twainer

In my views, it's mostly about balance rather than picking between divergent choices. Who says one can't be a firm leader also capable of soliciting and respecting the opinions of others?

The NY Giants won the SuperBowl as you note, with a famously dictatorial top-down coach [Tom Coughlin]; the NY Jets didn't even make the playoffs with a very horizontal come-as-you-are coach [Rex Ryan].

Interestingly, Coughlin didn't win any SuperBowls - he now has two - until he learned to loosen up. And by all appearances, the NY Jets won't win one until Ryan learn to tighten up.

Apologies for all the football references:) But I suspect Mr. Spolsky would understand very well.

I disagree that one cannot distinguish between the likely ethics of a bootstrap or VC-funded startup. Logically, when a business has its own customers as the only means of support, there is a greater symbiotic relationship - sustained by age-old notions of fair exchange. I work hard to give my customer what they need so that they continue to sustain my business. A big side effect is ethical behavior.

The entities most capable of unfair or exploitative behavior are those who no longer need value that relationship to their customer. Yes, in one case this applies to companies close to failure - no matter their funding source. But as noted elsewhere, the acceptance of investor money adds many layers and new definitions to what 'failure' is.

Failure is no longer just 'going out of business' - it morphs to mean things like not having hit a number, not having made money fast enough, being pushed out of a job because people have lost faith in you, etc. The options for failure proliferate in an investor-funded corporation.

It's that same irony when a Fortune 500 firm makes a nice profit but the stock tanks because they didn't make as much as someone thought they should. Profit = success in the natural world; but somehow it gets turned around to equal failure - oftentimes costing real people their real jobs and costing companies real value of their shares that they could use to conduct real business.

So, as investor-funded companies are allowed only a small number of ways to define success, they are always closer to failure, and are forever more aware of the benefits of unethical behavior - especially when that behavior is so well-shielded by the corporate veil.

Actual success rates aren't that important - I think the point can be examined more clearly simply by considering things in their true light: there is a big difference between having money you've got and having money someone has lent you. They may both be money, but one is a credit and one is a debt.

Practically, this is the difference between buying a house with cash or buying it with a mortgage. And that's part of DHH's point - the homeowner who buys their house with a mortgage they can pay only if everything goes right is hardly and barely the owner of their house or destiny.

I'd also add that the successful moon-shot companies don't justify the business model in-and-of-themselves either. An overnight success, beholden to investors with short time frames, that gets pushed to an IPO and into the arms of shareholders with an even shorter timeframe . . . not an attractive recipe in my opinion. Companies built slowly, organically, and personally are capable of more longer-term thinking and risk-taking then entities that more resemble a joint-venture between investors and contract workers glued together mostly by their dream of mutual exits. If everyone is thinking of how they are going to leave, the bonds are by definition very weak.

This is not an indictment of VCs per se - moreso of the short-term pressures that dominate when money is at stake and opportunity costs are forever pressing on the gas pedal.

In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt. It's more like social engineering.

You continue to be free to do your art for free and without concern for profit; in no way does someone else doing their art for profit affect your ability to make your choice. So what gives you the right to champion something that 'removes economic concern from the art'? How does your desire not to have your output be property - totally your choice - square with your desire to deny choice to others?

Another point oft-heard is that 'people won't stop making art' - which is a selfish, parasitic argument if I have every heard one. For years I worked producing independent musicians - you might not pay for art that you experience, but I assure you someone does - there is no free lunch.

I have seen indie musicians burn tens of thousands trying to monetize their art; have seen marriages and relationships end - and careers end. My point here isn't about piracy - a much more important point is for consumers to respect the work that goes into the content they consume. The art you consume 'freely' may appeal to your idealistic side, as though you are removing commerce from art - but all you are actually doing is turning a blind eye to the cost. There is always someone paying a price so that you might have it for 'free'.

Once upon a time, people grew their own foods, hunted them - people worked with their hands -people had an intrinsic sense of the burden of production. I think one bad side-effect of the internet is that it has removed people so far from the means of production that they are incapable of appreciating the work that goes into what appears in front of them.

I am not trying to be too pejorative, but it really is like a child who is used to just stating their urge - whether for food, drink, or sleep - and having a benevolent force [parents] provide those things on-demand.

We have fair-trade products from a to z and yet the work of artists isn't worth .01. Really??

Agreed.

But in my conception of copyright reform there is a separation of copyright ownership law vs. legal protection of instances of when that copyright is monetized. The weakness in current copyright law isn't that it exists at all, it's that rights that properly benefit the individual transfer wholesale to the entity able to bring the idea to market. This needn't be the case. And a fix has beautiful consequences that align well with the major needs of the players involved. Though it would take agreement between both public, corporations, and government alike, the prime mover for such a parallel opt-in copyright system would be the individual themselves - which means such a system is both incremental and possible.

I appreciate your sentiments - I really do. From my perspective, the inability of people to involve themselves in discussion both prevents them knowing me and also finding a better solution. My views on copyright are far more nuanced and forward-thinking than the rants against copyright that fill 20% of HN on any given day.

Go ahead - look through all my comments I've written on IP. When you know what I am saying, you'll know I am not saying one should play by the rules - I never have in my life, that's for sure.

And yes - the current urge is selfish - as you point out it grows out of having taken a freedom - not having worked to be 'granted' anything - and then had that freedom 'revoked'.

There is always a greater good. I am 100% for us building one that benefits us as individuals rather than corporate entities. But the desire to wipe out IP does nothing to put economic power into the hands of creative individuals - what it empowers by a much greater factor is consumption. Last I checked we had enough of that as it was - and this is empty-calorie consumption that flows upward to the new corporate entities that can withstand the pennies to be made on it. It will never devolve power to the individual level.

A better system of IP exists - I have several detailed ideas of how it would function - and it basically revolves around treating the work of corporations differently from that of the individuals - separating ownership and monetization. A system built like this could work as an opt-in model to gradually replace current copyright - but it NEVER will without consumers playing by the much fairer rules. Yes - there are still rules - no system works without them.

If one can't meet the most basic burden of civil society by playing a game, however new, by mutually accepted rules, then there is no recourse - is there? And one can't, won't and shouldn't be taken seriously as a partner for change.

Enough with the cowardly and anonymous down-votes. If you've something wrong with what I've written, presumably you have a point to make of your own. Otherwise you are just confirming my point that people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality.

Sorry, but this post is based on a false notion that intellectual property is a beneficial crutch propping up only corporations and piggybacks on the idea that destruction of entrenched interests is always regenerative. That second point is likely so - but the battle isn't about finding new corporate captains to pay creative individuals - it's about how not to pay creative individuals.

I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve.

I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.

Does Harvard Business School have a kindergarten class now?

Expiring copyright and open-sourcing are not the same thing - but they can have the same result. That's a point I think tech-people don't think about enough. If my business is the creative work I've done, what right does an expiring copyright have to put me out of business? By placing my work in the public domain?

Open-sourcing code - though different from an expiring copyright - would create the same result in a business based on the ownership and public non-availability of that code.

Regarding the 'simple contract': contracts mean very little - leverage means everything. Granting very short-term copyrights removes all leverage from the owner of the work. His commercialization window grows very small and he is dependent on organized outside entities to 'make it happen' for him.

Patent coverage isn't even as short as a ten-year term mentioned in the OP. And patents are usually produced by it integrated firms that already have a huge commercialization apparatus running 24/7.

I'm a new arrival in the tech industry; used to work in the content industry. I have NO love for corporations - none at all - it's just that I have really gotten to know the people on both sides and find it frustrating that the fight ends up being about which sides corporations can win - not how we can all win. I might add, as an aside, that we've seen with Google's recent turn that no corporation can be trusted to 'not be evil'.

I would certainly agree that the people that make up the content side of the tech industry - programmers, devs, designers, etc . - really do take open and shared contribution seriously, to an impressive extent.

But that's true in Hollywood too - forget about the business structure - the real work happens across thousands of small disparate shops with groups of people working together on the things they love. This is true from development all the way to post-production. It's an open and creative environment.

I do see a clear way that copyright can be reformed to create a win-win scenario. It's a lengthy idea and if I can find the time to put it on paper, I'll happily post it here.

The limiting of copyright and patent is supported by advocates of such limitations on the basis of benefits from the work accruing in a more fair balance between the individual and society. It is stated on this thread and many others that it is society that chooses to allow patent and copyright to exist exactly in order to bring forth the work of individuals. The good of society is placed above that of the creator of the work.

If one likes that idea, it works even better in the case of 'trade secrets'. Abolishing trade secrets and instead substituting a time limit like that of a patent would REALLY let those benefits flow to society at large. We force pharmaceutical firms to come up with new ideas every patent cycle; why should software - after all, it's 'eating the world' and is a highly-maleable product - be exempt from that process of creative renewal?

Case in point: Microsoft used it's dominance gained from Windows to directly stifle competition, to the point where the law had to get involved.

Google was a disruptive force initially, but now they have begun to tweak their algorithm to fortify the walled-garden they wish to build - while also using the Microsoft model of buying up potentially disruptive companies.

It's funny, I never down-vote people even when I don't agree with them. But that's just me - I am anti-censorship.

Though, I do thank you for taking the time to make an argument - I get down-votes for almost every unpopular viewpoint I take here on HN; 90% of the time the down votes are anonymous.

In order to get a sane compromise one first has to appear credible. The pro-copyright folks have no legitimacy around here because they demonstrably don't understand how the tech world works; clearly that disconnect extends to both sides.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If my business and my copyright are the same thing, why should I be forced to 'open-source' my business after ten years?

Neither trade secret nor trademark nor service marks protect my creative work; only copyright. But my copyright is my business just as the source code is the foundation of Joel's business. So what Joel thinks is good for my business is surely acceptable for his own.

If anti-copyright folks are as concerned as they claim to be about adding value back into society - and as quickly as possible at that - it makes overwhelming sense that valuable services such as software should be scrutinized first, before mere entertainment. We should obviously be talking about limiting a term on trade secrets - not just copyright - people will still have trademarks and service marks to defend their reputation and authenticity.