PayPal's Honey extension should be pulled by Google for doing the exact same thing. There is no difference and Honey shouldn't get special treatment just because it's owned by PayPal.
Are you a lawyer? Asking because "cookie stuffing" (which is indeed criminal) refers to the practice of setting a ton of referral cookies for the sites the browser had no intention of visiting, just for the case it will visit them some time in the future. In my understanding it does not refer to setting a cookie for the site the browser is currently on.
Is he suing for class action on the claims of cookie stuffing? I haven't found the actual case in either link (the second one is for "creators" only), so I can't get the answer myself.
No, he's claiming breach of contract and unfair practices. Cooking stuffing is just a customer issue, not a partner one. He would have no standing on that front.
My understanding of US law is extremely limited, but seeing it's a class action, would the lawyer be able to file the suit on behalf of the customers instead, if e.g. they thought it has a better chance to succeed as such? And if not, is the fact that this suit is filed on "breach of contract and unfair practices" claims presenting any evidence that Honey engaged in a specific legally defined practice of "cookie stuffing"?
The event is very fresh. <24h as I write this comment. The claims are not laid yet, but as far as I can see, it's starting with wire fraud, and they'll go from there.
I don't think they're in the (private) discovery phase now.
P.S.: I'm not a US citizen, so I'm not familiar law terms in the US, if the above comment makes no sense, please forget what I said and move to next comment in the chain. Thanks.
I see. To be clear, I’m not saying what Honey did is not criminal activity, I’m just saying what they did does not look to me as if it qualifies as “cookie stuffing”. It might still be illegal, for a different reason. (Obligatory IANAL.)
My understanding from comments on reddit is that part of the suit relies on tortious interference, basically that honey is damaging the relationships between content creators and vendors by masking the source of referrals and therefore making the vendor believe that the content creator is under-performing in their contract.
This thread has started with GP saying "cookie stuffing is illegal" and me replying "does this qualify as cookie stuffing?" I'm not claiming what they did is legal, I'm claiming it might be illegal, just not for "cookie stuffing". As far as I can see there is no evidence that this particular suit claims "cookie stuffing", so there is nothing in it that can add to the question whether this qualifies as "cookie stuffing" or not. Which was my only original question.
Cookie stuffing is criminal fraud because the offender is receiving commissions for sales they did not generate, thus defrauding legitimate advertisers and companies paying for the advertising.
Obtaining money by means of false or fraudulent pretenses is wire fraud.
Honey's extension stuffs a ton of different affiliate cookies via its extension for sales it did not generate. They are representing themselves as the one who made the referral, and receiving commissions for doing so, when they did not.
There is no disagreement about that. Murder is also criminal. The disagreement is whether what Honey did classifies as "cookie stuffing". (I hope there is no disagreement that it does not qualify as murder, which is a different crime.)
> Obtaining money by means of false or fraudulent pretenses is wire fraud.
This is ... not the definition of what "wire fraud" is, but let's leave it aside as it's irrelevant to this discussion.
> Honey's extension stuffs a ton of different affiliate cookies via its extension
I have not seen any evidence that Honey's extension stuffs more than one cookie for any given transaction. In my understanding "cookie stuffing" refers to a practice of stuffing a ton of cookies for one transaction, not to a practice of "stuffing" one cookie for multiple transactions. Moreover, "cookie stuffing" is not a result of "stuffing" a "cookie", just like "guinea pig" is not a "pig" and it didn't come from a place known as "Guinea". "Cookie stuffing" is a specific legal term describing a certain well-defined behavior, and it would be inaccurate to apply it to anything that involves "cookies" and "stuffing". In other words, if I put some jelly inside an Oreo, this would not qualify as "criminal fraud" known as "cookie stuffing", even though it can be said that by doing that I'm "stuffing" (putting "stuff") inside a "cookie" (Oreo). That's why I asked if you're a lawyer -- they usually understand that e.g. "wire fraud" could be done without any "wire", for instance completely wirelessly -- or that someone committing a "regular" fraud while holding a pack of wire in their hand does not commit "wire fraud".
P.S. The search for "stuffing" in the filing you attached brings no results, so I assume the lawyers also don't argue that Honey engaged in "cookie stuffing" (which is criminal).
A distinction without a difference. It's functionally the same whether you store the same referral info elsewhere and stuff the cookies "just in time" vs stuffing the cookies all at once beforehand.
Functionally the extension is inserting itself as a second impromptu persistence mechanism ("cookie jar"), allowing it to stuff its cookies at a different phase of the e-commerce flow.
Slightly altered mechanism, same effect, same crime.
Similar actions can result in different verdicts. For example, an act of firing a gun on one end and having a dead body on the other can result in a whole variety of verdicts, which includes (but not limited to) “terrorism”, “murder”, “killing”, “negligence”, or “self-defense”. You can have several functionally identical cases — e.g. same gun, same ammunition, same wounds, etc. - and still end up with a variety of verdicts, from “not guilty” to “death sentence”.
I hope you don't mind if I'll wait for the court verdict on whether it was the same intent or not. Courts usually give more substantiated verdicts with regard to intent when they review all the available evidence, which I assume you don't have (neither does the court at this stage).
From what I can find, the definition of cookie stuffing is to deceptive claim credit for sales that they did not facilitate. Its the deception that is illegal, not the act of setting cookies. As such, the amount, ton, or a few, does not change the definition. If they are claiming credit for the sale then they are either doings it in good faith or in bad faith.
Which definition/source for cookie stuffing are you looking at?
> claim credit for sales that they did not facilitate
They will argue that by providing a coupon that lowered the price for the customer they did in fact facilitate the sale. IANAL but this sounds reasonable to me. Less so for the sales they did not find a coupon for (even if they argue they've tried).
The rest of your comment folds under this.
I guess we'll see how this plays out, but for what it's worth, the attached filing does not argue "cookie stuffing". (It argues other things.)
This may also go to a completely different direction of e.g. "securities fraud" -- the SEC may argue that PayPal, as a public company, has advertised their Honey service as "finding the best deals for their customers", and on the basis of that claim some of the investors chose to buy its shares. If this was a lie, the shares sale was made under false premises, and that seems like "securities fraud".
This reminds me of how as times changed, once illegal behaviors are now considered normal because "big tech" embraced it.
Remember Kazaa, BonziBuddy, Gator (The OG adware), etc.? They were demonized for collecting data on all the web traffic you were doing it. They got sued by the FTC and were forced to change their business models and/or close down.
Then Facebook, Google came along and did the same thing in the early 2010's except via cookies and Javascript, but somehow that's ok. Even worse, it's considered a normal business practice.
It amazes me that Honey has been able to become so popular given it's business model has always been more of a hack than an actual product. How did commission programs not sue them for fraud?
Probably because they had good ole Silicon Valley VC money to scare them off.
Pie also removed its footer reference to being the team that made Honey and then deleted all of the team photos from the who are we page. They seem to understand cookies and affiliate links well but aren’t versed in the way back machine.
The ethical standards of everyone involved with Honey/Pie are deplorable and they should be outcast from the software industry.
And it's spiraling from there into lawsuits etc. I'm kinda glad PayPal bought them as they can't just shut down and file bankruptcy. Hopefully some of these creators will get paid out for lost revenue.
Great find. I noticed the photos disappeared yesterday, but didn't catch that footer reference change.
Sadly, Ryan Hudson knows how to play the game and Pie (with its charming .org domain) is on a roll --- already hit 1M downloads just 9 months after its launch and grown to 10+ Engineers/20+ employees.
Shameless.
On the bright side, LegalEagle also called out Pie in the video. Hopefully that'll help shine a light on them.
Before, this is how ALL coupon sites/extensions have worked for decades.
I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge, despite being common sense, before the MegaLag video. Did people really think that sites like retailmenot.com or wethrift.com make you open tabs to the shop you're searching for coupons for before you can see the coupon code just for fun??
Affiliate code stuffing is the coupon provider business model, it's not Honey-exclusive at all. I'd be surprised if you find a coupon site/extension that haven't always done that.
It is pretty funny how the MegaLag video claimed it was hard to find discussion of this online, and cited a HN thread from over five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588663
I suppose it's easy for us to forget how an average person really doesn't think about how cookies and referral links work.
Not even just questioning how referral links work, but questioning how a company makes money. I never looked into Honey, but since it wasn't obvious how they were making their money, I assumed it was something sketchy and stayed away from it. My assumption was it was the typical data harvesting and selling (once they had the extension in your browser they could track you). While I think the tracking/selling is immoral, what they did instead seems like fraud (IANAL).
I'm pretty surprised that so many YouTube creators pushed Honey without questioning how they were making money off giving away discounts. Did they not ask, or did Honey have a lie for that as well?
I guess they say it, but being owned by PayPal I'm guessing there was an assumption that the commissions weren't being stolen from other people, and the codes being provided were organic codes and not ones created for Honey by the merchant to manipulate the user into thinking they were getting the best deal, when they weren't.
I read the HN link after the video though, and it was full of vague misunderstandings of exactly what honey was doing, even if people did understand the technical logistics. Some of the dark patterns honey goes through to get a user to click any link or button is pretty shady.
Yeah, as I watched the video all I could think was "what the fuck did you think they were doing?". I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose. There's also value to getting that money immediately, rather than at some unknown point in the future.
The only part that seemed uncouth to me was setting the referral code when they hadn't actually found any coupons, and collaborating with retailers.
You want to stick your lawyers on them and try to punish them and extract as much money as you can out of them? Fine. Whatever.
>> not screwing over their partners and customers?
I wasn't around to organically take in this situation, but being introduced to Honey by seeing this blow up today, I can only say: "...no? I don't think so?"
Take, for example, the wild west days of rampant SEO exploitation (I'm talking like 2000s or 2010s era) and its race to the bottom, and Google's subsequent refinement of the SEO program over the years. Why am I supposed to root for one side over the other, again?
Their bottom line purpose is the revenue stream; this is not a FOSS project that does so much as to not even solicit donations.
--
I hope the top thread writer from that HN discussion five years ago is having a field day dancing on top of his I-told-you-so mountain :)
> I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose.
... and helping to screw everyone else over in the process. That is what makes advertising for Honey so unethical.
From watching the original video sounds like that’s exactly what LinusMedia did. Which doesn’t surprise me, I’ve always been amazed by how many people like that channel.
In my defense I assumed they were a user data-mining scam, not a coupon code scam. Still never used it and told people not to whenever they asked, but, whatcha gonna do.
Honestly I knew that that coupon websites were adding their affiliate link to links from their websites, but it never occurred to me that the toolbars would be stripping and replacing affiliate links from actual links you were clicking yourself.
I wouldn't mind if they were transparent about what they were doing or gave you the option to substitute your own code specifically. I'm sure there are a lot of situations where I've clicked an affiliate link to check something out and then that affiliate got credit for other things I've purchased hours or days later. I'd really like a toolbar that let me modify or block the affiliate code from those links.
When I'm actually looking for coupons I tend to use an incognito window, but there are times when I'm clicking a link from reddit to see something someone has mentioned and then later go to the same site and buy something I was planning on buying and in those cases if the original link had an affiliate code, I'm pretty sure they end up getting credit for the later purchase that they had no involvement with.
All the YT creators are making a stink about this because surprise surprise, honey was stealing from them, not their viewers.
It's one of those open secrets that most youtube-peddled services are predatory in some way, and the creators happily kept pushing them on to their viewers because money talks. Now it turns out Honey is hurting their own bottom lines, so of course they all get on their moral high horses.
I'm curious why Amazon doesn't show you in some obvious way what affiliate code your purchase is linked to, if any. I'm imagining something like the way they used to display your Amazon Smile charity if you used that option.
Perhaps they've guessed that it would shock some people to learn how often they inadvertently use affiliate links and they would be discouraged from shopping or find some way to disable the codes.
Or even better give you option to take the affiliate cut as discount. Which would be win for everyone. Affiliate spammers would get knowledge that people gave them money out of charity. Shop would sell more as things are cheaper. And buyers would get cheaper products.
Wait what? :) Are you proposing that amazon should have a “give me a discount on my purchase” check-box on their checkout page? Why would anyone not click that? And if people would click it why would anyone share affiliate links of amazon?
That would completely undermine the incentive structure of the whole structure.
> Which would be win for everyone.
Except of course the content creators. It would not be a win for them.
They would still get cut from those who choose to support them this way. Rest of the people would get discount. There seems to be plenty of people who click affiliate links so creators get money. Those same people would still give the cut to them wouldn't they?
> Those same people would still give the cut to them wouldn't they?
It is a very different proposition. In the current practice you get the product for the same price as everyone else and the creator gets a small slice of the shop's profit. In the system you are proposing where you could decide to pocket the money it would feel like you are giving the money out of your own pocket to the creator. It literally would make the product more expensive for you to purchase if you decide to not take the discount but give it to the creator. It would feel like charity with weird extra steps and a middle man.
Sure, some people would do it. I guess there are turbo-fans everywhere. But the income from affiliate links would collapse dramatically. Because if there is a button to get a discount easy then people will push the button to get the discount. They will justify it to themselves however they want it.
> Or then just ban the whole scam.
Ban as in with government force? Or ban as in the online shop decides to not engage in affiliate marketing anymore?
The first: ok? Why? I'm not that fussed about it, but I'm also not seeing why this would be a good policy. Or what exactly you want to ban for that matter.
The second: Presumably the webshops made their own calculations that they earn more money with affiliate marketing than without. I don't know how one would do that, but I assume they are not just doing it out of inertia, or goodness of their hearth.
> I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge
I think the last time I actively investigated how to save pennies with these online coupon things was the 90s when I was a teenager and I suppose that's true for more people.
1. Honey makes money through deals with retailers to not offer the best coupon code to the extension's users
2. Honey swaps out the referral code from the blog/video/etc. that actually referred you to the product with their own, even when they didn't find any coupon deal
Merely "Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners" is not at all a "very upfront" description of that behavior. Moreover, many of the people affected by this are reviewers/etc. who have never themselves used Honey so had no particular reason to look into how it works.
The two together results in honey essentially being paid instead of real affiliates to suppress coupon codes from you(since they advertise to stores that they direct users away from finding coupons, and towards a more stable discount percentage).
This is hard to grasp. Do I understand correctly that some web pages may display a coupon code for a discount on some possible future sale. And the Honey extension detects this coupon code and replaces it with a different coupon with less discount? This all seems so absurd, making money by skimming hypothetical discounts.
From what I understand, no, they don’t replace coupons you’ve entered.
Honey’s advertising message was “never search for a coupon again” and “we’ll ensure you always have the best discount possible”. However in reality a merchant could sign up as a Honey partner and for a mere 3-5% commission they’d let you set the coupons that Honey would show.
So for example if your business gave a 20% promotional coupon to a small community, you could set Honey to ignore it and only show a 5% coupon in the coupon search. People with the 20% coupon will still get to use it, but Honey will never supply it.
So not only was Honey removing affiliate revenue from the people promoting it, it wasn’t giving the people using it the best deal that it promised.
> Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
Paying Honey means you can limit the discounts available through Honey, sort of like a shitty protection scheme.
Because Honey bills itself to the consumer as the be-all-end-all coupon and discount app and advertises itself as "we know ALL the coupon codes and discounts", a consumer with the Honey extension will likely not look outside of that for a discount and assume whatever they got from the extortion racket as the end customer was "the best deal".
Does Honey get the full amount from the affiliate programs? What if Honey only gets a fraction? Then the merchant might be happy to pay Honey 1/10 of the normal affiliate amount if Honey puts its own affiliate code there instead of some Youtube reviewer's affiliate code, which would earn the Youtuber the full affiliate value.
"Earning money from affiliate links" and "stealing affiliate links" are not the same thing. There is a big range of behaviors here, and they're right at the worst end of it.
I'm surprised by how far they went, not that affiliate links were involved at all.
At no point in that writeup does Honey say they use cookie stuffing to fraudulently steal affiliate attribution when no discount code is found. This is a serious crime: people have gone to prison for cookie stuffing affiliate codes (see: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...)
> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
Because Honey has leverage.
Just to provide one example, Honey can very easily hurt Amazon's bottom line by adding random affiliate codes (of independent creators) to every transaction. This wouldn't make them any money, but would bring them to the negotiating table.
Instead, Amazon can work out a deal with them where they get half the standard affiliate fee, and Amazon pockets the rest. Amazon is happy because they pay 1.5% to Honey instead of paying 3% to a different creator, Honey is happy because they get 1.5% instead of nothing, and Honey users are happy because if Honey is well-funded, they'll use some of that money on letting them find good deals online.
This is just one of the ways it could have played out; it's also possible that e.g. Honey had good access to some kind of Amazon discount codes that they kept applying too often, which Amazon didn't like, so they worked out a deal that wasn't too bad for Amazon and great for Honey.
> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
One YouTube channel, theo dot gg has a conspiracy theory about it which is honey:
1. amassed a huge (rabid) user base
2. Offered "protection" to companies
The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.
So I think basically the strategy here was:
1. Pay a lot of money to buy a user base
2. Offer protection to stores if they do certain things
3. Deliberately don't give the best offers to users if the stores pay this protection money, wreck the store somehow(?) if they don't
4. Profit
PayPal Holdings Inc. made a big bet in November with its $4 billion acquisition of Honey, a web browser extension that helps online shoppers find the lowest prices. Now Amazon.com Inc. is warning customers not to use the tool.
Shortly before Christmas, Amazon said Honey posed a security risk, which was reported Thursday by Wired. The warning perplexed some online shopping experts since the tool has been available for several years and Amazon makes no similar warnings about other browser extensions such as price tracker camelcamelcamel.com.
Yeah, that tiny blurb was all I could find, which doesn't really tell me anything.
> The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.
I don't get this, if Amazon really thought that Honey was "trampling on Amazon's TOS" surely they would just ban Honeys affiliate status? If anything this implies to me that someone had a grudge.
It could also mean Amazon dot com has decided that it was not possible to kill honey and it was better to join them rather than trying to and failing to kill honey.
I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users. So how and when does honey decide to hold back? The conspiracy theory is honey decides to hold back when there is an agreement with the vendor. Now logically, why would honey intentionally give its users a poorer experience? It makes sense to me that honey will only do so intentionally if honey is getting paid to do so.
> I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users.
I think so, however I'm not sure how you would prove that they do this knowingly, mostly what's been proven are affiate link hijacks, because thats directly impacted sites.
And why would companies offer coupons, they then spend money not showing?
My guess to your question would be that perhaps there is the belief, or maybe data proves it factual, that when someone is considering a purchase and might be on the fence and then they see that Honey can get them a coupon or rewards points that they are then slightly more likely to go through with the purchase thinking they are getting a good deal. If data shows an increase in sales then some might consider affiliating worth it. Just my guess.
>> We earn these commissions when a member uses Honey to find available savings or to activate PayPal Rewards
Do you really think that clicking an "OK" button to dismiss a dialog after Honey doesn't find any coupons that secretly reloads the page your on and replaces the affliate cookie with its own is just "earning money from affiliate links?" That's just one of the super shady things they do.
Same with Paypal rewards. They entice users to click the rewards button to again steal the affiliate cookie, and pay them a few cents while they take tens of dollars in affiliate commision.
They literally advertise this as a feature on their home page in that they give you X% of what they earn from affiliate links. It says a lot about the influencers advertising it if they did not realise that Honey is taking their affiliate revenue while reading an ad that says they do. More realistically, most of them likely did know that this is what Honey does and determined that honey paid more than any lost revenue, but know that saying that would lead to some of this outrage being directed at them. As a bonus, by asking users to uninstall Honey they can have their money from running Honey ads previously and money from their affiliate links too. The only way I can maybe see influencers being unaware of this if if they read an ad that only talked about the coupon feature and they never bothered to even visit the Honey homepage or try it themselves, which would be a pretty bad look for them.
I also think most users that use Honey have to know that this is what it does given that, again, it's an advertised feature. I suspect most people outraged at this are people that never used the tool in the first place.
I certainly think it's a bad product as it defeats the purpose of affiliate links and reduces revenue for anyone using affiliate links for their intended purpose, but I don't think they were misleading anyone about what the product does.
If a company says they make money “selling cars” you don’t assume they get those cars through theft. Same deal here, saying they get affiliate money doesn’t imply they overwrite existing affiliate links which is about a clear a case of tortious interference as you could find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
So, no Honey didn’t disclose what people are complaining about.
I agree that it's likely tortious interference, I just don't agree that they're being deceptive. I think it's reasonable to say that most of the target market would be considered tech-savvy enough to know how these purchase affiliate programs work and the influencers advertising it absolutely do.
If users are not aware of how this works then I have to question where they think the cashback comes from, and if they are aware that it comes from the business they are making a purchase from then I have to question why they think the business would give a commission to Honey on top of the existing commission to wherever a link was clicked from. I think a majority of users would have to be somewhat wilfully ignorant to not question why money is being given back to them whenever they make a purchase.
I would posit that the "average user" has no care about how the companies they interact with make their money. The modern world is filled with black boxes to them.
I think you’re missing the point. Honey is stealing affiliate credits from influencers who don’t have any relationship with them.
If a YouTuber posts an link with their own affiliate code and during checkout the user uses the Honey extension to look for coupons Honey steals the affiliate credit even if they don’t have a coupon the YouTuber gets nothing.
*Even if they know there is a coupon, but are hiding it from you because of a partner relationship with the store who hasn't published any coupons to their honey admin portal.
I very much agree that it's bad in this regard and potentially even illegal, I just don't think they were ever misleading about the fact that they do this.
It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN. They then decided to stop accepting sponsorships from them.
Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere. Yet some have found them knowingly preferring their own coupons even though others users had manually entered and successfully used better coupons from elsewhere (while the extension was installed).
> Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere.
I agree that this can be called misleading, or even potentially a scam.
> It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN.
They're well aware of how affiliate links work, so as I said above, even if they only advertised the coupon part and never the cashback part they'd have to have never bothered to visit the Honey homepage or tried it themselves. I'm sure they just determined that they'd make more revenue than the lost affiliate revenue at first and later determined they no longer would.
Just because they know how affiliate links work, would the wording on Honeys website not lead them to believe they're only being the "affiliate" if they find a deal?
How would they have detected this without doing an investigation themselves into how the tool works, and they don't seem to be the kind of company to do that kind of due diligence when accepting ad deals.
Between this and that botched FOIA request, it feels real good to have content creators out there actually looking out and fighting against this BS that every other content creator lacks the expertise to do anything about.
I don't care if they do two ads per video (a normal ad and one for their firm), they more than deserve to shout themselves out.
>content creators out there actually looking out and fighting against this BS
Maybe they should have looked out before taking advertisement deals for products they don't even try to understand.
The only reason all of the "content creator" (influencer would be more fitting) care about this, is for once the product screw over them instead of there audience (just look at betterhelp).
That's the wonderful part: you don't need to have accepted the deal or even have heard of Homey to be affected. There are some decently sized channels in that comment section of the class action That had no relationship with homey sulking about how othrt deals they took were in danger because of seemingly low click through rates.. And it's effect isn't limited to YouTubers. Y
ou don't need have been socially engineered in order to be a part of a company hack. Same deal here.
>you don't need to have accepted the deal or even have heard of Homey to be affected
no you at the very least needed to install the addon for it to swap out your browser cookies.
>And it's effect isn't limited to YouTubers
the reason for the lawsuit based on financial damages very much does only effect them, the people who have referral programs which aren't the audience. ofc it also effects youtuber who didn't have a deal with honey.
> ofc it also affects YouTubers who didn't have a deal with honey
Yes, that was my primary point. And It may hurt them even more.
e.g If you're a tech YouTuber and Marquee took a deal, odds are you will feel the effects more than he would a A multimillionaire and industry known influencer. Because you'll probably have a huge overlapping audience with him.
Also, remember that a honey spent billions advertising this. I doubt this level of budget was limited only to YouTubers. Plenty of Instagram and TikTok and Twitter influencers to target.
But to attempt to summarize it, LegalEagle was trying to file a FOIA request for to DOJ and the FBI for rejecting their request to retrieve documents related to the January 6th riots. And they were rejected in one way that basically suggested that it wasn't read, and one claiming that there were not "part of the media" (which shouldn't matter since anyone can file a FOIA). There's a lot of stalling tactics being done and there's worries that the records could he expunged if too much time passed.
Saw the numbers on some VPN provider and was surprised just how huge the cut for essentially nothing for consumer can be... Like if that was in the original price. Then again VPNs are weird when you hear these deals and compare them to normal prices. Something is broken in the model.
To me, the whole affiliate marketing with behind-the-back deals and kickbacks just reeks of corruption. We have made the kickbacks illegal for public servants ... why all the rest are fine?
The money that "the creators" and Honey are in disagreement over to whom it belongs, should have never left the consumers' pockets to begin with.
I know it’s not necessarily the same people, but it feels contradictory for this community to say “copyright infringement isn’t theft” when we’re talking about movies, but use the opposite language when talking about GPL source code.
The GPL does the exact opposite of copyright; the fact that it uses copyright to achieve that is just an implementation detail.
If you believe information should be free to share and remix, you would believe that copyright infringement is not theft and that not releasing code is wrong.
The fact that the proprietary code is based on GPL code just shows that the ex-Honey folks are hypocrites: they're trying to use copyright to control their code, but breaking the same rules in the way they reuse others' code.
> The GPL does the exact opposite of copyright; the fact that it uses copyright to achieve that is just an implementation detail.
> If you believe information should be free to share and remix, you would believe that copyright infringement is not theft
No, this is absolutely incorrect. GPL requires copyright (or similar mechanism) to function. Without copyright, anyone could take the GPL'd code and release a compiled binary without releasing source. Releasing the source is the "payment" for being granted a license to copy the original code; without releasing the source, you are in violation of the author's copyright. No one who wants to use the GPL to protect their and their users' rights would advocate for eliminating copyright, because the GPL's goals cannot be achieved without copyright.
The more direct solution would be a law that required distributing human-editable code alongside software. No need for copyright or anything remotely similar. Code being copyrightable would just be getting in the way at that point.
But in a world where that is politically infeasible, we have to use whatever tools we have at hand to get as close as we can. And, unfortunately, the tool we happen to have is the modern copyright regime.
But nobody is compelling anyone to write and release software. It's no different to requiring food to include a list of ingredients or products to include safety standards references etc.
I mean, there's a reasonable argument that large swathes of current copyright law in the US also violate the First Amendment. I haven't read it yet, but the book No Law from Stanford University Press[1] makes that argument and has been on my to-read list for a while.
One can still want much looser copyright. For example, 14 years by default, pay $$ to extend it, increasing exponentially each time (as compensation for stealing from the public domain). At least I'm willing to call extended copyright terms stealing if we're going to call format shifting and other personal use cases stealing.
> pay $$ to extend it, increasing exponentially each time
Doesn't work with DRM protected media. Version 1 will be pulled from circulation shortly before the time runs out, version 2 will be slightly altered and qualify for a brand new 14 year copyright. Buyers of version 1 will not receive any refunds and will be expected to pay the full price for version 2.
Well, there should be laws to protect consumers from DRM, instead of laws to prevent consumers from circumventing DRM for legal uses, like say consuming the content they paid for on the device of their choice.
Apart from having to crack DRM (which has not been a problem so far) I think this should work. Of course, DRM provisions should stop working when a DRM-encumbered media reaches the public domain.
How is it stealing from the public domain if it’s intellectual property you’ve created? Do you also believe I should be entitled to a cut of your paycheck?
I don't believe that ideas/intellectual work should be considered property. I will concede that granting a temporary monopoly through copyright or patents can maybe be a means of incentivizing innovation and creative work, but I'm not convinced it is the only means of doing so, and the longer that monopoly lasts, the more it can have the inverse effect of stifling innovation that builds on existing innovations.
At least in the US, copyright is a monopoly on certain rights for a limited time. By locking those rights for an extended time, it is stretching that definition. The time to benefit from your creations is in that time window. That goes for my creations, yours, and everyone else too. Public domain is patient, but I don't think it is worth depriving it of moderately older works with which others can start to use as a foundation to build upon.
> Do you also believe I should be entitled to a cut of your paycheck?
I don't necessarily agree with GP or you, but this isn't a good argument because anyone other than libertarians (i.e. anyone who supports taxation), which in practice is pretty much everyone, does believe that.
No I agree it’s a poor argument when looked at either extreme. I think most folks would likely agree that some taxation is beneficial, albeit not a 100% tax rate, which would be broadly analogous to the argument that copyright shouldn’t exist.
The person you replied to wasn't making the argument that copyright shouldn't exist. Their argument is in line with "some taxation" where it goes into the public domain after a while, and they only (potentially) called extended copyright terms stealing from the public domain.
We can see with current legal situation around AI learning and data scraping how companies and their lawyers has starting to work around the issue of not having data protected by copyright. The general alternatives to copyright seems to be TOS and contract law, except for Hollywood which went and drafted their own special law.
Downloading software from a server means you need to have access to that server, possible through an account. There is also a fair amount of precedence covering the enforceability of TOS and limitations of server access, especially when a company earn profit on intentionally ignoring them.
Contract law has its own issue, and copyright is generally seen as much easier to understand and enforce, but if contract law can be used to control how software and data is used after a user has downloaded it then it could be used for something like GPL.
If you want a mental metaphor of what the vast body of GPL'ed code is, think of a very, very large multinational corporation.
If you want to use their code, you have to join the company. Fortunately for you, all you have to do to join the company is to agree to use the same license for you own code as the company already does. If you agree to that, you are free to use any or all of the code "owned" by the company.
However, if you do not agree to the company's terms - i.e. you wish to use a different license - then you are not a part of the company and have no legal right to use any of the company's code. You may of course continue with your own software, but you cannot benefit from the amassed resource that is the company's own code (though of course reading it is allowed).
The body of gpl code is absolutely a commons. I don't know why you imagine otherwise unless you're confused about public domain or something.
There is no joining any company or anything remotely like that no matter how hard you try to squint. The single rule in GPL is no more than any other usage-of-commons rule like don't pee in the pool or litter in the park.
The park is still free for anyone to use, you just can't fence off a part for yourself and start operating your tire-burning business in it. The body of people who either first donated it or the tax payers who voted for it set some terms for usage, and now you can either enjoy the goods under those terms or not.
But what's interesting is how some people have this kind of reaction and try to come up with this kind of argument over the act of being generous.
Are you sure GPL isn't even worse than you said? Why be so nice? Are you sure it doesn't also eat babies?
You cannot (re)use any GPL code unless you agree to license your own code under the GPL.
You and I may agree that the terms of the GPL are essentially just a way of protecting the commons. I happen to spend quite a bit of time on HN and elsewhere debunking people who cite Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" precisely because that whole story ignores the fact that real commons have historically been managed with a variety of social and civic techniques.
However, precisely because of this widespread repeating of Hardin's use of the term "commons", I tend to doubt that random mentions on HN of "the commons" actually means "a carefully socially and civically managed resource available to all but notionally protected from abuse". Rather, it does indeed tend to be a synonym for "public domain".
BTW, I've been writing GPL'ed code for more than 35 years, and for the last 25+ years, it has been my full-time self-employed means of making a living.
> "a carefully socially and civically managed resource available to all but notionally protected from abuse".
no it seems that you've just been triggered - I did mean it in the above sense. that's why it's offensive when somebody takes gpl code and puts it in proprietary code that they distribute.
public domain means do as you want, even burn tyres in the park.
"BTW, I've been writing GPL'ed code for more than 35 years, and for the last 25+ years, it has been my full-time self-employed means of making a living."
That is embarassing for such a self professed domain expert to say something as ridiculous as:
"You cannot (re)use any GPL code unless you agree to license your own code under the GPL."
I still don't hear an argument that actually shows how it's not a commons. If you're just arbitrarily declaring it actually means "public domain" I say you don't get to declare that and inventing your own definitions for terms is not a valid argument or even valid comminication, and there is no further point in attempting to communicate with anyone doing that.
I'm not making up my own definitions. I'm contrasting Garrett Hardin's use of the term in his famous book "Tragedy of the Commons", which is the way most people on HN use it with Elinor Ostrom's much more enlightened definition of it in her refutations of Hardin's claims (refutations that Hardin has accepted).
In Ostrom's sense, yes, GPL'ed code comprises a commons. In Hardin's sense, it does not (or at least, it has a bunch of features to it that render his entire thesis about commons inapplicable).
I think it does fit "a bunch of resources that people can just use". It's a shared pool where the only rule is to put derived code back, except the rule is even less because personal use is exempted.
You want to use gpl code go right ahead. Want to modify it? No problem. Ignore the optional license. It isn’t a usage license.
I make changes to gpl code all the time. I never release the changes because my coding is far too embarrassing. Nobody forces me to release anything. I can and do compile it with gpl incompatible links, not a problem.
> The fact that there are terms that you are required to agree and adhere to, OR live without the goods, that is not.
Uh, no there aren't. The GPL's requirements only kick in when I try to redistribute: that's why the license is in a file called COPYING. It's not an EULA: you don't need to agree with it to use GPL'd software.
Not technically. GPLs requirements kick in the moment you make a copy for you own use, it's just that there aren't any requirements that apply under those conditions.
But they'd have to take effect right away, otherwise you'd be illegally copying copyrighted software :). It is the GPL license that grants personal use without restriction.
Downloading is both literally and legally "creating a copy", at least in the US. [0]
> I don't need to be granted permission to run a program on my own computer.
Correct, you can run programs on your computer without permission. It's the 'loading the program on to your disk' part that you may need permission for.
> Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution.
>If you believe information should be free to share and remix, you would believe that copyright infringement is not theft and that not releasing code is wrong.
I'm mixed, because it's an entire spectrum and there's no clear sand in the ground. It's a very nuanced topic.
But fundamentally, if people want to make sure they can benefit most from their creations, they need some way to protect themselves. Otherwise the biggest wallet will grab the idea, out-advertise you, and out support you.
That's why I always vied for minimizing copyright periods, not abolishing the idea. Creators should benefit: creators have almost zero need to benefit almost a century after they die. the original 14 + 14 made enough sense and can still work: something that was basically an average lifetime back then and is now most of a working career. Those rights can transfer to whoever they want, and it would be transferred to a beneficiary posthumously. But when 28 is up, it's up.
Copyright was created in part, and allows the author of some covered work, to control the terms of how that work is used and distributed; so that both the creator and the user may benefit from that work.
GPL was created in part, and allows the author of some covered work, to control the terms of how that work is used and distributed; so that both the creator and the user may benefit from that work.
The GPL and copyright are both about controlling what other people do with something you made. The MIT, or BSD license, or some other very permissive license that doesn't set down restrictions are arguably different from copyright. But the GPL isn't the opposite of copyright. It's just has different terms of use.
No, public domain is the opposite of copyright. The GPL absolutely does give the author rights to dictate how people copy the software -- in fact -- even more so than many other open source licenses.
Copyright itself is arguably theft sponsored by the state, because information can naturally be freely used/shared by all of humanity. Creating property rights in information reduces the collective knowledge of humanity (the commons), because now information can't be shared.
The goal of the GPL and viral licensing is to undo copyright as such.
I don't agree with this maximalist approach because many forms of knowledge wouldn't be created without a financial incentive. But there's many niches in the economy where free software creates greater economic benefit than a proprietary solution.
> The goal of the GPL and viral licensing is to undo copyright as such.
This does not match my understanding. My understanding is that the goal of the GPL is to weaponize the copyright system to enforce copyleft. Many creators and supporters of the GPL do oppose IP laws (at least in their current form) but the goal specifically of the GPL isn't to destroy copyright, it's to weaponize it to accomplish higher purposes.
I dislike this framing. I was paid money for over a decade to write GPL'd code; I didn't do it as a gift. I release my code under the GPL for selfish reasons: I want others to be able to improve it, and me to be able to take advantage of their improvements. To me, it's not a gift, it's just the most efficient way to write software.
OP is not asserting that all GPL'd code is part of the "gift economy". I also wrote some GPLv2 code a large corp in the past, and I wouldn't consider it that, either. But projects like UBlock Origin that are run by volunteer contributors are very different.
You seem to be basing your rejection of "gift economy" as a label for the latter on the basis that it's not done for entirely altruistic purpose. But that is generally true of gift economies - most people who participate in them (and I'm not just talking of software here!) are not doing it out of purely altruistic motives, and actually expect to receive benefit from such an economy as well. Usually this is cultural, but some people, like you, might consciously believe that it's the most efficient way to distribute goods (whatever their definition of "efficient" might be).
you can work at a charity and still be paid, even though the "non-profit" moniker can confuse layman.
> I release my code under the GPL for selfish reasons: I want others to be able to improve it, and me to be able to take advantage of their improvements.
I suppose that metphor depends on what you think of community efforts. Like say, sharing a food recipe or a workout routine. I see see the framing as "giving it away". Even if your endgoal is an ultimately selfish search of "better recipe/routine to use".
One thing I see over and over again is that those with lower moral standards often seem to prosper. The saying cheaters never prosper has never seemed to hold true from what I have seen. Still I hold myself to a high standard in life even if I could get away with something I believe in morals. If I find a wallet I return it with all it's cash. Sadly if you have no morals you take the cash and come out ahead. My son last year had $900 in his wallet and dropped it. Returned with no money. I could never do that as I would be thinking that is someones rent money or bills or food for their family. The person with low morals however gets a new ps5 and some games or whatever else they wanted. I can only hope the person who took it was in a worse situation and paid their rent or something. Thankfully my son only learned a hard lesson and was not without food or rent or anything.
I think the "information want to be free" crowd is very consistent. They want the information to be free. They don't want artificial scarcity.
Sure they'll use IP as a means to an end, but that doesn't mean they believe IP is a good idea in general. It's just one of few tools that exist to solve it.
In an ideal world all software would be forced to be FOSS, and we'd have to come up with ways of funding it that aren't based on artificial scarcity.
It seems like a bit of a strong restriction to have in the law that if I distribute an executable (which people may reverse engineer, modify, redistribute as they wish) that I am obligated to provide the source code upon request.
Like, what if I want to release a rather difficult puzzle in the form of an obfuscated executable and provide a reward to the first person who solves it? If I’m required to release the source code upon request, then that kind of spoils the puzzle. (Sure, I can say that anyone who gets the source code this way is ineligible for the prize, but how could I tell?)
This is of course a somewhat silly and niche edge case. Still though, it doesn’t seem natural/appropriate for a law would prevent such a thing.
Whereas, agreeing to only distribute modifications I make to some software written by others if I’m willing to distribute the source code to my modifications, well, that would just be an agreement I would be making, and seems unobjectionable.
Though, I wouldn’t really claim that all IP is illegitimate. I think many IP protections go way too far and last too long, but, I think some amount of copyright and patents is probably a good idea, though for a much shorter duration. So maybe I’m not really in the camp being described.
I think the freedoms described in the GPL are good.
I guess one alternative could be to say that all software written “for a useful purpose” (or something like that) has to have the source code made available, and that could handle the puzzle case I mentioned?
It does seem important to avoid the case where one needs to use some software for something but is prevented from modifying it due to not having the source code.
So… maybe if one is only required to provide the source code if someone could reasonably be described as “needing” the software for something? (E.g. if you “need it in order to get your printer working”, or the like.)
The puzzle case is no different to how you can't sell somebody a rubiks cube without allowing them to "solve" it by taking it apart and putting it back together.
You can make a physical item intentionally hard to work with or modify, but I see that as a shortcoming of our current legal standard—that's why we need some kind of "right to repair" framework. Requiring people to distribute human-readable code alongside software follows the same underlying philosophy as physical "right to repair" requirements.
I wasn’t thinking forbidding them from decompiling it or anything. I don’t think any rights are violated if government doesn’t issue any further copyright protections (even though I don’t think this for the best).
I am not saying that the puzzle author should have any legal authority to restrict people from disassembling the puzzle.
I’m just saying that the government shouldn’t compel the puzzle designer to distribute disassembled versions of the puzzle.
If other people want to take apart their rubix cubes, they’re free to, I just shouldn’t be forced to help them take it apart.
A reasonable tradeoff to explore is that software ought to work like a halfway-point between copyright and patents: in exchange for an exclusive right to distribute your binaries for 10-15 years, you provide your documentation for how it works (including source code) so others can build on your work after the exclusivity period ends. The exclusive right does not cover the basic idea/independent implementations of the same functionality.
Potentially utilitarian software and creative software could be treated differently, e.g. have an escrow for games (for which user customizations are less important).
Obviously DRM to restrict user modifications is unethical and harmful toward functioning markets and should be illegal.
>Though, I wouldn’t really claim that all IP is illegitimate. I think many IP protections go way too far and last too long, but, I think some amount of copyright and patents is probably a good idea, though for a much shorter duration.
For what it's worth that's the camp I'm in as well, I'm just being a bit silly for the sake of argument.
They want other people's information to be free for them. I doubt very much that they want their professional work to be free to other people.
It takes a certain kind of insanity to think that it's feasible to spend millions of dollars writing software when your customers are all entitled to take it for free.
I’ve heard an argument that people / companies would still pay for custom development, like they do now. It is a pretty weak argument, but I do see the point.
Sure, custom development could still be a thing under such a framework because there is only a single potential user, but can you imagine how catastrophically expensive that would be? The business of software development would be absolute misery to work in as the core skill would be to write such convoluted, impenetrable, single use code at the pain of being put out of business by source code copiers. Software would be completely out of reach to most consumers and small businesses. Basically we would be back in the 70s where computing was only available to large enterprise.
I'm with you until the final sentence. From my perspective, that's the current state of software development. Hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript and "assets" for what could be a 60KiB bundle of HTML, or a 500KiB Win32 program.
Forgot the name, but it's a variant of Hawthorne's laws for computers. If tech gets faster, programs will work to fill that newfound space and performance. even if it's just a simple web text page.
But no one complains and it lets them ship faster. So not much will change here.
> But no one complains and it lets them ship faster
I think we’re past even that point by now. Not only the code we ship now is slow, it’s also harder to build and maintain, and expensive to run. I have no idea how we got here to be honest.
Yeah, the reality is, our industry produces a lot of garbage right now. That wouldn’t change.
Still, there are people who care about quality, and some of them also share their work with others. Those people would exist regardless of whether there is copyright or not. The only difference is, we won’t have LICENSE files anymore.
Things are often inconsistent however there are cases where something appears inconsistent but it is only lack of knowledge of observer that displays it as inconsistent. At least that is what I have learned today in some different matter (I was that observer).
If it isn’t the same people your observation is that some people say one thing about one topic and other people say something else about a completely different topic. That is like saying some people like elephants and other people speak Portuguese
Being fair these are semantically different meanings of “theft”.
1. Movie copyright is compared, by its owners and the law, to physical theft. This type of theft does not remove the physical use or any use from the owners.
2. GPL copyright only requires sharing changed code. Failing to disclose the changes actually does affect the owners in the way claimed.
They’re two different social contracts and we need different words for them. Honestly many social problems are like this.
right, infringement is not theft, and corporations are not people. Corporations are governments.
The corporation you probably thinking of right now is a small private government to run a for profit endeavor. But note that cities are also corporations.
Corporations are not 'people' as in 'natural persons', but they are 'persons', as in 'juridical person' -- as are trusts, estates, and other institutions.
Trusts etc. are mechanisms to move inheritance from personal law into corporate law. This lets you game the system as corporate privilege often handles this more gracefully than personal privilege(wills and inheritance).
Probably want to contact a lawyer for the nuances, but the thousand foot view is you create a corporation with yourself as chief officer, and others as backup officers. set your corporate law to make your backup officers useless until the death of the chief officer and strict guidelines as to how the backup officers are to manage corporate assets. then finally transfer assets to the corporation.
The point being, the thing that makes a corporation a corporation is its corporate law governing its members, thus the assertion that corporations are not people, they are governments.
> this community to say “copyright infringement isn’t theft” when we’re talking about movies
I wasn't aware there was this community standard. I explicitly disagree with it and I presume many others here would as well. The contradiction exists only in your one sided assertion.
I think the position is more nuanced. Once I've paid for the movie then breaking it's "copyright circumvention measures" so I may copy it or display it for my own purposes and reasons is neither immoral or illegal regardless of what hollywood or the law they paid for says.
I also think that Copyright terms being the life of the author are explicitly in violation of the Constitution, let alone, life plus some arbitrary term. These laws have fallen out of the service of the many and into the hands of the few.
There's a habit to "point out the contradiction" in these forums. I think it's almost always misguided.
Not saying I agree with infringing on copyright, but I don't think it's contradictory:
GPL: "The code must be shared"
Downloading/Pirating movies. "The movies should be shared"
I don't think people that people who believe in the GPL and pirate movies often do so because "pirating is the right thing to do", but one can certainly make the case that they share the same basic idea.
Individual pirates are rarely profiting from it. I'd wager most people who think pirating a movie is fine aren't cool with printing 1000 bluerays and hawking them at the flea market.
I once paid for a Plex share that initially was very convenient. Some free stream sites can be very slow and constant buffering. The plex share had high bandwidth connection and a huge library with content from basically all major streaming services at a great price so it was an easy buy. Plex started cracking down hard and it would disconnect way too often and require the guy setting it back up again which could take a half hour or a half a day so I ended up moving on.
I was paying for netflix until my kids could no longer watch from my house and my exwife's house. After that nonsense I just taught my kids how to find stuff for free.
I used to pirate all my games but now pay for all of it. I am trying to rack my head around why I stopped with games but having a hard time thinking of what made me change. For PC I just think it probably is risky running pirated software that may be malicious. For things like the switch well I have a older switch that can be fully modded but haven't due to not having the time to fully research all the ins and outs and not wanting my kids switch to be banned or something.
That is hypocrisy on the level of thinking buying drugs is ok but selling them is bad. You can argue about the severity of the behavior, but if you are drawing moral lines in the sand, buyer and seller are always on the same side.
They are different senses of the terms. In "copyright infringement isn't theft", "theft" is in the sense if car theft. In the title, "stolen" is in the sense of a stolen idea.
Copyright infringement, while it may be wrong, truely isn't akin to car theft. It is however akin to a stolen idea. A car theft deprives the rightful owner of the car, but they don't otherwise care that the thief now has a car. An idea theft doesn't deprive the thinker of the idea, but they care that the thief is benefiting from the idea without compensation. Yet they don't care if someone becomes aware of the idea, but keeps it to themself.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, whether it's about movies or source code.
I don't care about the movie industry, and don't care if they lose money. I don't care about the software industry or if they lose money.
I do care about information being freely available whether its in the form of movies or source code - it's in no way contradictory for me to want people locking up source code to be stopped from doing so while also wanting to see more torrenting. Copyright law is a tool - much like fire. I don't want my house to burn down, but I also don't want the fire in the furnace to go out... is it contradictory that i want to use fire to keep warm but not have all my possessions destroyed?
There are very many differences already pointed out, so to add an other one, there is a difference between a company doing something at scale and for profit, and a private person doing something for themselves.
The people in this community that says “copyright infringement isn’t theft” do not refer to copyright infringement where people exploit the work for-profit and put it out as their own (feel free to find a single occurrence to prove me wrong). The word plagiarism comes to mind, which is morally and (depending on country and circumstance) legally a bigger crime than copyright infringement. The legal system usually also recognize that exploitation done for-profit and large scale should be considered worse and punished harder.
You're missing the point of GPL-style licensed Open Source Software. It's a matter of copy_left_, vs copyright. The difference isn't comparing the rights of GPL software writers/publishers vs the rights of movie publishers.
It's about the idea that software (and, for many, all digital media) should be free. The GPL is designed to "infect" other projects, by forcing them to be free if the GPL code is included. It's using IP/copyright laws to combat profiteering in software (and, in the case of movies, Blender releases a GPL'd movie every few years).
It's the activists' FOSS license, unlike the MIT/BSD/Apache licenses, which are just the literal definition of Free and Open Source, no strings attached.
Yeah, they used the wrong word. No "stealing" of code is happening here. It's just infringement of someone's copyrights. Theoretically, they could be taken to court over it. In practice, courts are a rich corporation's game.
Copyright should not even exist to begin with. GPL is just there to try to use the system against itself by essentially forcing everything it touches to be public domain. GPL is barely above the copyright industry from a moral standpoint. That usually causes people to treat violations of it far more charitably. Nobody feels sorry for the trillion dollar copyright industry.
We live in a world where the same trillion dollar corporations who compare us all to high seas pirates who rape and burn will also engage in AI washing of copyrighted material at industrial scales. That's a far more interesting contradiction than what you're presenting and far more deserving of the people's indignation.
I guess the difference lies in ownership. If I pirate movies I won't claim that I own the rights to that movie. Can't really say the same when I have a product with stolen code.
“So you’re pro assault when somebody’s broken into your home at night, but suddenly anti assault when I want to punch your grandma?” Exaggerated but the same idea. Though people often communicate and maybe even internalize it in simplified “copyright bad” form, actual beliefs are much more contextual. The piracy debate would look a lot different if it weren’t literally millionaires demanding money from children.
Consider a homeless person stole from a food bank to sell the food to make money - and nowhere acknowledged where the food came from or that others can get the same food for free; and moreover claimed "this is fresh food I have meticulously sourced myself!"
Everyone from the foodbank to other homeless people would justifiably be furious at this scam artist when they learn more. That's the morally repugnant situation we find ourselves in with Honey.
Copyleft infringement is perhaps better thought of as stealing from a foodbank than government corruption.
Said on a forum where 99% of the posters are rich. When I see drivel like this it reminds me to be grateful that I wasn't born with the narcissistic delusion to believe that my behavior is privileged and morally superior to the same by others. The height of insanity is seeing yourself as the moral arbiter of the universe.
People are willing to let behavior slide when it aligns with their interests, but will call it out when the "other team" does it.
- Copyright abuse of games, movies, commercial software vs open source software
- Censorship of conservative speech vs censorship of liberal speech
- Genocide of one geopolitical entity vs another geopolitical entity
- Separation of church/state with mandated removal of religious symbols from students and government places vs freedom of religion with removal of LGBT symbols from students and government places
- Use of executive branch authority for [liberal goal] vs [conservative goal]
It's the same behavior on both sides, just different groups of people doing it.
>- Separation of church/state with mandated removal of religious symbols from students and government places vs freedom of religion with removal of LGBT symbols from students and government places
>It's the same behavior on both sides, just different groups of people doing it.
I'm actually curious to understand how you came to the conclusion that non-standard sexual and gender identities are equivalent to a religion to you.
I don't mean to start an argument here, but do you actually believe that endorsing a specific religion is the same as endorsing gay rights?
> I don't mean to start an argument here, but do you actually believe that endorsing a specific religion is the same as endorsing gay rights?
I'm LGBT and agnostic.
Schools banning crosses and the Swiss banning burqa are very similar to the LGBT flag removal in Michigan. It's all censorship to enforce the ideology you agree with.
A free society would do none of these things.
Instead we have two angry sides playing games to anger one another.
I don't follow your logic. We have separation of church and state. Having religious symbols displayed by publicly funded schools violates that principle and favors the displayed religion(s). Protecting everyone's right to religious freedom requires not favoring any specific religions. This is pro first amendment.
An LGBT flag is a symbol of support for people who are not cis and straight. It is not a religious symbol. It is not infringing on any individual's right to practice their own religion. This is pro first amendment.
Banning burqas is oppressing muslim students' right to practice their religion, and is anti first amendment.
The problem is that enforcement is unequal and always seems to benefit the rich over the creators.
If I use Photoshop's 1's and 0's and don't follow Photoshop's rules, I could be bankrupt and thrown onto the streets, dramatically decreasing my life expectancy, or locked up and legally enslaved by Tyson Foods.
If PayPal, an 85 billion dollar market cap figure that has monopolized a large amount of digital commerce, uses our 1's and 0's and don't follow our rules, we're laughed at, because we are not an 85 billion dollar market cap figure.
I expect you understand this on some level.
> - Censorship of conservative speech vs censorship of liberal speech
How so? There are many left aligned websites that remove conservative content, and many conservative websites that remove lefty content, many sites that allow both and many sites that remove both. Perhaps I misunderstood, apologies if so.
This isn’t the first time they’ve been accused of shady practices.
> MegaLag also says Honey will hijack affiliate revenue from influencers. According to MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer, Honey will then swap in its own tracking link when you interact with its deal pop-up at check-out. That’s regardless of whether Honey found you a coupon or not, and it results in Honey getting the credit for the sale, rather than the YouTuber or website whose link led you there.
Referral sniping is only a half of the scam. The other half is that Honey snipes the code even if they don't find a discount, and that companies pay Honey to prevent it from showing certain coupon codes. They pay for it because
1) thinking you got the best code when another one exists means they get ($best_discount - $honey_discount) more than they would had you actually searched
2) honey gives the false assurance that you are getting the best deal, making you more likely to complete the purchase
So Honey is both sniping referral codes and running a protection racket.
This is likely astroturf since they posted it twice, verbatim, in the same article [1], and it uses pretty standard PR deflections (e.g., "So are there some problems with the affiliate industry? Probably. But ...") without actually addressing the central claim.
Afaik the scam is honey telling users they find the best coupon but also letting shops dictate what coupons honey shows to the user. If I remember it right, the video also shows honey replacing the attribution cookie with its own even if it did not find any coupon
I heard that vague snippet from the podcast in the video. From my time in the affiliate space (which was a few years ago), Honey would not let merchants delete a code unless it was an employee or internal code. If it was publicly available, they refused to delete a code without providing an equivalent exclusive code. Maybe that policy has changed? If so, that's definitely bad, but I have no way to confirm that and I don't see any proof.
But they are allowed to claim attribution even if they don't find a coupon. Merchants know this when partnering with Honey. Most of the time, even if users don't find a coupon, they still get cash back which is funded through the commission.
Like I said, the affiliate industry is pretty wack and that's why I left it, but this is far from a scam.
Clearly users didn’t know that all this was going on. And neither did the social media influencers who promoted honey while being robbed by it.
If it were an honest business, honey wouldn’t have needed to hide what they did. (And lie about it on their website - where they claimed until recently that honey found you the best deals). Also if it were an honest business, nobody would be surprised or mad when it all came out. Honest businesses can just explain everything and people still want to do business with them!
What honey did doesn’t pass the pub test. It’s scummy.
Its not. I have had honey installed on a separate chrome instance (mainly use FF). I was not aware that the extension pulled this, otherwise I would have never used it. There are some creators I follow, whose advice I somewhat trust and I have used their affiliate links to purchase a product. I want that creator to get the commission because they sold me on the product, not honey.
Also, just because something is standard industry practice, doesn't somehow make this behaviour any less egregious.
I already agreed the affiliate industry has issues (and is part of the reason I left). If they switched to first-click or multi-click attribution, none of this would be a problem.
But I am just saying it's not a Honey problem, the blame is focused on the wrong place. If they want things to change, they should direct their rage at the companies who make the rules.
Of course people should blame honey for deciding to act unethically. If you’re actively looking for ways to get away with being a scumbag, you’re a scumbag. Crime isn’t the fault of the police or the parliament. Crime happens because someone wakes up and decides to commit a crime. Honey is the same. It’s nobody else’s fault that honey exists. Honey exists because someone found a legal way to steal money. Then they decided to do it.
Any system of rules will always have loopholes. It’s the mark of civilisation that people choose to act honourably even - and especially - when they could get away with being a dirtbag.
I watched the video and I am pretty sure that the rage is warranted at this time. There is plenty of context given: Honey and their browser extension is swapping out cookies and lying about it to the end user - it does not matter if "everyone else is doing it as well". It's bad and it needs to stop.
They don't just swap out everyone's cookies. They comply their the affiliate network's "stand down" policies. Which means they don't actively try to poach commissions in the same shopping session. These are terms everyone agrees to, including creators. If it's the next day, most merchants don't pay out for referrals older than 24 hours anyways.
So like I said, there are some legitimate problems with the affiliate industry, but the rage should be directed at the affiliate networks that dictate the terms. They could easily switch to first click attribution which would solve this problem.
You can replicate his same case and see for yourself. Click an affiliate link and go to checkout. Honey won't pop-up like normal.
He doesn't provide the context for what his timescale is for his specific case. He cites that it can be up to 30 days later and Honey will still take the commission, which is true, but most merchants don't honor any cookies that are older than a day anyways.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If he actually wanted to influence change, he should cover the affiliate networks responsible for dictating this behavior (CJ, Impact, Rakuten, Awin, etc). The extensions are forced to comply by their rules.
They were always a protection racket against retailers, and I haven't seen any proof that they started stuffing their affiliate code in 100% of the time only recently.
The racket is that they f*k with your campaigns by stealing codes typed by users of the extension, so even users who don't think they're sharing them end up sharing them with Honey. Imagine the fun when someone creates a valuable code for someone trusted and doesn't limit its usage sufficiently, and someone uses it on a Honey-infected machine. Now the whole Internet is getting a possibly loss-making discount!
Honey then contacts the business and says "Gee, wouldn't you like us to stop doing that? Just pay us 3% on every sale any of our tens of millions of users buy and we'll let you blacklist any codes you like!"
2 years before PayPal bought Honey. It's possible that the extension was fine at the time. Even if it had always been hijacking the referral codes, I wouldn't consider that a scam from the perspective of the users.
The fastest way is often to just run the "Strings" program on the software. Often it will dump out a bunch of strings that match those in the Open Source project: Error Messages, Logging messages, etc. Sometimes if they're really sloppy it'll spit out the name of the GPL program/library directly and a version number.
I often add magic arrays to my code. So.. if I find them in a binary blob...
Have there been any lawsuits involving breach of open source licences?
Suspecting users can try the software to see if it has the exact same functionality or bugs as the copied GPL library. This is of course not a definite proof, but some amount of rare enough coincidences can be considered as a very strong sign for copying. Legal measures can be taken on account of these evidences.
And of course there is always the option of a whistleblower.
Usually 'strings' on the binary shows up tell-tale signs.
Granted that means the 'smart' infringers are likely to slip through the sieve, but at that point they'll have to essentially be re-writing the code anyway, and lose most of the benefit that they'd get stealing the GPL code (they'd have to hand-roll any bug or security fixes back into their stolen-but-obscured GPL code)
Pretty much any (non-entry level) engineer at a decent software company knows what licenses to avoid. There are strict policies against the use of viral licenses along with training and automation to detect it, etc.
Also I don't think it's that easy to conceal and not sure any serious company would risk the liability.
Is he correct? That you can't have GPL files in your project without all code adhering to it? I thought it has to be linked static. So just calling a GPLed js library likely wouldn't be enough. I think the law is muddy here and not clear at all, even if the code is directly bundled.
There are multiple aspects here. In short, any kind of linking or equivalent process definitely makes your code a combined work with the GPL parts; the "safe" way of using the code are more like calling a GPL process like `system("ls -l")`.
First, if you are distributing modified code or code compiled from GPL sources, in any way, you must advertise that fact clearly, and extend an offer to the original sources plus your compilation methods to anyone who recieves this from you. This is true regardless of whether your work constitutes a combined work.
Then, if you are distributing a work that includes GPL parts and parts that you don't want to release under the GPL, you have to check specifically how the GPL parts are used. The relatively safe boundary is calling GPL binaries as separate processes, especially over a network - if this is the only way you are using the GPL code, it's probably OK to keep your other parts under an incompatible license.
If you are using the GPL parts any more closely, such as calling functions from a GPL library directly through an FFI, or worse, linking to that library, then you are almost certainly building a combined work and all of your own code has to be released under the GPL if you wish to distribute the GPL parts.
Even if you are calling the code only as a separate process, the amount and type of communication you use matters - if you are exchanging extremely complex and specific data structures with the GPL process, rather than just a few command line switches and parsing some yes/no answer, then your work may still constitute a combined work and have to be entirely distributed under the GPL.
GPL is called a viral license. Any project that you add GPL code to must be licensed under GPL (and made available to others under the GPL guidelines). That's why many commercial companies don't include GPL code - see Apple.
LGPL is typically meant for code packaged as a standalone library called from other, possibly non-GPL, code. You can distribute and call LGPL code from your code but your code does not have to be GPL/LGPL-licensed.
I believe the intent of LGPL was to have free LGPL versions of libraries where only popular non-LGPL libraries existed before. Any changes made to LGPL source code must be released under the usual LGPL/GPL guidelines, i.e. you can't make changes to LGPL code, release it in your project, yet keep the changes to yourself.
What Apple does not ship is GPLv3 code. GPLv3 had two major changes around patents and "tivoization". The tivoization clause in particular forces changes that break Apple's security model for their hardware, and is probably the core reason they do not ship GPLv3 software.
Note that the anti-tivoization provisions only apply to software that is sold with the hardware. If Apple wanted to use GPLv3 software in apps that you have to purchase separately the anti-tivoization provisions would not be a problem.
This points to one area of Apple's use of GPL code. Apple doesn't want code licensed under GPL v3+ so they're sticking with the GPL v2 codebase (and custom-backporting bugfixes?). Apple uses Bash v3.2, GNU Bash is at v5.2.
GCC was replaced with LLVM in Xcode 4.2, and GDB was replaced with LLDB in Xcode 4.5 and GDB removed in Xcode 5.0. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode
If the GPL code is an integrated part of your code, then you've created a derivative work, a "work based on the Program" as the GPL calls it. In this case your work must also be licensed as GPL.
>5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.
>You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
>[...]
>c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
It seems to be the case here since, as the top comment by RraaLL says, they've included GPL-licensed JavaScript from uBO in their extension.
I think you might be thinking of the LGPL, where it’s fine to use a piece of code if you dynamically link to it (and maybe something about providing relinkable object files, but I’m not too clear about that). The GPL, on the other hand, mandates that any code that interacts with GPL’d code must be GPL’d, unless it can be easily replaced or such and such (i.e. your non GPL code calls a GPL binary via fork & exec or the like).
I’m not an expert in this sort of thing, so a more knowledgeable person may chime in.
But if you create a plugin that calls (via mv2 api?) a separate GPL-licensed JavaScript file to block all ads on the page, and then use your own closed-source code to add your own ads in step 2, is it really integrated or just two separate programs bundled together?
The mere act of communicating with other programs does not, by itself, require all software to be GPL; nor does distributing GPL software with non-GPL software. However, minor conditions must be followed that ensure the rights of GPL software are not restricted. The following is a quote from the gnu.org GPL FAQ, which describes to what extent software is allowed to communicate with and be bundled with GPL programs:[74]
What is the difference between an "aggregate" and other kinds of "modified versions"?
An "aggregate" consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are non-free or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights that each program's individual license would grant them.
Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.
By contrast, pipes, sockets, and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.
The FSF thus draws the line between "library" and "other program" via 1) "complexity" and "intimacy" of information exchange and 2) mechanism (rather than semantics), but resigns that the question is not clear-cut and that in complex situations, case law will decide.
I don’t know about that hypothetical case, but from what the redditors are saying, it looks like the Honey team are directly including and calling upon the GPL’d code, which I’d say constitutes derived work.
For that specific hypothetical, I’d say it would function as a derived work, but others would be able to answer better.
To be fair, Honey could easily bypass the blocklist redistribution legal issue by downloading filter lists at runtime from the official source. Then they aren't redistributing the resources.
Update: It looks like they're also using code from uBO without attribution or authorization. That's most likely illegal.
I would be careful handing out legal advice as a non-legal expert, especially when it is about "bypassing legal issues". You might be doing someone a big disservice.
@readers: Obligatory notice: Don't base your business decision on random internet comments.
It's fine and good to disagree with/challenge wrong comments. But you don't need to do this meta commentary cautioning the mere act of commenting. If Sephr is wrong, just say that!
Ok. You are right. I think he is likely wrong, but I'm not a lawyer either. Just someone who researched this a lot for my own projects/company.
If that was true, all user-side aggregations would be considered as separate projects.
I think it might be possible to circumvent the GPL license, when the URL to the list would be user-configurable and the program also worked without the list.
If any software ever deserved being sued into non-existence it is the Honey browser extension, and any other scam software they turn out (Pie Adblock in this case).
I've seen a few ads from them on YouTube promoting their ad blocker, specifically touting that it gets around YouTube's efforts to block ad blockers.
I thought it was interesting that YouTube, in the midst of trying to crack down on ad blockers, allows ads promoting an ad blocker that is specifically claiming to evade that crackdown.
Your comment implicitly absolves PayPal of responsibility.
One thief sold to another , it is like credit card lists or botnets are sold on the dark web .
PayPal is hardly innocent here , they knew what they were getting into , this is the core business model of not just honey but all of the coupon sites.
From what I've gathered, honey basically replaced affiliate codes with their own and then gave the user part of the commission back? Is there something they did that users should be unhappy about?
It seems the voucher codes they 'find' are not the result of them searching the Web.
They are simply codes provided by partnered businesses and may be beaten by codes you can get by searching yourself.
If true, then this is them outright lying to the user.
And you know, if they don't find a coupon code for you, one might still be at least a little annoyed that the original 'salesman' didn't get their affiliate commission; it instead being pinched by another.
I think in addition to the coupon thing, they had/have some cash back points? In any case, as someone who filters affiliate links, I can't understand why anyone would want to preserve them. Making them useless by having the user's browser automatically inject one seems like an awesome feature and a great social good, even without the user getting part of it. Affiliate programs are a direct cause of a lot of the spam on the web.
It should bother you if 10-30% of your price went to whoever last got you to click on a link.
Yeah, they pass on 80 cents of the $35 commission they get from Nord VPN when they hijack someone else's affiliate link. And it's 80 cents in "points." So you have to spend more to even use those.
It's a scam in partnership with the on-line shops. The consumer loses, the reviewer using affiliate links loses, and it turns out the extension goes further by occasionally making up discounts that don't exist (this will be in the next video it seems), so the seller gets screwed, too!
Well some people actually do believe in giving credit to the person who helped them make an informed purchase. I have gone into a store and had a worker spend like 20 minutes showing me things. I wasn't ready to buy but when I was and came back I had another worker try and help me but said to them the other worker spend a lot of time helping the other day I would like to buy it through them and was sorry.
This video is just rage bait and weaponizing creators and their fans by singling out Honey and not providing any additional context. Anybody in the affiliate industry knows how last click attribution works. This isn't new or specific to Honey. CapitalOne Shopping, Rakuten, RetailMeNot...they all work the same way. Merchants partner with these shopping extensions knowing how they work, nobody forces them to do so.
The affiliate networks (CJ, Impact, etc) are the ones who determine what attribution method to use, shopping extensions just comply. The vast majority of shopping sessions don't have any prior attribution and merchants fund all of these commissions (nothing is taken from a creator or a user). Yeah, it does seem like the codes Honey has have gotten worse in recent years, probably just a consequence of PayPal acquiring them and not giving it any attention (and layoffs). But the example MegaLag points out of finding a better code on a coupon website DOES THE SAME THING AS HONEY (overides the attribution).
So are there some problems with the affiliate industry? Probably. But calling Honey a "scam" seems completely unfair and lacks critical thinking. It's saved me thousands of dollars over the years.
It is personal to creators because honey paid a lot of them generously over the years to work with .
It is not the industry is shady that made honey standout, it is the fact that they were paying the people to pick from their own pockets is what got YT creators railed up.
It is being singled out, because without that heavy creator promotion they wouldn’t have grown anywhere close to the size they were last month. They have already last 3+ millions on Chrome web store in December .
No other coupon company has been valued or sold at 4 billion honey was, it is by far the largest and most successful. It is not uncommon for largest player to get the most scrutiny even though others do the same
Couldn't agree more, fellow authentic consumer! As a completely real person with no vested interests, I must say this resonates with my genuine, unprompted experience. Thank you for sharing your totally unscripted thoughts!
This but unironically. Why would an authentic consumer care whether the right shill gets paid, and be upset that instead some other party does and they get a discount or cash back?
Do all of the upset people work in ads or ad-adjacent industries or something? Are the "influencers" (i.e. propagandists) trying to manufacture outrage and make it seem like normal people care? Please think of the spammers!
I consider myself pretty normal, and I care, just because... I dunno, I appreciate honesty? Especially in our modern world where it increasingly feels like every individual person and every company is out to fuck every other person/company for every last nickel and dime they can manage? And like, this is pretty scummy. If I get sent towards a given product because someone I follow recommends it, yeah I want that person getting their pay for that. I don't give a shit how little it is. They were approached or they approached this company, offered to rep the product, did the work and showed it, and clearly they did a good job, because I watched it and used their link.
Like I don't particularly like sponsored segments, but I know why they exist: because ad revenue on YouTube is fickle and pretty shit, and I enjoy the creators I follow and want them to keep making stuff, and making stuff costs some combo of time and money. So yes, I want the creator to get that.
I think most normal people would vibe on this train of logic. I don't view and never have viewed business, including my own, as a cutthroat competition between me and everyone else. I view it as mutuality of purpose. I offer my work, and people who need stuff done that I can do, give me money. I think if the broader markets had an attitude like that instead of chasing every last penny at every single intersection, then we'd live in a better world.
A paid "recommendation" is dishonest to begin with, and is taking advantage of misplaced trust/parasocial relationships. An honest relationship would involve asking viewers/readers/listeners to support them directly.
I offer my work for money. I don't work for free and tell clients "hey you should support me by using AWS (who will give me kickbacks) for your infrastructure." The conflict of interest is fundamental to such an arrangement, even if disclosed. Instead my employer pays me for my expertise and I do my best to give them my honest, unbiased experience/opinions/analysis. I'm explicit about the boundaries of my knowledge/experience.
Case in point: these "influencers" obviously did not do any due diligence on what this program was doing. They "recommended" something they didn't understand because they were paid to do so. If this were "merely" stealing user information (the monetization method someone else in the thread said they assumed), would there be controversy? What exactly did the people who recommended this thing think it was going to do to the people who installed it? That's the actual story here (though it should be unsurprising).
The problem is that beyond stealing the affiliate rev, which might matter if you actually like the person (like project farm for me), Honey is in bed with merchants and will give negligible discounts or nothing depending what the store wishes. The whole "scrapping the internet for coupons" is practically speaking a lie. Also even if you don't give a shit, reduced affiliate revenue means that creators are more likely to sponsor in-video, which is annoying if you don't know about sponsor block.
For me is mostly the same the disgust when I discovered that hyperparasitoid wasps exist.
Obviously the correct solution is to spread the word about ublock and sponsorblock (and perhaps adnauseum) too. Help contribute to a better society by making advertising a less viable way to make money. If something is worth paying for, pay for it. Push the incentives toward honest practices. Don't white knight when shills play themselves.
Well, 95% of people on HN know about uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock, so why are you telling me to preach to the choir instead of saying my original point? I was making fun of how GP sounds exactly like a PR person, not saying that affiliate marketing is good for society. Even if you're a hardliner against advertising, you can recognize that not literally everyone is a shill (e.g., most metric-based reviewers). And even if it's harmful at a societal level that some random YouTuber discussing a movie also shills dropshipped razors, you wouldn't say that mugging them is actually good.
It's like crypto - it's environmentally harmful and facilitates ransomware with minimal benefits, but I wouldn't be okay with someone showing up in the comments saying it's totally fine to steal someone's shitcoins with malware (though laughing about it is fine). It seems that you wanted to make a point about the post itself and used my comment as a launching point, which is fine, but don't accuse me of white knighting.
Your behavior in this thread is spammy and your perspective boils down to "everyone in the industry ratfucks creators, so the video is ragebait". Why do you feel compelled to defend clearly unethical behavior?
Except honey does not clarify that it replaces the referral link anywhere. The vast majority of shopping sessions do not have attribution, so adding attribution to them would just drive prices higher for regular users, damaging both users and the sellers.
It could lead to lower prices if they are indeed replacing referrals. Supposing the retailers notice that this is a huge affiliate, basically understand what's happening, and negotiate a smaller commission for these programs (they obviously have a lot of negotiating power since they aren't really getting referrals and could just ban these programs, destroying them), they might have a lower overall cost.
I imagine people running affiliate programs have heard of rakuten, for example, so I suppose they have some reason they haven't banned it (i.e. it actually benefits them/lowers overall costs).
This cost would lead that less creators would participate in the referral program. Because the only criteria to participate is how much money they get from it. Though, maybe a good thing, I am tired with all the tech reviews glorifying new stuff, like it is an ad all the way. The good sign if reviewer has a ref link is that the review is probably optimized to be the last place you visit before making a purchase.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If he actually wanted to influence change, he should cover the affiliate networks responsible for dictating this behavior (CJ, Impact, Rakuten, Awin, etc). The extensions are forced to comply by their rules.
> I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem.
You didn’t just say that. You said a whole lot of other things. You lead with the fact that it’s well known within the industry. The implication of your comment is that the companies did nothing wrong, and people are idiots for not knowing this stuff before. If that’s not your stance, you should make your stance more clear.
If you instead simply said “people should also be angry at all these other extensions and companies, they’re complicit and just as bad” then nobody would be calling you out for astroturfing.
People should also be angry at all these other extensions and companies, they’re complicit and just as bad. But the source of change needs to come from the affiliate networks, who dictate the rules.
The source of change should come from influencers - who shouldn’t promote this stuff. From honey, who shouldn’t steal money, lie about their business practices and steal people’s code. And it should come from Google and Firefox who allow extensions like this in their stores. And from consumers who install this crap.
> So are there some problems with the affiliate industry? Probably. But calling Honey a "scam" seems completely unfair and lacks critical thinking.
It is a scam. It’s an industry wide scam. Calling it out is important because it’s the calling out of shady practices which puts pressure on industries and people to change.
Unfortunately, nothing will actually change from the inside. This industry is rotten to the core, and companies will continue to exploit users and other companies as long as they can profit from it. It's not like PayPal Honey was some obscure company with no visibility. PayPal knew damn well what they were buying and how the company operates.
The only way this could change is if the tech industry is hit with strict regulations. But considering that governments are technically incompetent, and that they're either in symbiosis or plain bought out by Big Tech, this has no chance of happening. Especially in the US, where any mention of regulation is met with criticism even from consumers, and where Musk will be taking the reigns for the next 4 years.
Once this "scandal" blows over and consumers forget about it, PayPal Honey will either continue to exist, or will rebrand as a different company in the same industry, operating the same way it does now.
As for influencers: it's hilarious that you think any positive change could come from them. They only care about getting paid, and could promote anything that lands in their inbox. Hell, they're often the ones who scam their own audience. We're decades away from regulating that whole mess.
I imagine you'd get farther with your arguments if you started with those parts instead of what sounded like a full-throated defense of one bad actor by claiming they're forced to be bad by circumstances.
Don't hate the player, hate the game is fine if you say it up front. If you leave it for a comment buried down below you just look like a shill to all the people that read only one or two levels deep.
Minor quibble with the linked complaint: the GPL doesn’t require you to post source code, it just requires that you have to provide it when asked, and only to people using your software. (But you’re not allowed to restrict anything they do, like repost it.) Just follow the whole Redhat / CentOS drama for exhibit A in this behavior.
It works. The only reason I knew what Honey was because so many Podcasters and Youtubers have advertised it on their content. I have never used it, but I recognized the name and knew what it does.
In case you missed the news, it doesn't work the way it was advertised.
Honey _does not_ scour the web for discount codes. Honey instead partners with webpages to provide you a discount code (or not) with the advantage for the webpage being that less people will use a 30% discount code and instead use Honey's 10%.
Of course the really funny part was that basically none of the influencers did due diligence on their counter-party and Honey also took all of the influencer's affiliate money as well.
They do crowdsource discount codes from other users which is how you get internal discount codes used for testers leaked to other users.
I think this is a facilitation of theft, though the theft is hidden to the user so the user does not possess criminal intent while using the code. I’m not sure how illegal it is but it is clearly wildly unethical.
There is no theft as long as the “testers” or whoever are voluntarily installing Honey. The T&C of installing Honey surely includes the right for Honey to see and share the discount codes.
It should be incumbent on Honey to check if these discounts are indeed public. 100% discounts would be an obvious place to start. Given that Honey claims to search the public internet for discounts according to their claims they can in fact do this.
At the scale and resources of Honey the claim of ignorance becomes unreasonable. It would help their case if they had a made a documented good faith attempt, but I think due to the obvious nefarious nature they would have avoided collecting such data because they wanted to continue the practice.
But as mentioned, I’m not sure how illegal it is despite the TOS but it’s clearly wildly unethical.
Just because the user agrees to Honeys T&C does not mean the user has the right to share the coupon in that manner. The coupon originating company did not give the user the coupon with permission to share.
If it was a printed coupon and photocopied it would be obviously illegal, I’m not sure how the digital equivalent would not be illegal. If such a coupon was publicly available then it would be like if honey went and fetched you a new coupon instead of copying an existing one.
Even if the user says they have the right it doesn’t mean they do, and at what point does it become handling stolen goods. Consider a scrap dealer accepting a clearly stolen catalytic converter, would that still be illegal if the scrap dealer did not pay for it? How ‘clearly stolen’ would it have to be to be illegal. What is a reasonable amount of verification?
The original post I responded to mentioned “testers”, presumably employees of the business, and therefore, this would be an employee insubordination problem for the employer to deal with, if the employee shares something they should not.
> Consider a scrap dealer accepting a clearly stolen catalytic converter
Why? I don’t see where the claim is being made that Honey/Paypal is accepting clearly stolen coupon codes.
As mentioned, if honey did a reasonable amount of verification that the coupon could rightfully be shared for some definition of reasonable they could make the case for innocence. They should be able to provide evidence of this.
There are external testers as well as many other reasons to issue one off coupons to third parties. So the presumption that an employee of the company has permission to act as an agent of a company does not apply in such cases.
They ask the user first. That's all they need to do. "Do you have the right to share this? Great, let's go!" That's plenty. If you're asking them to do more, you're wildly out of touch with how any of this works.
You could argue the law is in effect determined by what you can get away with. They could argue that what they did it’s industry standard and therefore reasonable. This is usual slap on a wrist, pay a fine, and force employees to watch some ethics videos territory. Perhaps some donations to local politicians directly or transitively via lawyers.
Consider if I ran a file upload site, someone uploads The Lion King, my software asks them if they have the right to give this to me to distribute, they say yes, I then distribute the upload to many other users who pay me for it. Honey is paid in a round about way but they are still paid.
There is a special holding out as an agent rule where if the uploader was in fact a Disney employee and stated that they acting on the behalf of Disney give you this right. That could get the distributor out of trouble a few times, but on an industrial scale the distributor would lose reasonable tests which are the tests made at the civil court level.
> Why would it be incumbent on Honey, or illegal at all? It is a voluntary transaction by two businesses.
There are three businesses involved. A 3rd party (eg YouTube reviewer) has their affiliate code stripped from the page, and as a result is losing out on income. That may be illegal. And the affiliate doesn’t have a business relationship with honey. They didn’t sign anything away with them.
Also honey was (until recently) marketing themselves as “we find you the best coupon code”. That was & is false advertising, since they were clearly hiding coupon codes they knew about when companies paid them to do so.
> And the affiliate doesn’t have a business relationship with honey. They didn’t sign anything away with them.
Sure but the affiliate (influencer) has an agreement with said business and another affiliate (honey) has an agreement with same said business. It'll be interesting to see if Honey's agreement allows them to do this.
Can even think of it just like HN. You and I don't have an agreement with HN that lets use edit other user's posts. This doesn't mean somebody can't edit other user's posts.
Yes, possibly a huge difference. If they provided legitimate work and contributed to the project, with diligence and respect for the licensing, and respectfully, transparently, honestly ran with some sort of referrals / adshare type program for monetization, it would almost be respectable.
What they did was out themselves as garbage humans, with laziness, antisocial grifting, disrespect for the law, and general unpleasantness at every possible level. It'd be difficult to be worse people without adding murder or violence to the mix.
I would never install anything advertised on youtube. Not claiming that I'm an elitist, but the audience on youtube would not have the ability to differentiate between a chocolate bar and a landmine.
Not sure where to start here. You could have found Honey advertised basically anywhere on the internet, not just YouTube. YouTube users are common across most of the developed world at this point, so it's probable that there are millions of YouTube users that are more intelligent than you or me. And what you said implies you do differing levels of due diligence for the services you sign up for depending on the platform you heard about them from, which is ill advised; regardless of where one found out about Honey, you should have questions about how their business works. Someone who has been around the block a couple times would have deduced that a business that clips coupons for you is doing something to make money, and since it's not obvious what that thing is, it's almost certainly something shady.
After what happened with Honey, I guess this probably means: they replace ads on pages with their own, pocket most of the money, and extort the sites who would have earned money with the ads into partnering with them.
Looks like they sold in 2020 for $4Bn, and both founders left two years later in March 2022. One founder started Pie, which basically seems like Honey with a slightly different angle. The other founder became a VC.
I really wish PieAdblock was in the article headline, since it's more relevant.
"UBlockOrigin GPL code stolen by Pie Adblock Extension and Honey team"
Of course Pie is scummy, it is brought to you by the people behind Honey.
In addition to stealing GPL Source the new over-hyped Adblocker that probably also steals (silently rewrites in the background) affiliate links, just like the old "coupon finder". No surprises!
The developers of the misused code can sue for breach of copyright. The people in breach in this case have money and are worth going after if there are a reasonable number of copies of the code illegally distributed.
Is there a better option to Honey? The extension has saved me a good bit of money over the years, especially on newer and independent sites that sometimes offer deep discounts for your first order. But it does seem like the coupon codes come from the community and there should be a community version of the extension.
I'd rather get 10% off automatically instead of 15% off if I have to spend 30 minutes on every single purchase trying dozens of dead codes from various sites. It being automated is the entire point.
I don't think you can copyright lists of publicly available information (iirc there was some case with phone numbers before).
That being said, they also stole code...
> For Zeidenberg's argument, the circuit court assumed that a database collecting the contents of one or more telephone directories was equally a collection of facts that could not be copyrighted. Thus, Zeidenberg's copyright argument was valid.[1] However, this did not lead to a victory for Zeidenberg, because the circuit court held that copyright law does not preempt contract law. Since ProCD had made the investments in its business and its specific SelectPhone product, it could require customers to agree to its terms on how to use the product, including a prohibition on copying the information therein regardless of copyright protections.
Moreover, it doesn't seem like static linking to me.
A similar example would be using a GPLv3 licensed JavaScript library in a website. What it implies to other HTML/JS/CSS code is controversial [0]. The FSF actually believed that they should not be "infected" [1], and the legal implications may need to be tested in court.
The FSF question is about templates, but the chrome extension in question also seems to have copied nontrivial JS.
I don't think chrome extensions can be modified by the user; there's probably some integrity check. So to be GPL compliant they need to publish source files to rebuild the extension?
Right, or: maybe. Depends on where you are (or maybe better: where they are), and whether data collections fall under copyright or some other protection that is translateable enough for the gpl to apply. But if they really also used code that point is moot.
The author of UBlockOrigin should contact the PayPal legal department (in a legal manner). That might be a more direct path dealing with the Honey business.
Money has nothing to do with it. The justification for piracy has always been that the original work is still there, so it's not considered theft.
Not only is the original GPLd code still there, the owner of that code didn't have the money in their pocket, so nothing was actually 'stolen'.
It's why I support using GPLd code in proprietary applications. This team just got sloppy and copy/pasted. They should have hired me and I would have made it virtually untracable.
The bad pushes out the good until you’re only left with bad.
A system that tolerates bad actors like this will in time only have bad actors. It’s tolerated because it makes a large amount of money for a small number of people.
This is exactly it. When things are horrible around us, there is a strong temptation to throw ones hands up in apathy and let the rot fester. "Eh, Honey is probably selling my data but I got $5 off my new mattress, so wtv".
We need to resist that call to apathy, stop acquiescing, and start demanding better of others. That, incidentally, often starts at demanding better of ourselves.
I work for a very large company. I'm very close to throwing my hands up in apathy because the company keeps throwing the teams in our area into chaos and disarray with little regard for the humans in them.
We have no investors to answer to. We're printing money. Yet at every opportunity company leadership reveals itself as this slavering beast where the only people in positions of power have gotten there through duplicity and a lack of empathy.
The tech job market is terrible. I'm trapped in the guts of a machine that was supposed to be one of the "good ones".
I'm not sure there's anything to do for people who want to act ethically and be decent to each other if even the "good" companies show a complete lack of regard for anything but making their profits take off into the stratosphere.
I disagree that it’s down to the individuals. While individuals can throw themselves into the gears of the machine it is understandable why they do not.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
Absolutely! I think this was kind of what OP was driving at with the suggestion to "start demanding better of others." It doesn't work to expect they should do better from their own motivation, we need to fix the broken incentives and consequences that result in those bad decisions being attractive.
While I agree with that ideal I’m not sure how realistic it is. Trump was elected on a populist platform and quickly betrayed his base again, this time before he has even taken office. What are people to do, vote harder? It’s not like Kamala would have fixed this either. If Kamala had a better chance of winning the ‘Tech Titans’ wouldn’t have switched teams. They would have done anything the government asked for so long as the scamming ad revenue kept flowing.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
The US is rife with scams and has been for a long time, and the US has had the two party system for a long time. It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this time 4 more years of Democrat rule would have been when the they finally decide to actually do something about it.
> I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
‘We’ are animals who have evolved to be a certain way. You could maybe at tremendous effort fix one person but you cannot fix a population. Ever try to get an alcoholic to quit drinking, a junkie to quit drugs, a gambling addict to quit gambling.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
Unfortunately the "first past the post" system used in the USA and UK are effectively a form of prisoner's dilemma. The best thing to do is for everyone to not vote for one of the two oligarchy parties, but if only a small number do that it's meaningless.
It does and yet this seems to highly simplifying things.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
That's not apathy, that's not caring and, frankly, there's nothing wrong with that.
You and I value our privacy but most people don't. That's the truth. The tone of your post assumes people agree with you but, clearly, most people don't.
This. Allowing bad actors to participate in a system allows them to externalize costs, which makes them more competitive than good actors. In human relationships, this behavior is punished by excluding bad actors from social relationships (i.e. the "no assholes" rule).
That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
The main solution is regulation, oversight, and legal action, but the first two of these are unlikely to be enacted in the US in the current political climate. The Biden administration made some steps towards stronger regulation (e.g. by putting Lina Khan in control of the FTC), but received little to no political benefit from it and probably harmed fundraising for the Democrats.
Legal action is often prevented by arbitration clauses or disparate funding, where it is financially untenable to restrain bad actors using legal action.
> That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
I mean laws are supposed to stop the bad actors but at this point the extreme cost of legal action and the street-crime fixation of police forces mean those laws don't constrain wealthy interests unless they harm other wealthy interests.
Protects and does not bind vs bind but does not protect. Same as always.
How do you propose a company like Honey should make a profit without deception and scams?
Their product is supposedly: install a FREE extension and you get discount codes applied for you at retailers when you check out.
It turns out they were able to be profitable by making themselves the affiliate every time you purchase something, but that's scammy because it's stealing from others who actually generated the referral.
But what other non-scammy business model could they have? There's basically no business model for what they're trying to offer that makes sense other than end-users paying for it.
I propose Honey should not make money. There is, in fact, no right to make money by doing whatever you want. Honey should lose massive amounts of money and be shut down. Theft is not a business model that needs to be protected.
Why do you assume they are always stealing a referral from somebody? Do you think everything people buy comes from a prior affiliate link? Yes, Honey makes money from affiliate commission. That money is funded by the merchants who voluntarily choose to partner with Honey. How is that scammy?
In the rare case there is a prior referral, yes last click attribution comes into play. But that's the same for every shopping extension (Rakuten, Capital One, etc). The extensions have to comply with the affiliate network's "stand down" policies, which means they can't just automatically pop-up and actively try to poach the commission if it's within the same shopping session. And they all comply. MegaLag focuses on a very niche case of going back to the merchant in the same month.
Source: I worked in the affiliate industry for a few years
I don't know anyone over there anymore, just a few people back before they were acquired, from when I worked in the industry. I'm just trying to provide an industry perspective.
If I understood MegaLag's video correctly, Honey was indeed overriding an affiliate session cookie with their own once the user the reached the checkout. The extension would silently open a tab in the background, which seems pretty scummy. I've observed the same background tab shenanigans with the Capital One extension as well.
They do this to not interrupt the purchase flow, not to be scummy. Opening a tab in the foreground or refreshing the page is extremely annoying to users and merchants request it to be in the background so it doesn't hurt their conversion.
I never said Honey doesn't override cookies. I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If the affiliate networks used first-click or multi-click attribution, none of this would be an issue.
Yet another defense of these practices, it's almost as if you're not sincerely trying to put blame in the right place as you've said in other comments on this story but rather defending the whole evil industry like a shill.
> Why can't people just run businesses decently without deception & scams?
1 - Because investors are now the customer. There is no incentive to solve a problem or provide a product for end-users, only to funnel money to investors. That is the business model.
2 - The attention economy is run entirely on deception. Without solving someone's problem, the best option is to keep their attention and prevent them realizing they don't need a subscription. Literally addicting people to notifications and scrolling.
My understanding from consumer branding research is that consumers have a strong preference for established brands. The average person is much more interested in drinking Coca-Cola than Neo-Cola, even if Neo-Cola is said to taste just as good, and offers a 10% discount.
If you assume that purchasing decisions are also affected by scandals -- which would make sense -- then the overall consumer purchasing algorithm could be summarized as "buy whichever brand has existed for the longest period of time without a scandal". So businesses are rewarded for minimizing their scandal rate.
Top story on HN today:
"Since we launched PlasticList, we’ve been heartened to have quite a few food companies reach out and ask for help interpreting their results and tracking down and eliminating their contamination." https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1874884925587087434
Warren Buffet said:
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
"Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless."
And also:
"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient."
Overall, I think there's a case to be made that doing the right thing is actually the most profitable strategy in the long term. It's not flashy, but it works.
Many businesses can be profitable without deception, but can Honey in particular can be profitable without deception? I'm not so sure. It seems like they have been deceptive about their core business from the start.
some people have a substantially lower bar for personal ethics. "why can't people..." what you and I consider to be normal is not even on some people's radar.
Most do, but the scammers and hustlers often win. When you're scamming and hustling you don't have to do the real work, which means you can spend 100% of your time and energy marketing and you win there.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future of open source. A lot of people are going to give up on it as it becomes clear that it's just free labor for SaaS companies and hustlers. That and I expect far more supply chain attacks in the future. I'm quite surprised there haven't been a lot more like the attempted XZ poisoning... yet. Or maybe there have been and we haven't caught them.
Edit: I forgot free training data for code writing AI. It's that too.
OSS is one of the Internet's last remaining high trust spaces. It'll be dead soon like all the others. The Internet is a dark forest.
I get all kinds of free open source and contribute. I don't care that people or big corps make money off my contributions.
I get linux for free, an entire OS. Tons of giant companies contribute to it. I get llvm and clang mostly paid for by giant companies. I get python, go, node paid for by giant companies. I get free hosting for open source projects and free CI (github) paid for by giant companies. I get free frameworks (React, Flutter). Free languages, free libraries, etc...
My open source is just part of that. Contributing back to all the free stuff I get, much of it from giant companies.
My general belief is that you can be a millionaire by acting ethically, but you can’t be a billionaire. Lots of people motivated by money want to be billionaires.
And in this case it worked, PayPal acquired Honey for $4 billion in cash. I can't say I'm surprised to learn that the founder is also very into Web3. Crypto is a grifter magnet.
I know one billionaire. He's third generation to run a investment / hedge fund firm that is super secretive. Can barely find him on google, just a few articles about his dad and granddad. They quietly played the financial system for 7 decades and the fourth son will soon take over, but all he seems to do is travel because their employees do all the work. I've learned there are hundreds of billionaires that play this quiet financial-machine game and do everything in their power to remain anonymous. To the first order they are "ethical" because they follow the law, but when you can write the laws that define the financial system by funding congresspeople to insert obscure legislation that no one but financial experts can comprehend, it is very hard to explain exactly what is unethical in a way that your typical Cletus-like voter can understand (hell, I have no effing clue so I should go easy on Cletus).
You're right though, centimillionaires feel entitled to become billionaires, and billionaires feel entitled to become centibillionaires. However, I have noticed that the decimillionaires I know are aware that they still aren't in the right lane to even think that way and are largely content.
(wow, you're getting downvoted, the little boys on the site sure are a jealous bunch.)
Because we, as a society, have decided that lying should be effectively mandated and there should be no punishment for it in general. It's not just a few businesses, it's practically all of them. As a rule, an honest businessman can't make enough money to survive while being undercut by everyone else.
The difference is that theft is a criminal offense, where you’ll be prosecuted by the state.
Violation of a software license is not a criminal offense but a breach of contract, opening you up to civil suits. So, it’s up to the rights holder to file suit and drag you to court for damages.
Both break the civil law , you can absolutely sue the thief for damages for lost property.
Typically this is not done because it is not worth the lawyer expenses as recovery chances are pretty slim unless it is a kleptomaniac billionaire maybe , instead you claim insurance to recover on your losses.
Similarly copyright theft is also same as any other property theft, you can charge under criminal law as well , typically success rate is not high , but people have gone to prison over pirating movies or bootlegging stuff etc
So what’s the case law for violations of the GPL? Did anyone get criminally convicted prosecuted for violating any software license at all, and was anyone convicted? I’m only aware of civil suits in this regard.
PayPal's Honey extension should be pulled by Google for doing the exact same thing. There is no difference and Honey shouldn't get special treatment just because it's owned by PayPal.
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UPDATE: It's criminal wire fraud.
Brian Dunning sentenced to 18 months jail for cookie stuffing: https://www.businessinsider.com/brian-dunning-ebay-and-affil...
“Cookie Stuffing" internet fraud schemer Jefferson Bruce McKittrick pleads guilty: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...
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