Wow, what a dick this Marak guys seems to be. He steals someone's code (possibly laboring under a mistaken idea of how copyright law works) makes snarky comments about the original and then when he's called on it instead of just admitting his mistake he is rude and nasty about it (and still doesn't bother to check what the actual law is, which just makes him look like a total idiot).
Also a regular in the Node irc room (JimBastard). I just connected the dots. He won a ticket to JSConf by winning the pre-conference talk in a bar about JavaScript competition.
He seemed ok in person, and I know he hacks a lot of his own code, but I'm surprised what a dick he seems to be being. He definitely wasn't this much of a jerk face to face. Oh the Internet, this is why we can't have nice things.
Hmm, total dick, says controversial things, is supposedly "cool" in person, and hacks a lot of code.. Sounds like he could be HN's next flavor of the month.
Taking a step back, I think this is an excellent example of how most people are woefully ignorant about copyright. The vast majority of people think nothing of infringing copyright - they use images from Flickr without bothering to check the license, they forward e-mails, they post & repost videos to Youtube, they download & share music & video & software with their friends without a care in the world.
Why? Because that's the natural way to use the Internet, and (despite the recorded music industry's best efforts) nobody has ever pointed out to them that it's illegal. They copy on the Internet like fish swim in the sea.
What Marak did is wrong, and I feel for the guy who had his code nicked. It's happened to me - Wordpress today contains my code in blatant violation of the license under which I published it. When that happened it annoyed me at first, but ultimately I decided to let it go because any complaint would be met by blank incomprehension. When your stuff is taken by "kids on the Internet", you can't just call them out on it, you have to educate them into a whole new way of thinking. And life's too short for that.
I think in the end, as sad is it is, what you said about "blank incomprehension" is the take home lesson from this. I've tried for months, if not years, to get people to understand that SO is violating copyright by not asking for permission to re-license user-submitted content under cc-wiki, but no one seems to get it. The basics of copyright law are not very complicated. I think the big problem is all the misinformation and rumors out there on copyright law. That and the fact that copyright law has historically not kept up well with new technology.
I don't know if this is the place for that discussion, but briefly, I think posting to SO gives them an implicit right to show your content on the web and store it on their servers. What I don't think it gives them an implicit right to do is re-license your content under cc-wiki, provide it in a data dump, and specify how you are to be attributed for your contribution. When I've brought this up with SO, their response was that because the footer says that all content is licensed under cc-wiki, it's OK. I disagree. If I say that your response to this comment will be in the public domain, that doesn't make it so. I would need your explicit permission to re-license your comment, even though I have certain implicit permissions, like the permission to cache it in my browser.
For comparison, Wikipedia requires that all submitters "irrevocably agree to release [their] contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. [They] agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license." (See the comment under the edit box on any Wikipedia edit page.) Wikipedia is big enough to actually deal with legal issues, and this is how they do it. They get explicit permission, and they explicitly require agreement with a particular method of attribution.
I am not a lawyer, but everything I've read about copyright (from reliable sources, such as the actual legal code) suggests that Wikipedia is doing it right. There are certain implicit permissions with user-submitted content. Permission to re-license is not one of them. Since Wikipedia does re-license content, they ask for permission to do so. SO should do the same.
OK, that wasn't as brief as I hoped. I apologize. I don't mean to derail the commentary here.
That's ok, I asked for the details. This is an interesting topic (especially to me, as I'm working on my own site which will have user created content). But this isn't the place for a discussion about it.
Thanks for your point of view though, I'll definitely keep take what you said into account.
I feel uneasy about the sense that the music industries appear on the side of right here. And this is a situation where we should hesitate to call things wrong simply because they are illegal.
We must remember that copyright is only justified on practical grounds, and with the internet these practicalities have changed greatly. If we only want to lecture 'kids on the internet' of how copyright was, we are failing to give the matter the thought it now needs. Copying, in itself, is good -- it is one of the two sides of the trade-off, and that the internet enables and encourages people to copy is a substantial good that we don't want to impede.
I think we should want attribution, but permission I feel less certain about. It is probably corporations that muddy the waters: people do plenty of open-source and share freely, and so retaining a little control seems socially reasonable. But corporations are all too often obnoxious sociopaths about copyright.
So I am not sure what I would tell 'kids on the internet'. I lean toward the share-everything-freely side, but it doesn't really matter anyway because the whole system is going to be doing a lot of evolving and adapting by itself in coming years.
The recorded music industry are not in the right here. The law is on their side, but they are trying to swim against an overwhelming tide.
I have a little more sympathy for the author of the plagiarised code. Whatever "copyright" system emerges from the Internet storm, it's not going to enable the RIAA to make money, but it might protect guys like that from having attributions removed from their work. I hope so.
Using pictures unlawfully is sadly the trend on internet forums and to a large degree on big blogs. This is particularly prevalent when it comes to videogame magazines which are scanned and uploaded and is either showed on the videogame-related site or referenced by a link. Everyone basically does it. It's ridiculous and appalling.
Add to this sites like reddit who, willy-nilly, deep-link to images on other sites with few if any moral qualms. Hotlink/Deep-link protection is something you ought to make sure you implement. The comic artist The Oatmeal chose to split up his images so they couldn't be exploited effectively.
Can you expound on that? I was under the impression (from some discussion about electronic search-and-seizure laws) that mail, once delivered to the recipient, is no longer considered your property. I guess I've never reflected on exactly what property rights are transfered to me when you mail me something. Certainly if you send me something in a physical envelope, I can forward that to anyone, copyright law has nothing to do with that. So the question is whether electronic mail shares that feature with physical mail, since mail service is something that's explicitly talked about in the law.
> I was under the impression (from some discussion about electronic search-and-seizure laws) that mail, once delivered to the recipient, is no longer considered your property.
While true, owning a piece of mail does not imply that you own the relevant copyright.
Consider a book that you own. You own that copy. You can destroy it, you can sell/give/lend/show it to someone else, you can keep it. That physical thing is yours do do with as you will.
However, you can't (legally) copy it if its copyright is still active. (Yes, fair use comes in here too.)
You are incorrect. The author of a letter retains the copyright to the contents. The recipient owns their copy, but cannot duplicate it without permission.
I think that that is a more ingrained issue. Nobody would think twice about running a snail mail letter through the copy machine and forwarding a copy to someone else either. No internet needed.
Maybe game magazines aren't the best example given their habit of whoring out good reviews in exchange for "exclusives" which mostly contain marketing material. Hardly bastions of creativity.
Not just ignorant, but willfully ignorant. The copyright violations have been brought to his attention yet the project is still available and he's acting as if he's done nothing wrong.
If it really is the case that this is copyright infringement, the easiest step may be to send a DMCA complaint to GitHub. The purpose of the DMCA complaint mechanism was to make it cheap and easy to deal with online copyright infringement without resorting to the courts. I know we're used to hearing about silly and illegitimate DMCA complaints, but this would seem like a reasonable use of it.
(This isn't legal advice, of course; I don't know enough of the facts to be sure what applies.)
if this code was licensed with an open source license and he adhered to terms, this would be perfectly valid. You _can_ indeed copy such code and write whatever snarky comments you want about it.
But in this case this code is copyrighted and has no open source license clause:
"His response to my comments was that because I didn’t explicitly put a copyright notice in my code that he could use it however he wanted (which I’m pretty sure isn’t true)."
AFAIK copyright law says its not obligatory whether there is a copyright header or not, the work would be copyrighted either ways. Copyright is there the moment you create the work. So what he did was clearly illegal (and unethical).
Just picking some nits, but "But in this case this code is copyrighted" is wrong. In _all_ cases, code is copyrighted, even open source code. It's just that with F/OSS, someone has given you a license to use something they've created.
Actually no, you can put code in the public domain, thereby explicitly waiving your copyright. I believe, for example, that all code written by the US government is in the public domain.
I'm not a lawyer, but in some places, isn't it hard or next to impossible to get your work into the public domain? You're 100% right about government works, but I was under the impression that the WTFPL was the closest thing you could really get to putting something of your own into the public domain...
I could also be totally wrong. Then again, anyone who does this isn't going to face the problem that the OP did, and it doesn't really invalidate my earlier statement either. Only part of it.
I'm not a lawyer, but in some places, isn't it hard or next to impossible to get your work into the public domain?
I'm also not a lawyer, but I've asked this question of some law professors, and the consensus appears to be that at least in common law states, while there is usually no de jure mechanism for placing work into the public domain, if such a case ever went to trial you can be 99% certain that the judge would wave a magic common law wand to fix that.
That said, wikipedia's "I place this in the public domain, or if that isn't possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions" is probably the safest approach.
In EU, there are essentialy two kinds of protection awarded by copyright law, something around the lines of author rights(like right to attribution and so on) and usage rights. And it is not possible for author to vaive his author rights, so there is no strict equivalent of public domain, but in practice this formal difference probably does not matter.
Personally, I'd be more okay with the fact this dude was posting some code on github had he properly credited the original author and posted a link to the original project. IMO he probably should have also asked for permission to post the author's code in the first place.
I can't say whether or not he made changes to the codebase, but it's just plain wrong that he goes about crediting himself as the author when the truth is he probably contributed a very small amount to an already functional program.
This is why I stopped releasing source code. Idiots who want 15 mins of fame and constant attention but cannot create, so they consume what others create.
You own the copyright. The declaration is an option. If you have been financially damaged by this, then you have legal recourse, but you must be able to prove damages with a dollar figure.
Wow I totally did not put 2 and 2 together until now. Now we just need someone to release "gothic nightmarez" for IRC and revive KnK and it'll be like it's 1995 again.
Hahaha this is exactly why I clicked this article..I saw the name patandjk and thought holy crap I haven't heard that since the beautiful days of AOL.. I remember using there API generator while learning to code in vb6...I think everybody had a copy back then..Boy does that bring back memories....
I don't get it. If every change is tracked by github and he gives links and attribution to TAAG what is the problem? Is there any license issues involed that i can't grasp? What is the original codes license? In what license the new library is distributed?
The original code was not open source. It just happened to be JavaScript so it was possible to steal it.
Just for anyone who doesn't know: when no explicit license or copyright information is given this means all rights are with the author. Code is only ever public domain when it is explicitly put there by the author.
If you want to take a hardline attitude towards it, then TAAG itself is in iffy territory, because many of the fonts it uses were just thrown on BBSs or the internet with no explicit open licenses. He seems to have just assumed (probably correctly) that if they were put online, or as part of "figlet font packs", then a BSD-style license was intended, but there isn't an explicit one on most of them.
That has more to do with the vagaries of U.S. copyright law than anything to do with ethics, though, doesn't it? Unless you think that, when it comes to reuse of creative materials, whatever the copyright law of the country you live in says is what the ethical thing is? Font designers definitely still consider it theft when someone rips off one of their fonts--- just theft that they can't legally do anything about.
In this case, though, my guess is that the figlet font packs are copyrightable, especially since he didn't just copy the font shapes (as you say, not copyrightable in the U.S.), but literally included the entire original binary code of the fonts, and even their commentary/packaging/etc. That's of course fine, because they were produced / distributed in the context of a community in which BSD-style licensing terms are assumed as the default--- an understanding he seems to have violated. It's in his legal right to build something on figlet fonts and then (c) All Rights Reserve it, but it doesn't seem in keeping with the share-things spirit that he himself benefited from.
Since they are not copyrightable, why do people pay lots of money to the foundries to use them? Seems like we'd be able to freely distribute things like Gotham, and anything from Veer.
Things like TrueType font files are considered computer code and copyrightable, because they have some embedded scaling and kerning logic, which makes it a bit harder to just use them free. The designs themselves (in the U.S.) aren't copyrightable though, so anyone can legally rip off the font by e.g. tracing it. There are quite a few of those floating around, but they have a reputation for being poor quality, esp. with kerning and such, depending on how quick the tracing/repackaging job was. That, and there's a risk that if you used one of the "ripped off" fonts and it was different in a way that was noticeable, your publishing house / design firm / etc. would get a bad reputation in the trade.
Probably FIGlet font packages have some kind of license, which is open enough, and the problem goes back to FIGlet and not to the original author.
If the original authors had some problem with someone using these fonts (and keep in mind that ASCII fonts are somehow "easy" to think from scratch!) they would have complained way earlier.
So is this a good place to be slightly pedantic and point out that "theft" as a concept doesn't apply to non-rivalrous goods?
I suppose plagiarism could be seen as "theft of attention/credit" or such, but copyright infringement is only what it sounds like -- not respecting someone's government-granted monopoly rights.
It is always a good time to point that out. Big content owners try to twist the meanings to their benefit, but while both are illegal, they are not the same thing, and it's not to society's benefit to confuse them.
I have a brilliant PR move for the content industries: we will wrap all their stuff with four lines of Javascript and then suddenly the Internets will rediscover copyright.
(1) Add an explicit copyright/license/reuse statement to the code to avoid similar misunderstandings in the future. While not required, it's wise for people who care about the copying of their work.
(2) If he cares enough to enforce his preference against reuse, he should then send a DMCA notice to github/etc.
From what I can see, both people are a little naive about copyright. The mature resolution isn't fuming back-and-forth, but to just learn and implement what the law already provides.
On the other hand, if the real goal is to instead have an attention- and inlink- and traffic-grabbing web feud, they can each boost their fame/infamy by a few more rounds of mutual criticism in every forum that will have them and their supporters. For this goal, the more emotion/insults/ad-hominem, the better.
Since apparently nobody has yet posted here about it, the current state of all this is that Patorjk sent an email to Github, and they've taken the project down.
Yes, but de facto is not de jure. Moreover, if you write something like
i had to do unholy things to make the original code work, seriously.
check the commit logs on github and you’ll see how much “code” i had to delete and refactor.
what’s left isnt really acceptable, but it does work.
and on the first comment in this post is
I think it’s really funny you still don’t quite grasp the reason why I ported this library.
You said, “He tried to say he did it for altruistic reasons, but FIGlet itself is open source, and there are already PHP modules available for people looking to use it in the browser (here and here).”.
That is just funny. Thanks a lot of the write up, this will give me some great SEO.
You are not really being "cool" about someone else's code, which you didn't ask for permission (which is de facto done, at least to say you have done so, if not to ask for permission).
Hmm, I guess my understanding of hacker norms, at least in the communities I've been in for some years, was that there was no particular requirement to ask permission before building derivative versions of stuff, and generally you should assume it's allowed and encouraged, though credit is appropriate (and generally more prominent credit than this asciimo site gave). There's a half-dozen or so Hacker News repackagings that never asked pg's permission before going live, for example (e.g. http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/).
So I'd definitely agree credit was poorly given, and this guy's motives probably aren't good either, but "code theft" seems a bit silly. "Nobody can use my stuff without permission" seems sort of out of place in hacker culture. I mean, TAAG itself is built on reusing a bunch of other people's work.
This was not open source code. Would you expect to be allowed to download the GMail JavaScript code and use it to make your own webmail software?
Hacker culture is great, but that doesn't mean you can or should force everyone in the world to abide by its norms (or your perception of those norms).
There is quite a big difference between Gmail and a just for fun ascii art generator.
I could see this guy being upset if he wasn't given credit for it. But the new version gave credit to his original from the very start. Kind of a weird thing to get mad about.
>There is quite a big difference between Gmail and a just for fun ascii art generator.
No. There isn't. It's all someone's hard work and effort. Just because one belongs to google and one belongs to a fellow hacker doesn't make it OK to steal his work and get away with it.
You're right: This particular instance of plagiarism isn't such a big deal. The reason it's notable is that it shows just how little respect some people have. The guy took the creator's code without permission and altered it to insult the creator, then when the creator expressed unhappiness with this, he hit the creator's comment section with more insults and entitlement.
Maybe I've not been long enough in hacker comunities, but being rude when tacking the code is not exactly correct. I guess that if Marek had written just : Taken from blablabla and modified to work with blablabla Patorjk would be somewhat OK with it, but the way Marek did it... Don't know, it is being plain rude.
It is like hacker-newspaper came in and said PG's work is a lot of crap, removed some part of it and took credit. What do you think would happen?
He did actually make a bunch of negative comments when launching Hacker Newspaper, which is sort of interesting. He says he repackaged HN because HN's layout was crap, and its discussions were "ridiculous time-wasting garbage", so he wrote Hacker Newspaper, with a new layout and no comment threads, to "reach a higher level of information hygiene".
No, no, not necessarily. Follow HNN for a few months and you'll know about the archive-type and newsletter-type repackaging sites. I'm not behind any of them, and I know of them.
But your larger point, that Marak is a jerk - yeah, 100% agreed on that one.
The code is, yes, but repackaging the actual live site content is a bit iffier. From what I can tell, pg's never either explicitly blessed or objected to it--- he seems to benignly tolerate it (though I may have missed somewhere where he addresses it?).
I love that there are people trying to conflate an blog's image use that falls under a lot of concepts of "fair use" with a particularly obnoxious act of code plagiarism.
What on earth makes you think it's fair use? It's not commentary about the image. It's not educational. He reproduced the whole image, not a part of it. I suspect that you need to go and read up about copyright law.
If I'm reading this right he took messy javascript someone wrote, and ported it to a php library... If he didn't give original credit to the OP, then yeah thats rude, but don't we all end up porting old code at sometime or another?
He took (possibly messy, although that doesn't have much to do with it) JavaScript code which he didn't own and had no rights to without asking and made changes to it. No PHP here.
Okay.. but Javascript is free to view through the client machine no matter what. It brings up that question "if its easy to cheat, will people do it?" and the answer is, usually yes. Sure theft really sucks, but was there a way to prevent this other then trusting someone not to steal?
Well is there a way to hide your javascript, or compile it to hinder the ability to steal it so easily?
I'd like to know cause as far as I knew you had to be extra careful on what you do with javascript to protect the security of your site. I always have my controllers verifying my input from javascript/ajax, cause I know my js is easily viewable.
I start hearing Smeagol's my preccccciiooosssss when some artists and coders talk about their work.
[Edit] Ownership of goods is a social construction, not a universal truth nor is there some universal morality to consider. We can consider his feelings, but I'll tell you what, the peeps getting snippy here about justice for someone's ASCII generator, while simultaneously accepting the near universal oppression of poor people by their own consumption habits protected by intellectual property laws have somewhat questionable priorities, it would seem.
> nor is there some universal morality to consider
It's a social construction most of us agree on, though. In fact, I have no doubt that some on here consider it fundamental to the advancement of the species. You're free to be here and disagree with us about it, but don't expect us to couch all our conversations in hypotheticals because you differ with us on our "undebatable subjects" -- those subjects we have pondered over enough that we need not debate them again and again every time someone raises an objection.
> near universal oppression of poor people by their own consumption habits . . .
The theory is that if the content isn't protected it won't be generated _at all_ at the margin. You can debate that theory if you like, but if it is true then the mere removal of the laws won't do a lick of good for poor people. Similarly, if wealth accumulation is disallowed, it's not that poor people will magically become wealthier. Instead what will happen is those who had previously worked hard to accumulate wealth will stop working as hard, and less wealth overall will be created.
1. Agreeing on it doesn't make it moral. [Edit: although it does create a moral majority, aka, the tyranny of the majority]
2. Trickle down economics at its finest. Where's the evidence?
I'll give you some counter-evidence: music after vs music before MP3 pirating. Seems like this vibrant cultural explosion happened despite all that lack of trickle down, huh.
By your logic the colonialists and imperialists did a favor for all those tragic natives. I mean, where would all those Indians and Indonesians be without all that wealth creation by the East India Company?!?? [Edit: or Apple]
The point is this system of IP is predicated on acceptance of not just winners but losers (at life), and justified with a generous self-serving of trickle-down economics.
[Edit, to insert an LOL at people who think IP wouldn't be created without necessarily oppressing foreigners and people born without silver spoons. Note, I am aware that I have to construct the connection, and I haven't done that here, but there's no point in this forum, abstractions like this remain couched as a conveniently theoretical debate, despite the very real lives that poor people lead]
[Edit, to insert another LOL at people who think that we must support our wealthy people's desire to create more wealth]
You can unapologetically assume that only for as long as you do not accept culpability for the outcome. Or rather, you may accept culpability unapologetically, it just says a lot about you, even if you don't realize it.
[Edit: people can't stand when you only debate on the actual terms of an artificially constructed reality, rather than the make-believe terms that only exist within that reality. It's human, it keeps us from having to think about consequences. But why is that reasonable, it is just convenient.]
You can talk about artificially constructed realities all you want, but the idea that other people matter is also artificially constructed. It's not the "source" of the reality that matters. What matters is whether we generally agree on it.
>>> You can talk about artificially constructed realities all you want, but the idea that other people matter is also artificially constructed.
Yes, we can choose to believe that other moral matters relating to people driven in herds to create profit for far wealthier people matters more than say moralizing about IP regimes which have a large net negative affect on those same people. As I said earlier, it's a matter of priorities. Nicely put ;)
There's a handy quotation from random famous person that nails this one nicely, but I can't think of it right now.
[Edit, but we can break it down more in so many directions, and all of them end up very badly for the true believers in advancing civilization with schemes that necessarily require there to be vast numbers of losers for the small numbers of winners. Goddamn that whole conscience thing gets in the way, put a cork in it fast!!!]
>>> It's not the "source" of the reality that matters. What matters is whether we generally agree on it.
Actually, I think that only matters to the winners under that scheme.
> Yes, we can choose to believe that other moral matters relating to people driven in herds to create profit for far wealthier people matters more than say moralizing about IP regimes which have a large net negative affect on those same people.
You've yet to establish the net negative effect, so I think this is putting the cart before the horse just a little. Also: "other moral matters relating to people driven in" -- what?
> Goddamn that whole conscience thing gets in the way
I disagree with you on how best to advance the lot of people in the world. That's not the same as not having a conscience.
> Actually, I think that only matters to the winners under that scheme.
>>> You've yet to establish the net negative effect, so I think this is putting the cart before the horse just a little.
I'm not the one claiming that trickle down economics is a morally justified way to rationalize the goodness of IP regimes. Why do I have to disprove conjecture which is not generally proven as a net benefit? Proponents of this dogma are the ones who want to justify IP regimes, and not only that they (i.e. you) insist this is the way to progress. You've got to prove that the inequalities created are better than the inequalities averted. That basic first step (proof of net positive) has not been done. I am not suggesting action (i.e. IP enforcement), I am suggesting inaction. As in, don't fuck with people unless your theory is proven.
Of course, it's worth pointing out that whole line is thinking is utilitarian. Are you truly utilitarian? I doubt it. So some consistency would be nice too.
Oh, well, this is something entirely different than copyright, since copyright is not specifically for businesses at all. It certainly doesn't fall in the broadly understood definition of "trickle-down economics."
What you're doing would be kind of like if I called the policy you're endorsing "socialism" and pointed out that that rarely works and is widely discredited among economists and everybody else. Makes for good reading I guess, but it wouldn't be very honest.
The widely accepted view on copyright is that it's needed to protect creators' ability to profit from their work and encourage the production of more such work. That's why it's written into the legal codes and sometimes constitutions of almost every major political entity in the world. Most economists similarly embrace its efficacy -- with caveats, in many cases, but the overall consensus is for. Misnaming it "trickle-down economics" changes that not a whit.
You start by eschewing the idea of "universal truth" and "morality" in order to show that we don't have the right to act so high-and-mighty, but then you attack us for our "questionable priorities." I can't really figure out your standpoint, unless it's just "What I believe is correct and anybody who holds a contradictory view is immoral."
In the absence of an absolute, we have to deal with what we have, there are people who wish to grant monopolies and claim a moral prerogative, all the while assuming or claiming that the inequalities created are justified. I suggest that those assumptions or claims are faulty.
And yes, I choose to attack priorities that do act high and mighty (good description for the whole general mob outcry, btw) while they ignore the inequalities created and/or bolstered by the very same IP regime which is at issue. Why is that confusing?
We must constantly select intellectual abstractions to guide our reasoning. That becomes more difficult once there is a realization of the lack of clear absolutes (and very difficult if one is originally religious). As coders we're aware better than most that all abstractions are leaky, but they are still valuable.
My specific desire in the discussion for this article is to cause someone who is in the midst of mob furor to question the trade-offs of the IP issue at hand and consider that all this sense of justice may (I say does) create and rationalize more inequalities than we would have otherwise, and either way is utilitarian in its notions (i.e. the greater good, etc) and the people arguing for it may not have considered that and may not actually agree with the full implications of those ideas.
We've got enough actual scarcity, why are we creating more?
[Edit: It's very convenient for artists and artisans (coders, for instance) to feel morally justified, but why are the inequalities created by them in the pursuit of wealth or fame any different than those created by the uber-wealthy? It's all just a bit too self serving.]
[Edit: We have to live in the world we have. Getting the impression that I'm claiming a person should not utilize IP at all is incorrect, it's a whole other thing to light the torches and burn down a house with a smug sense of rightness of a cause, and that's when I think, okay, enough play, you might have to use what we've got to survive, be stable, attempt to find satisfying lives for ourselves and our families, but let's not get too sure of the justice of it all.]
