I issued a (valid) DMCA notice to a small corporation who used the intellectual property of a colleague but did not pay them for it (they promised payment in writing, then just… didn’t pay for a year or more). Their whole business website was down for a week or more as a result, as their registrar just took down their website without checking anything, and they didn’t really have technical staff to resolve it.
The whole DMCA system is quite a broken mess, and is often (usually?) used unethically. However, it is possible to use correctly, even by private individuals. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it a little, that day.
No.
Honestly running a business in Asia is like… 35% harassing people who haven’t paid you. I hear it’s pretty similar elsewhere but can’t confirm.
It’s most businesses. At least as a former owner of an Auto Body shop in California, and then one in Georgia, this was the case. As a Buyer for a chain of bike shops I also spent a significant amount of time avoiding paying at least 35% of my purchase orders at any point in time.
One time I stole a balloon on free balloon day. The guilt still keeps me up at night.
I am an apartment building manager. Once, years ago, I was brought in to clean up after another manager who had quit/been fired for… let’s just call it incompetence.
Anyway, there was a unit in the building that was occupied by a guy I never met or even saw, and the rent was months overdue. So I followed the required legal procedure to declare the unit abandoned. I spoke to neighbors. I posted notices, etc. Eventually, the unit was legally declared abandoned and I started the task of clearing out any property left behind.
The unit was very neat and tidy and full of nice stuff. Not the usual state of a rental that someone abandoned, and this should have tipped me off. But it didn’t, and so I had everything hauled away. Furniture, electronics, clothes, the lot.
Then after 6 months I moved on to a different building. Later, I learned that the person who lived there was on active duty in the military, and that’s why no one had seen them for months. Apparently, a neighbor had been entrusted to pay the rent but they had just kept the money for themselves, and lied to me when I inquired about the neighbor’s whereabouts.
So, this poor guy comes back from overseas military service to discover that not only has he lost his apartment but also everything in it. And since I had followed the legal procedure, no law was broken (by me.)
Copied an example source code, which was under MIT+Apache 2.0 license, and created a derivative work under GPL, maybe that’s questionable?
Tracing art back in highschool for an ungraded art project since it was just for the front and back of a crummy “sketch book” made entirely of white paper and staples.
