Who would you expect to receive a message from? Presumably this happens more often than you think, and the company protocol is to get legal to deal with it. I think you've misinterpreted this as in any way "aggressive" - this is just a company trying to tie things up as efficiently as possible. Sure, you'd like an informal response, but when a company is operating at the scale of Mailchimp, that doesn't seem realistic.
I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.
This is an issue of direct relevance to many of those that work at Google. I think it's fine for corporations to take a stand on social issues that directly affect their employees.
I'm not sure "honest mistake" is really acceptable. This is a multi-million-dollar Triple A game. I think it's reasonable to expect their legal team should have double- and triple-check the rights to all arts assets. Ye, there are a lot of assets used in a game of TLoU's magnitude, but the subway map is so prominent I can't understand how it would have been skipped over. If they had time to include the asset, they should have had time to secure rights.
The screencap used to demonstrate the theft constitutes fair use, by the way. Cameron's using it to make a point to support his argument, which is totally legal.
If true, "honest mistake" is an acceptable answer. But it's not one you bring up with the person whose work you appropriated. It's one you bring up with your insurance company when they're following up on the errors and omissions claim (E&O) you filed in order to cover the losses incurred by your own negligence.
Protip: When you're in this situation DO NOT blame an intern. Interns - by definition - are unskilled, unpaid, and uninvested. If your insurance company finds out that interns are the only thing standing between them and damages for an IP lawsuit, they'll strongly consider yanking your insurance altogether, at which point you've got a snowball's chance in hell of finding a distributer.
That's because copyright law allows rights-holders to sue not just the author of the illegally derivative work, but the author's distributors. Since the distributors have no way to be absolutely certain that the authors they buy from have actually cleared every single underlying right, they insist that the authors carry insurance that will cover any losses suffered by the distributer in cases just like this. In any human enterprise, a certain number of errors will happen. That's normal. But if a production company develops a history of recklessness, it may find itself uninsurable, and that's the end of commercial viability.
Handling Rights & Clearances is work that is both skilled and tedious, meaning it should pay well. Employers that "inadvertently" screw artists by cutting this particular corner deserved to get hit as hard as the law allows.
I'd agree with that. But why couldn't the abstraction for "save" be the floppy disk symbol?
Just pretend the floppy disk never existed, and that the floppy-save symbol is just a completely abstract symbol. Doesn't it still work? As long as a symbol is unique, easy to identify, and easy to reproduce, it does its job. I'd argue that floppy symbol has stuck around because, on a purely visual level, it's hard to beat.
I will argue with that: The floppy disk on has grip on our mind, because we, as the user of the medium, have stuck with it for a couple of decades. When I am saying we, I am talking about computer users in the science/business world roughly during the last 30 years (god forbid there are still people using this thing today).
If one take the idea of saving outside the computing world (meaning where the computer is used on a daily basis), then I see two choices for the representation: a bank safe as the old age mean to save (money or valuable in this case) or a folder for document (dead tree medium are not going to die any time soon). I think that a study needs to be done among non computing educated people to understand better what is their mental (pictural) representation of the action of saving is.
All I am saying is that the floppy disk is pretty much a cultural centric representation of the action of saving valuable information for later retrieval.
I explored the possibility of using a bank safe as a replacement symbol in the original piece. A bank safe is very difficult to represent symbolically, particularly at the scale of a small icon, so I think we can probably rule that out. A folder symbol is an even worse candidate, as folders are already used to symbolically represent levels in a hierarchical file structure.
Any replacement for the floppy would need to be immediately recognisable and not already tied symbolically to another concept. My argument, simply, is that I don't think there's anything better. The floppy is a unique shape and conceptually tied only to "saving". The effort required to move away from a commonly-used symbol isn't trivial and I just don't think there's much to be gained.
I'd argue that "better designed" is subjective here. Hacker News is optimised for high content density. Designer News has lower content density, but there's more space between posts (and visual signposts in the form of "badges") which makes the front-page easier to scan. I appreciate both approaches.
While "better designed" is definitely subjective, I find that HN reads easier and is more visually appealing. Personally, HN feels superior on an aesthetic as well as functional level - many of DN's design techniques feel kind of cliched or tacky.
This seems to have a huge chicken-or-the-egg problem: the site is only valuable to consumers if they know their requests could have some influence, but companies will only listen to requests from Pvsh users if there's a critical mass (say, thousands or millions of votes for one feature).
Is there some way to re-jig the concept to get around this? Perhaps by focusing more directly on one particular product category and expanding outwards? Or by working with particular companies that are actively soliciting feature requests (in which case I'd know I'd be listened to)?
From the stats Kickstarter have released previously, situations like this (in which a project just barely doesn't reach its target) seem extremely rare. Kickstarter works because the model is simple: a hard deadline, a hard target, and go. It sucks that they were so close, but I don't think it would be in Kickstarter's interests to tweak the system to assist almost-made-it edge cases like this.
Agreed in general, though I'd dispute your point that hacking can't do permanent good. Sure, in fifty years, you likely won't care about the web app you built, but maybe that app helped somebody achieve their goals or inspired somebody else in some way, and that is what you'll remember. The work itself is never important in the long run... it's how that work helped others in some way.
I find it hard to get from, "Food, water, and energy shortages, exacerbated by climate change, could lead to instability and violence and the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people in the future" to, “Yet the probability of a more peaceful world is increasing." Food and water (and to some extent, now, energy) are base needs, and if those end up in short supply, it doesn't matter if we're "winning" or "gaining" in other areas. Fundamentally, a sustainable supply of food and water trumps everything else on that list, and if we end up losing at that, we've lost at everything... just worth keeping in mind.
Well, that's more a political and organizational problem than anything else. The US alone produces enough grain to feed well over a billion people (though most isn't consumed directly).
Imagine two scenarios. On the one hand you have a Bangladesh as it exists today struggling against, say, flooding or drought or brownouts. On the other hand you have a Bangladesh that is industrially developed and wealthy (say, as wealthy and developed as South Korea is today). Obviously a wealthy and developed country is going to be better able to deal with such problems, and is going to make it less likely that war or famine result from disasters or adversities.
I can see your point, but, taking a longer-term view, what happens when we hit hard limits to global growth?
In a world in which every country is developed and wealthy... where in the world does that material wealth come from? I can't conceive of how such a world could exist without some kind of significant technological breakthrough or massive social change.
Are there hard limits to global growth? What are they exactly? What's the evidence that the Earth cannot support a population of 10 billion with wealth equivalent to, say, the current US?
Today there are potential long-term problems in the way we use fresh water and hydrocarbons, but those are not fundamentally insoluble, far from it they are immanently tractable engineering problems. Consider that by the year 2100 the global economy will likely be over a quadrillion dollars in size (in 2012 dollars). And it will be filled with millions upon millions more engineers, entrepreneurs, technicians, and so forth than the world of today. I find it hard to believe that such a world will have trouble growing food or operating desalinization plants or adapting to using nuclear fission power, etc.
None of this requires massive social change or technological breakthroughs, it merely requires that people invest money and effort into engineering solutions to problems as those problems develop, which is something mankind has excelled at for millenia and will be extremely well prepared for in the 21st century.
37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.
It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.
I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.