even then that could have been accomplished
| with 1/10th of the effort and smarts that was put into
| trading, and it was mostly driven by greedy people and/or
| fools, so when I got out of that industry I was glad to be
| shut of it. Crypto strikes me as yet worse, in that there's
| no underlying value, just a circus of greed.
| digging wrote:
| The crypto industry is extremely untrustworthy, but for
| me, I don't think "there's no actual value creation at
| the bottom of it" is more true of e.g. Bitcoin than USD.
|
| Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and
| other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is,
| but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we
| need, but we don't need money to create them. We just
| need energy and physical resources (which, _technically_
| , also just require energy). All money is an accounting
| system built on top of the physical processes that we use
| to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build
| matter.
|
| So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built
| almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes
| sense.
|
| Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-
| unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more
| attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume
| 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say
| that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder?
| That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which
| has been used and which can't be unused. The food
| _itself_ is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can
| 't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only
| traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is
| an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but
| reasonable.
|
| Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto
| grifters and the majority of the industry. They're
| generally not operating on the arguments I've made above
| anyway.
| wpietri wrote:
| All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat
| banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various
| national currencies failed was never about resources, but
| lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The
| USD has been a very strong currency because it's backed
| by a stable government with a strong economy and has a
| stoutly independent central bank, which has built up
| enormous trust as a custodian of the currency.
|
| I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy
| usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most
| obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to
| proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's
| plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good
| evidence there, like:
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-
| today.htm...
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-
| decentralized.htm...
| digging wrote:
| Well, yeah. I avoided the subject of trust because it
| wasn't the subject of the comment I was responding to.
| It's a different component of money.
|
| Money _depends_ entirely on trust which is a form of
| belief. But it only _matters_ because it accounts for
| energy. Because there is nothing to _trust in_ if money
| can 't be exchanged for energy. We _trust_ that our
| paychecks will buy food because our society is usually
| fairly robust in that respect. We _trust_ that the US
| government will go to war to prevent the USD from being
| deprecated, which lets us continue to use USD.
|
| There's _no trust_ that Bitcoin can always be exchanged
| for any arbitrary good or service - whereas USD can be
| turned into _anything you want_. Bitcoin will always
| account for some energy usage, but so will starting
| forest fires. The difference is that nobody is ever going
| to trade me anything of value for starting a forest fire.
| That 's the trust element. But starting a forest fire
| leaves just as real an impact on the universe as mining
| crypto, as mining gold, as building bombs to threaten
| grifters with.
| wpietri wrote:
| That also doesn't make much sense to me. Money existed
| long before energy was a significant commodity. Like,
| thousands of years before.
| esperent wrote:
| > there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed
|
| At least it keeps the clowns occupied.
| wpietri wrote:
| I thought that too, but we're seeing increasing
| spillover. Molly White points out that the crypto
| "industry" spent $200m to influence US elections. That we
| know of.
| k__ wrote:
| I don't know much about fintech, just that token
| incentives motivate people to host service I'd like to
| use.
|
| Proof of work for stored data sounds like a reasonable
| use case for me.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| It's actually stranger than that. The legal cryptocurrencies
| are often _worse_ than the ones that lack respectability.
| Take for example, Greyscale 's Chainlink Trust. It would be
| hard to find a more respectable cryptocurrency investment,
| yet I did some analysis of it about a year ago, and concluded
| they were selling Chainlink to their customers at
| approximately 8x the price on Coinbase[1]. Chainlink isn't
| likely to pull an 8x an time soon, and even if it does, trust
| investors wouldn't see the benefit, because Greyscale can
| simply seize those gains. There are two one could think of
| this in traditional market terms:
|
| 1. You can think of Greyscale as an arbitrageur between on-
| chain Chainlink and trust shares, where they'll be trying to
| purchase Chainlink at times when the difference between on-
| chain Chainlink and trust Chainlink is maximized.
|
| 2. You could also think of Greyscale as being able to print
| "shares". They can't print shares for free (i.e. they are
| legally obligated to purchase on-chain Chainlink) but they
| control the supply part of the supply:demand ratio. They can
| simply purchase on-chain Chainlink when the supply:demand
| ratio for trust Chainlink is higher than on-chain Chainlink,
| which takes money from trust Chainlink investors by diluting
| their shares. In theory the market will trend toward rational
| (i.e. eventually on-chain and trust Chainlink will trend
| toward a value that is equal, adjusted for the value of legal
| integration) but until that happens Greyscale is positioned
| as the only player that can take advantage of that temporary
| irrationality.
|
| Cryptocurrency has always been an application of _caveat
| emptor_ where the caveats can be hidden in the code or the
| economics, or both, but with the integration into the legal
| system, it 's now possible for cryptocurrencies with solid
| code and economics to scam the public with _legal_ caveats.
|
| The average person was always at a disadvantage with
| cryptocurrencies, but I fear with the addition of legal
| respectability, even someone like myself who can read the
| code and has a solid understanding of economics can no longer
| be sure of my crypto investments.
|
| I'm finding lately that options trading has the same high
| variance (high upside potential is why I wanted into crypto
| investing), without a lot of the parts I don't like.
| Particularly, I'm doing it with my Roth IRA money so even
| taxes are easy.
|
| [1] These numbers have almost certainly changed since I did
| this analysis--I know HNers like to correct people, but
| consider that before you correct me here.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Cryptocurrency has always been an application of caveat
| emptor where the caveats can be hidden in the code or the
| economics, or both, but with the integration into the legal
| system, it's now possible for cryptocurrencies with solid
| code and economics to scam the public with legal caveats.
|
| In other words, a EULA?
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've never read the book, so perhaps I'm missing the point, but
| -- surely then the Guild points out they've _always_ known
| where the Patrician lives and where _his_ wife had her hair
| done and so forth? And the Patrician says, ahem quite right
| what was I thinking? We 'll maintain what we agreed.
|
| I mean, in US urban areas back in its heyday, everyone knew who
| the mafia were. But that didn't prevent them from doing their
| mafia thing.
| bombcar wrote:
| In the books the Patrician is a politician who was trained as
| an assassin (who have their own guild, and after many
| incidents refuse to take contracts on the Patrician because
| it's not worth their life).
|
| What he's doing there is turning the thieves into the watch -
| they have a permitted level of theft they can do, normal
| people can buy "guild passes" which immunizine themselves
| from even that level of theft, and the Thieves' Guild comes
| down exceptionally hard on unlicensed thieves.
|
| And the Patrician is unmarried.
|
| They're quite fun to read as Pratchett has a good handle on
| the "balance of power" negotiations that the Patrician
| engages in; he plays various power groups off against each
| other in such a way that he is always the _second_ worst
| problem to deal with, and taking him out would make it worse.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The most important factor in that the Patrician (Havelock
| Vetinari, as a joke on the Medicis) ensures that almost
| everyone agrees that his continued rule is marginally better
| than upsetting the status-quo... And in some cases allows
| opposition to succeed just enough to make people regret it.
|
| Part of this rests on the ancient Guild of Assassins, which
| requires a certain amount of _style_ and also has a very
| _very_ dim view on anyone threatening their monopoly on
| killing-for-profit. Their price for going after Vetinari is
| high enough to discourage most bidders, and Vetinari is a
| skilled (mostly non-practicing) alumnus that can largely
| protect himself from them.
|
| ______
|
| > "I see you're very comfortable here," said Vimes weakly.
|
| > "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the
| night in yourself," said the Patrician, laying out the food
| on the cloth. "The world would be a happier place if more
| people remembered that."
|
| > "We all thought you had built secret tunnels and suchlike,"
| said Vimes.
|
| > "Can't imagine why," said the Patrician. "One would have to
| keep on running. So inefficient. Whereas here I am at the hub
| of things. I hope you understand that, Vimes. Never trust any
| ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape
| routes. The chances are that his heart isn't in the job."
|
| [...]
|
| > "You see," he said, "it's always the case, is it not, that
| should a city be overtaken by violent civil unrest the
| current ruler is thrown into the dungeons? To a certain type
| of mind that is so much more satisfying than mere execution."
|
| > "Well, okay, but I don't see--" Vimes began.
|
| > "And you look at this door and what you see is a really
| strong cell door, yes?"
|
| > "Of course. You've only got to look at the bolts and--"
|
| > "You know, I'm really rather pleased," said Lord Vetinari
| quietly.
|
| > Vimes stared at the door until his eyebrows ached. And
| then, just as random patterns in cloud suddenly, without
| changing in any way, become a horse's head or a sailing ship,
| he saw what he'd been looking at all along. A sense of
| terrifying admiration overcame him.
|
| > He wondered what it was like in the Patrician's mind. All
| cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and
| little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of
| mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn
| it to advantage. It was a perfectly normal dungeon door, but
| it all depended on your sense of perspective.
|
| > In this dungeon the Patrician could hold off the world. All
| that was on the outside was the lock. All the bolts and bars
| were on the inside.
|
| -- _Guards! Guards!_
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The insanity of "destroy free work" as proof of concept to keep
| what you got. IP as a moat vs IP as a eco-system mycelium
| constantly producing new growth is pretty psychotic as concept
| from a growth perspective.
| fardo wrote:
| One of the best sonic games ever made, sonic mania, wasn't made
| in-house by sonic team, but a handful of fans making fanwork.
|
| Sega's choice to treat their fanwork seriously and make them
| second-party developers rather than shutting them down was not
| only an immeasurably good thing for both the project and its
| fans, but a measurably, handsomely profitable move for Sega.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've just finished reading the Doom Black Book -
| https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
|
| The number of ports of Doom that were made by fans and only
| licensed _after the work was done_ so it could be sold is
| surprisingly high. Randy Linden on the SNES is an interesting
| story (and the very chip he used was _also_ a similar story at
| its inception).
| tempfile wrote:
| As an atomised creative professional, copyright is not designed
| to help you. So it is not surprising that the "expected"
| mechanism for exercising your rights is not the most successful
| one.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > It's almost always the case that infringement happens
| negligently (that is, because of the vagaries of the internet,
| the infringer doesn't always realize they're infringing someone
| else's work).
|
| I disagree with this. Everyone knows _they_ didn 't make it -
| they know it belongs to someone. They just don't want to give
| anyone else anything for using it, so they hope either it happens
| to have been released to public use or the creator can't be
| bothered to chase it up.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| Most infringement is probably caused by sites that scrape content
| and automatically repost it for SEO optimization. Cron jobs are
| the ultimate infringers.
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