Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century? Data is trivially copied and there's nothing you can do to fight that, no amount of laws will ever make it non-trivial again. Even if you successfully sue somebody for this, it won't stop them.
At some point people are gonna have to accept this.
For what it's worth, I didn't think it was rude. And I do think it was a substantive aspect of his response. It's a valid perspective even if I personally think it's somewhat orthogonal and incomplete.
I was replying to a similar sentence, but it is true that in the end it did nothing but escalate the situation. I apologize and yes, I will try to be more polite.
Well if you want to stick to the hard facts then it's even simpler: copyright infringement is not theft - those things are covered by entirely separate laws.
That may be true. A list of prices might not be copyrightable in your particular jurisdiction. However I was only responding to the raw assertion made without any such qualification.
On the opposite end of the spectrum might be a photographer's website containing a gallery of their sample work. The fact that the gallery is openly published doesn't represent a relinquishing of copyright over those images.
No but those are substantively different situations such that this exact thing is being argued in the highest courts of the US. It's not quite the cut and clear case you seem to believe it to be.
Interesting. From what I can gather, the material in HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn was not claimed to be under copyright and that the argument being fought over in court was with respect to mechanically subverting access to a competitor.
You appear to have claimed that rights over material is broadly relinquished if it's published in public:
> If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website
And your distinction was further clarified when you argued that placing barriers to access fundamentally changes the equation:
> Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly available information any longer and you can cover usage, again, in a license.
Perhaps you meant to speak only of material which is not subject to copyright? In which case I think your argument does track.
Mmm I’ll go with that, to be honest I saw that LinkedIn had initially made a complaint under DMCA (which HiQ then got an injunction for) as well and given how the case played out I was uncertain to the extent the case was signaling that you may be waving certain rights by making some content publicly available with no gating like a sign up.
No, but there is a legit philosophical argument about theft when it comes to copyright. There are two ways to look at theft: acquiring something you didn't earn vs. someone losing something they did earn. Generally, we tend to focus on the latter. From that perspective, "copying" is really not "theft", and arguably "copyright" does more net societal harm than any benefit it provides.
At some point people are gonna have to accept this.