

How I Killed A Startup In 4 Hours (And Why I Don’t Regret It) - samx18
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/28/how-i-killed-a-startup-in-4-hours-and-why-i-dont-regret-it/

======
anigbrowl
Regular HN readers will know I often play Devil's Advocate for the existing
copyright/content model - because I think a lot of HNers have a poor
understanding of the economics of creation and publishing. And yet I think
Personalpaper.me is a fine idea and that Milo Yiannopoulis is full of it.

 _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.

~~~
dredmorbius
_When you 're sending it to an individual customer, by definition you're not_
publishing _it_

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.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm responding to the original claim of unauthorized republication in the TC
article. I'm not claiming that that's the beginning and end of copyright law.

~~~
dredmorbius
Fair enough, but it's still irrelevant under current law.

------
GuiA
I know the guys and gals at ustwo. They're a bunch of passionate, talented,
hardworking people with minds that stretch a bit further ahead than the
average technologist.

They're internet surrealists (just check out Rando). One of their leaders
([https://twitter.com/millsustwo](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!

------
jeffe3000
Meh this guy seems so full of himself. What if the company could act as a kind
of printing service so that the user must posses the rights to access the
material in first place, sounds like a good idea to me.

~~~
Mandatum
These companies can and do exist, the onus is put onto the user to not submit
materials they don't have permission/rights to print or share. This would be a
little hard for printing personalized news websites that remove ads however..

~~~
hamburglar
I don't know, it doesn't seem so cut and dried to me. I can print out web
pages for my own personal use, and I can even run adblock while I do it. Can I
remotely print them at my personal assistant's office and ask him to deliver
them to me? It seems like the very specific personal use case for the content
could provide a lot of wiggle room for lawyerin' if they really wanted to
pursue it.

~~~
Mandatum
I agree but it likely wouldn't be worth the hassle. Technically they're taking
content for different sources, stripping ads and reselling the content in a
different media format. It'd be akin to recording a song off of the radio,
removing ad breaks and selling it as a CD/downloadable MP3.

Law may differ with publications and citing sources however.

~~~
MichaelGG
Is it legal to record songs from the radio to a CD, even for personal use? If
not then it's not like what they're doing at all.

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.

------
mehwoot
_I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of
a lasting cultural contribution._

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.

~~~
optimusclimb
I would name Atari, but I'll instead just say that probably 1000s of video
game companies have created "cultural contributions" that have driven youth
creativity and imagination - possibly planting seeds that lead to careers.

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.

------
treelovinhippie
If there is attribution, how is this any different to what Instapaper and
Pocket and any RSS/content aggregator do? Why does printing it out suddenly
become copyright infringement?

~~~
macspoofing
Anybody? I don't see the difference either. Is it the act of charging $2 for
the printing and shipping?

And man, is this guy ever full of himself.

~~~
andrewfong
I'm not sure Instapaper is entirely in the clear either, but I think the
printing and shipping actually do make a difference. With digital copies, you
have the benefit of the DMCA (that is, copyright holders have to issue you a
takedown notice for user-generated content before you can be held liable,
assuming you comply with all of the other DMCA requirements). However, there
is no DMCA for print.

------
abracar
> "innocence and naivety are really no excuse for robbing other people of
> their paycheck." Says the guy who once failed to pay contributors...
> [http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-
> sued...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued-
> former-contributors)

------
MichaelGG
The ad removal option should be customizable, and rendering done by some
headless browser. Then he'd literally be renting out a browser and printer.
That shouldn't be copyright infringement, but as Zediva and others have shown,
copyright law can twist its head around. So it might be possible to rule
against this guy.

~~~
protomyth
They would be earning money by distributing copyrighted works with no prior
agreement. No change to process would mask this. Their business model is a
copyright violation.

[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]

~~~
anigbrowl
No it isn't. Printing a single copy at your request is not distribution, which
implies division among _several_ recipients (according to Black's Law
Dictionary).

~~~
protomyth
Distribution is not several. Kinkos already ran into this.

~~~
anigbrowl
If you're talking about Basic Books v. Kinko's, that seems like a completely
different question because Kinko's pre-emptively copied the course materials
and offered them for sale to students.

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.

~~~
protomyth
"How do you get from this that distribution is not several?"

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...](http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=iplj)

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...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=994289757272580461&q=839+F.+Supp.+1552&hl=en&as_sdt=2,5)

~~~
anigbrowl
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I think the severality and pre-
emption aspects of this case are also very different. In a nutshell (and
quoting from the judgment):

 _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.

------
VxMxPx
The author, above all wanted to get out the following points:

\- 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...

------
kevinwang
MAN, I really detest this guy's writing style. Even if the content were good,
I doubt I've read a more an article from an author that sounds more arrogant
than this.

------
ASneakyFox
I agree it would be copyright infringement. But its not malicious. Just a good
concept that doesn't fit in to the current legal climate.

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.

------
chazu
> I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much
> of a lasting cultural contribution.

Uhm, Xerox? Apple? Commodore? Nintendo? Sony?

------
dk8996
Techcrunch is still relevant?

