Comments on: The ethics of cloning: Why ‘original’ isn’t always essential

By: David Meyer

David Meyer — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:43:14 +0000

I know there’s a line. I’m just trying to stimulate a discussion to define where that line is. I’m certainly not trying to come across like a Samwer apologist; I just think the situation is complex, and there’s no point trying to think about it in black and white terms.

I don’t think the photocopying analogy is useful, because this isn’t about cloning a finished product; it’s about cloning a business that may then succeed or fail, that requires management and growth, and that will face different challenges to those faced by the business it cloned.

And as regards having my journalism ripped off? I’ve been there many times. Do I like it? Would I do it to others? Can I do anything to really stop it? To all questions, the answer is no.

By: Christoph Raethke

Christoph Raethke — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:01:43 +0000

It may not be clear-cut – what in life is? -, but there actually IS a line, and no sophisticated, educated “well, let’s look at this from another angle” will change that. As Jason C rightly maintains, there IS a difference between innovating in an existing market or versus existing competitors and outright theft of source code, business model, design and everything else that makes a company. Let’s not blur this by being oh-so-understanding for “the complexities of the digital industry”. The way the Samwers are doing it is like buying a book at a Barnes&Noble the U.S., putting it into a giant Xerox machine, and re-selling it in Germany – with the only words changed being the name of the author. And, if we’re lucky, a babelfishy translation thrown in. Would you like that to happen to the articles you write, David? And then have a commentator defend the copycat by saying, “well, David didn’t manage to dish out a German version of his writings fast enough, so it’s basically his fault that someone else did”?

By: siliconhillslawyer

siliconhillslawyer — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:36:45 +0000

There are all sorts of behaviors that society is perfectly fine with tolerating, and even encouraging, between businesses when if it were between individual people we would draw a line. Walk into a grocery store and notice the copycat brand of soda, cereal, tylenol that is practically a clone of a branded product. Nobody seems to think that’s unethical, although if it were one artist ‘cloning’ another person’s work and selling it for cheaper, we might think differently. Even IP law, at least in the U.S. and in certain industries, isn’t driven by a sense of moral obligation to a creator – it’s about incentivizing products that make society better… most of the time.

So we need to be careful about moralizing too much when it comes to business v. business interactions. Calacanis and other founders probably do so because they see (not entirely without reason) founders as artists – and they see clone’s as someone ripping off another person’s masterpiece. But Calacanis also likes to refer to entrepreneurs as “Samurai,” which signifies something. When you step into business, you step into an arena with rules that no decent society today would tolerate between people – like competing until your opponent is literally dead, and then writing an article about how awesome it was to put them to sleep. It’s utilitarian ethics to the max, which is fine because we’re talking about profit-seeking entities, not artists.

A cloned entrepreneur will hate their cloner just like a CEO at a big corporation will hate the entrepreneur that kills his Company, but that doesn’t mean we need to do anything about it. We should worry about how cloning impacts incentives for entrepreneurship, but that’s not ethics – it’s economics.

By: Jaime Novoa

Jaime Novoa — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:23:46 +0000

I’d never seen that rant from Jason before. It’s interesting that he complains about the Samwers copying other people’s ideas and businesses when, if you ask me, This Week In looks (and sounds) a lot like Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. And they’ve both had their own arguments in the past about the subject.

Trying to determine the legality/morality of copying/cloning other businesses is tricky. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it’s not easy to come to a conclusion. Many of the clones we have seen from Rocket Internet in the past 2-3 years saw an opportunity in a certain market and executed, in cases, brilliantly. That is why they are so powerful in some Asian countries, Germany or Russia. And let’s see what happens in Brazil.

I honestly think it’s just part of the complex startup and technology ecosystem. You’re always going to have early creators that execute brilliantly and create a market/industry, and then you’ll have others who, based on such ideas, will try to apply them elsewhere. And that’s not easy. Amazon could have opened shop in Indonesia but perhaps they didn’t have the expertise in the area that Rocket Internet has.

And you could argue that, even if considered to be experts in cloning, they might be helping the startup ecosystem providing capital via investments in other startups or straight acquisitions.

It’s all part of the game and you’re always going to find leaders and followers. But glory can’t be exclusive to Amazons, Zappos, Squares of the world. At least it should not be. The world is too big.