I posted here with the understanding I was providing everyone accessing news.ycombinator.com with access to my post.
A comparable example would be if I posted this on my blog behind a pay wall (which meant it cost $5 to access the post) and then someone copy and pasted my post here and you read my post while understanding it had been taken from behind my pay wall. That would be absolutely unacceptable.
Is it unacceptable to remember something you've read? To tell a friend? To write down and sell it? If you turn a profit? If you don't? If you write by hand, 1 character per second? If you use a machine to do it, 1 million characters per second? Are we allowed to quote? To teach? To paraphrase? To back up?
These are hard questions, and you're reducing them to moral absolutes. Make your case without shouting about how you're right.
Gray areas will always exist, you cannot take something and narrow it down to absolutes and I'm not trying to, there will always be areas where you have to take context into account and analyse that situation independent of another situation that falls under the same "rule".
The general idea is (in my opinion) that if you produce something then you should (to a degree) have the expectation of control over the consumption of whatever it is you produce. This includes the right to sell that production, distribute it for free, license that production out to specific groups or keep that production completely private.
If we stick with the example of me writing a post behind a pay wall then I would personally believe that summarising the post to a friend is acceptable as would be posting a summary of the article on HN, because the value of a blog post is not the general idea it's the way in which that idea is presented and formed.
If you were to take the post and reproduce the content in any form (for profit or not) I would believe that to be unacceptable. However there are gray areas which include people who could read a post and then repeat it perfectly. This is something that can't be included in some big flow chart of right and wrong, but it doesn't need to be if everyone stuck to core principles.
I think it can be reduced to a general idea with ease: Taking something (regardless of deprivation) is wrong.
> Make your case without shouting about how you're right.
Regarding this I apologise, I have very little ability to explain my thoughts coherently (failed highschool etc etc) so while I try to explain myself without letting my frustrations leak in it often happens. I spend a lot of time retroactively editing my comments to try and reduce the amount of that, but I often end up not being able to see my comments problems when looking back -- things like assuming my thoughts are the way everyone thinks etc.
The general idea is (in my opinion) that if you produce something then you should (to a degree) have the expectation of control over the consumption of whatever it is you produce.
