That is, you can make a drink that tastes like Coca-Cola, but you should not sell a drink in bottles shaped like Coca-Cola's, with a red label, and imitating the longhand of the name. That is, you should not make something excessively similar to an existing established thing in order to trick customers into buying your thing instead of the established thing.
Most often things are morally neutral, and can be used for good or bad, some things are morally bad and it is difficult to use them for morally good things, and some things are morally good and it is difficult to use for morally bad. But most things are morally neutral. I think the DMCA is morally bad, but here he can use it for a moral good. But even when you use a morally bad thing for good it is still slightly bad, as in people could point at his usage here (if he chose to use it) and say "see the DMCA isn't bad" and the benefit for the bad solution his good usage promotes would taint his good usage ever so slightly.
As I tend to be more of a pragmatist I would say use the DMCA takedown if possible, but I can understand someone else feeling that would be bad.
Your view is Stallman-esque, but the world is not so clear cut in terms of good/evil. At best, I would say the abuse of the DMCA by large entities is an unintended consequence of the existence of the DMCA, and it could be patched up by lawmakers if there weren't already a remedy for DMCA requests made in bad faith.
The problem is that places like Youtube have implemented policies more strict than the DMCA that do enable big content owners to bypass the DMCA process and remove user content without much recourse.
that's sort of a nonsensical statement - it would mean that abuse cannot be patched up if there is a remedy. But how does abuse happen if there is a remedy? Surely the remedy is not very good if it does not stop abuse? But abuse cannot be stopped because there is a remedy.
That's some catch there, that catch-22.
At any rate given that I said most things were neutral and only some things were bad or good I don't know that I am very Stallman-esque - or is it just because I, as many other people, have identified one particular thing as being bad that Stallman also identified as bad. Geez, I don't wanna be like that guy - I guess I should change my viewpoint.
Then again, maybe I'm just John Doe-ish, assuming your average John Doe when told about the abuses of the DMCA thinks - whoa, that's messed up! I wonder why the lawmakers don't do anything to fix it, I bet there's some non-working remedy that prevents it!
The target of the complaint can file a counter-notice. That is the remedy that you have if there is a false complaint made against you.
There is no catch-22 here - there is a clear path to follow within the legal system for cases of abuse. Could it be patched up to be better? Sure. But catch-22? There is no rule preventing you from responding to or addressing false complaints. If anything, the catch-22 comes from the sites that benefit from DMCA that don't allow DMCA counter-notices, or even worse that pre-emptively remove user submitted content that it suspects will generate DMCA notices. In that case, your argument skews toward "posted speed limits encourage a system where law enforcement officers set up speed traps" - but would we be better off without speed limits altogether? Or maybe just with some limitations on the problems that arise from them?
The net benefit of DMCA is better than without DMCA. The non-DMCA alternative is that I can go post the text of Harry Potter to Reddit, and J.K. Rowling can sue Reddit for distribution of her (registered) copyrighted material for damages. With DMCA, J.K. Rowling can send a DMCA notice to Reddit, and Reddit can take the post down and offer me the chance to respond that the content is not in violation - but Reddit is not in peril.
I'm not a lawyer, but I took a grad level IP law class as part of my undergrad coursework. I think people like us stand to benefit quite a bit from learning how things work at that level.
Said threat only comes from big content owners, and they don't even bother to check if they have the rights to the content before issuing a DMCA challenge. A small-fry content owner doesn't have the resources to find copyright infringement, while big content providers simply scrape everything with automation and issue a claim on even the flimsiest match.
At YouTube, big content doesn't even have to do the work, they've pushed the work off to YouTube's content ID system which automatically demonetizes (or, better yet, gives the revenue to the claimant).
Again, DMCA works out in favor of the small-fry content owner who more than likely has the resources to find copyright infringement (Google searches are free), but that certainly doesn't have the resources to take every case of copyright violation to court for injunction or other remedy.
Pre-DMCA, if someone posted content that I created to a website, my main recourse would be to ask the website nicely to remove said content and hope they didn't immediately delete my request. I could try to sue the website for violating my copyright by distributing my content without my permission.
Post-DMCA, if someone posts content that I created to a website, I can file an un-ignorable DMCA complaint with the website, and there are defined timelines and processes that must be followed if the website does not want to take on liability for distributing my content.
It's unfortunate that big content owners abuse the system, but it's unfair to say that there are no benefits for small content owners.
Also, the entire premise of your DMCA example for small creators is false and trivializes the difficulty of even finding violations. "Google searches are free"? As if I can spend 5 minutes google "who copied my stuff"?
I guess the Chinese copycat will still be sold in China and other non-compliant markets for IP law but that would ba a partial victory.
Just because another app works similar to another app does not mean it's infringing.
Apple is not in the same position: the businesses who would sue them to try to force them to enforce their copyright are much much smaller than it (and are additionally very reliant on Apple).
Just out of pure curiosity, where did you live/study that 2000 Euros are student living expenses?
In my neck of the woods in central-western Europe (Austria), 1000 Euros per month is already really good money for most students and 2000 is what you make as a junior full time employee in a good tech company.
At my alma mater (SW Germany) you could live on 450 Euro with the same frugality. OTOH a friend (living in the same dorm!) burned through 2500 Euro a month, that's until his parents started to expect some progress after a few years.
But yes, it was still more than enough. I lived on around 600€ side job + 200€ government stipend before I made my app.
But if you also want to go out, go to restaurants/bars regularly and live in a nice place (not a shared dorm room), 1500-2000€ are way better.
The one I know most students have, is living very frugally, cooking at home, counting every penny to not go into more debt, studying hard to get a head start in life and partying hard on a budget, mostly house parties with booze bought from the supermarket with the occasional club or restaurant outing being a treat.
The other one is the Instagram lifestyle student, travelling to fancy places, practicing expensive sports and hobbies, eating out a lot, going bars and clubbing all the time. That's not your typical student, more like the 1%-er.
Living alone in a non-shared apartment is already a huge luxury for most students unless you come from a well-off family.
Plenty of students get bankrolled by a combination of scholarships, their parents, and loans, and have for decades. There’s nothing wrong with it (or with going the frugal route either).
Edit: To live in dorm 25 years ago in a standard Canadian university (for me) it cost $500/month plus another $500 a month in mandatory food card. That’s equivalent to 650 euros. That’s plus utilities, off campus food and drink, computer, recreation, and transportation, probably another 100-150 euros. My family was hardly rich (school teacher and truck driver) and helped out, I worked part time, and took out loans. Things are more expensive now.
A student having their own apartment (and a car??) is already a luxury 99% of the world will never experience.
They usually had a mix of parental help, loans and part time or coop program work, and scholarships. They weren’t super rich, they were from middle class Canadian families 25 years ago.
I even have a friend going to school today with a rental 5 bedroom house, as single parent raising 2 kids, and having 2 exchange students help out. Between scholarships , loans, and the students from China it covers expenses (well over €2k monthly).
I recognize that is richer than 99% of the world. It’s just my experience.
If you’re coming out of university and making £2k a month that is a bit low.
An MBA graduate makes €90k+ annually in Denmark. This is about the same in other European countries maybe +/- 10k
My point isn’t that some people have it good, it’s that €1-2k a month isn’t exactly glamorous living. The “jet setting” types (I have known a few) are getting an allowance of €3-4k+ monthly.
It isn't glamorous, you're right but I wasn't talking about inequality here, I was saying that very few students in Europe have 2K per month at their disposal.
>If you’re coming out of university and making £2k a month that is a bit low.
AFAIK, 2K Euros per month, after taxes, is your typical starting wage for a full time dev job in a decent company in countries like Germany. To get significantly more than 2K after taxes here as a new grad would put you in the top 10% of devs your age, definitely not the norm in the industry or in Europe.
>An MBA graduate makes €90k+ annually in Denmark.
Do you have a source for this? Because if you do then it would be best for me to give up my dev job in Germany and become an MBA in Denmark. Not /s, but quite serious.
https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Germany/
SAP, not exactly known to be a top player, pays entry level jobs in Germany at around €50k: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
This grows €5k or so per year of experience with promotions.
Though if you leave Germany you’ll notice that your pay will nearly double. That said, job security in Germany is best in the world, so...
Some recent MBA surveys:
Economist: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/10/27/full-tim...
Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/data/Pages/location-details.a...
Cambridge business school:
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/mba/careers/employment-...
Germany MBAs tend to be a bit lower than average at €65k though I assume that’s due to labor protections etc. I am not an expert in German labor laws just going on information I have researched in the past. https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Degree=Master_of_Busine...
Dunno about MBA out of school salaries but in tech in most of europe they are quite a lot lower than €90k. In France it's around 38-45k (pre-tax) depending on location (it can go upwards a bit if you are one of the chosen ones coming out of top universities)
Edit: also a source https://www.usinenouvelle.com/comparatif-des-ecoles-d-ingeni...
University of Cambridge in the UK for example estimates on their webpage £22k tuition for an undergraduate arts degree (double for medicine!) and £11k living expenses annually. With GBP/WUR exchange rate that’s €1550 on living expenses alone, and not “glam”.
https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/international-stud...
INSEAD costs in France is almost double in living costs in Fontainebleau , and 3x in tuition... now admittedly a far more exclusive graduate school, but I have acquaintances in Canada that weren’t rich but really good students that got in and took out loans... the point is more about the living expense estimates :
https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba/financing
For locals i am sure tuition is far lower but if you’re living away from home the living estimates above don’t seem too far off what I’ve seen.. though I’m sure many can scrape by on less.
Granted, I didn’t go to a prestigious grande école, rather just a “pretty good” engineering school. Also business schools are indeed more expensive than technical degrees. Not to mention that Paris region is way more expensive than the rest of the country.
For someone earning half a million, 2k may not seem much, but there goes your reality check. See the other response to your comment - living on €600/month is the more common student experience, maybe even above median.
Average income in the EU is somewhere around 30-40k/year, most parents will never ever have close to 2k/month per child. Even in expensive cities, most will live in shared student accommodation which is cheaper (200-300). This is what allows almost anyone to enjoy the cheap higher education, if it required even 1k spare income you would exclude the majority of the population.
Overall I’m also going by what many EU schools say are average expected living expenses for an international student. Invariably it’s a lot more than €600 a month.
I’m not denying folks can go to school on the cheap, I’m just saying that if you think €1-2k a month is ridiculous jet setting luxury, you’re wrong.
Definitely not true in Norway, it's closer to twice that.
I know Norway has high wages and prices but I can't imagine new-grads there making 4k after taxes.
If you think Levels.FYI caters to a niche, you’re playing yourself.
This idea that €2000 a month to live and study and pay for materials is some sort of "Instagram lifestyle" is ridiculous.
In effect, you'd be triggering the same sequence that led to youtube-dl being blocked on GitHub for a while. Surely, GitHub = Microsoft didn't build it, but they still had to block access when the RIAA sent a DMCA.
In the youtube-dl case, the DMCA notice was later found to be fraudulent and thus the access was restored. But if the infringing app re-uses images verbatim, that won't happen so it stays offline.
What about... a service, that helps walk you through these kinds of situations, handles country-specific implementation details, can help figure out the best approach for a given scenario, and give you the best chance of getting things sorted out...
...and...
...is NOT a "welcome, welcome, one and all" type of environment, and requires Twitter, GitHub, an HN profile, proof of long-term domain registration (eg, Internet Archive history) - the kinds of things that would be infuriatingly difficult for a scammer to successfully clone?
HN is absolutely big enough that "the HN crowd" would use something like this.
In fact, a service like this could theoretically develop working relationships with contacts inside Apple and Google, build a history/reputation of forwarding accurate, high-signal issues, and maybe help to mitigate the current mess of "problem must attract 10K views to be fixed".
On the surface (ie, legally speaking), it would absolutely be an exclusive environment. The idea (and probably secret sauce) would be figuring out how to delineate between scammers and legitimate devs.
I think what you're describing is interesting as it is sort of a different ground to tread, like a specialized version of the above.
What a Marketplace cares the most about is maximizing transactions. Hence, they care about having plenty of vendors and showing good reviews for those vendors so that people will buy. They really don’t want to police vendors too much because that means reducing offer and transactions.
Still, threatening legal action against the people they plagiarized? The audacity of this chinese...
At least Apple can be pressured to get better on this.
Once you have multiple app stores, the game is over forever in terms of protecting apps from duplication.
Its a very difficult situation. However the issue is if Apple takes a view, they open themselves up to legal risk - they are not the court so its not their place to determine copyright infrigement. Rather, if you get a court order stating infringement, then Apple has to take down the offending app.
Whilst yours may be a clear cut case, it is not too difficult to think of examples where it is not copyright infringement or is very difficult to prove - is Signal an infrigement of Whatsapp?
I don't think Apple could have done anything differently, to some extent it is your word vs. theirs and the right medium to settle the dispute is the legal system, not Apple.
"Because our app was posted first" is not enough.
However, I have yet to write an app that has been highly successful, so being copied has not been a problem for me.
Seeing the behavior of these scammers, I have no doubt that they would gleefully take my source, tweak the storyboard, and release a clone. They don’t seem to have any sense of shame, at all. Some of these shops have stables of hundreds of apps; each, a minor tweak of other apps in their roster.
It is annoying that Apple gives me a hard time for some small cosmetic detail on my app, while rubberstamping these tsunamis of pure, shameless garbage.
I do get annoyed by “looks like” scams. A couple of years ago, my wife accidentally purchased a “looks like” app that was basically a screengrab of another app (and was approved on the App Store!).
She was able to get the subscription (!) canceled, but it was a pain. Apple also left the junk app on the store.
She was also so unnerved by the situation, that she never got the original app, so it shows that these spam/scam apps can cause a lot of collateral damage.
Getting a refund did not fix the problem.
Also... I just realized... in the same way the article OP mentioned they were ahead of everyone else wrt features/implementation etc, I wonder if the scammers are ahead of the game in terms of preternaturally staying under the App/Play Store radars? Like, specifically, exactly what might they be doing, I wonder?
These folks are experts. They probably know exactly what terminology to use, which screens to optimize, etc. Just because they are scammers, doesn't mean they are stupid.
They could probably actually make legit money, giving classes on the Apple App Store process.
And yeah, wow, the scammers could give classes... with the only irony that the once out of the "game", as it were, an individual ex-player's info will literally become outdated within 30 seconds :/ - or at least that's the impression I get.
Yeah, the Apple app provisioning system changes so much, and so quickly, that you blink; you miss it.
Or theirs could be available in another store, and you copied theirs from there.
So, I suspect Apple just wants to stay out of it, let courts decide based on a collection of evidence (and whomever has the money to pay for lawyers, and time to do all the proceedings), and profit no matter who wins.
I seriously doubt this has ever happened in the history of the App Store.
Scammers are "lazy". The look for the easy targets. Copying an existing app is easier and more lucrative than trying to write a new app based just on some in-progress screenshots, as if scammers would even be paying attention to you before you published an app.
Don't know about the App Store, but people have copied in-progress websites and did copy-cat products (sometimes complete with the original artwork/styles).
I wonder if they had bought website visit statistics via e.g. Alexa? And in the app store, they'll see how many downloads? ratings? already existing apps have, and can decide, based on that?
Meaning, "who was first" can work fine, most of the time?
> "theirs could be available in another store, and you copied theirs from there"
And one would need to check different app stores, e.g. who was first in any of Google Play and Apple's App Store?
Also a movie or song is a lot easier to determine copyright infringement. But a program might be harder due to its complexities.
But this is just my thoughts, I'm no expert AT ALL.
It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).
Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.
I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.
It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.
But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)