As a member of the company's advisory board and a long-time Slashdotter, I can assure you that ReputationDefender does not engage in any illegal activities, pretexting, cracking, etc. in the process of getting information removed from the web. I recognize that some of the marketing copy on the site is less than crystal clear, but in a busy startup, getting the website copy rewritten isn't always the top priority.
In any case, services range from sending polite requests on customers behalf (automated and manual depending on context), search engine optimization techniques, arranging for legal intervention in certain cases, and more. You can find much of this information on our Frequently Asked Questions page. Many of our customers have found our techniques effective and feel like we've provided them with excellent value for their money.
Nobody can make bad content posted repeatedly by a determined adversary disappear entirely, obviously, and we would be foolish to claim that we could do the impossible.
I should also mention that we hold ourselves to a very high ethical standard regarding the types of intervention we perform and the types of clients we will take on, and we are very sensitive to First Amendment issues and not trying to interfere with the dissemination of genuinely newsworthy content. However, there are a lot of people out there who've faced crazy stalkers and people trying to unfairly bash them, or just chunks of stale information out there that they really didn't want to be public, and having a service offering to track down that information, figure out who's responsible for it, and attempt to get it removed, or in some cases reduce its impact, is quite valuable to many people.
Every article about this on Slashdot seems to feature claims about this, and people with experience flying (as pilots or passengers) on non-commercial airplanes usually step up and clarify that this is not correct.
The people writing the article you reference may not have been any GSM reception in a particular place with a particular phone above 2100ft, but I've gotten reception from substantially higher altitudes than that on a private plane from my GSM Treo (a device that doesn't have the best reception to begin with).
The article makes it sound to me like an angry former tenant, embittered about an eviction in which some of their personal belongings left behind were disposed of, decided to get back at their landlord by having her home (i.e. not the rental property in question) stripped of its belongings.
Finding compounds that are potentially active against some disease, especially compounds with relatively new mechanisms of action, is considered "basic research" - academia does a good job in this area, because it makes for good papers, PhD dissertations and academic plaudits.
Taking those compounds and ensuring they are safe to administer in humans (rather than just animal models), and that they are as efficacious or more efficacious than other existing treatments is a costly, time-consuming process that requires managing a huge staff, coordinating clinics and hospitals, managing information systems, etc. This is not something universities or most research labs are set up to do properly.
If you eliminated patents, you clearly wouldn't stop the scientists, but you'd put a huge damper on industry and financiers wanting to back the latter part of this process. This would result in far fewer drugs getting through the FDA approval process.
It may be the case that there is a more societally efficient way to do this than the current system, but I'm not sure what it is. One problem with the current system is that one effect of it is that the US effectively subsidizes other countries drug availability, because drug companies expect to earn a large portion of their profits here, and have to deal with centrally negotiated pricing and other issues in foreign markets. But I don't see how you'd think that eliminating patents entirely would help the situation.
These people who flap their mouths have never really seen somebody waste away and die from cancer, I guarantee it. I mean *really* see it. Like watch every single day as they get thinner, and thinner, and weaker, and weaker, and go through surgery and chemotherapy and spend months in hospitals, wasting away, getting pumped full of valium and zofran (supposed the most effective anti-emetic they have) to keep the nausea at bay while they try futilely to stave off the cancer.
If you had seen it like I have, and somebody told you that smoking pot made them feel even 10% better and able to keep food down and maybe as a result just live a few months longer than they would have otherwise, or be strong enough to walk instead of lying in bed awaiting their death, you'd be growing a fucking cannabis farm for them. Or giving them whatever the hell they want, public policy stupidity be damned.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
* Benjamin Franklin, "Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor", November 11, 1755; as cited in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, p. 242, Leonard W. Labaree, ed. (1963)
Dell does offer Linux on their machines - specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is offered on their server machines. This is a non-story. They don't support Linux as a desktop platform - probably because there either isn't enough of a market, or those who want to use Linux as their desktop are for the most part hobbyists or tech professionals who already know what they're doing.
I ordered several Dell servers and actually chose the no-OS option instead of RHEL and put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on our Poweredge 2950 servers.
And you can get no-OS desktop-ish machines if you want to roll your own low end personal Linux box.
What do you people expect from Dell? It seems to me like they are making sane, economically rational decisions and offering products where there's enough market to justify it.
>>"(for example, the Command and Conquer 3 demo is completely playable but crashes after >>several minutes)."
>I think it's this definition of "completely playable" that keeps people away from Linux.
This article is talking about a group of people here who don't think they've overclocked their computer high enough until the CPU will POST about 80% of the time. I think this group would define "completely playable" in roughly the same terms.
I don't really remember receiving much homework at all when I was in first and second grade. Definitely by sixth grade, a reasonable amount. I came out just fine - didn't turn me into some sort of lazy, whining wimp that I didn't have much homework when I was a little kid.
Things are different in highly competitive private schools and top public school districts these days. I see my little cousin in fourth grade doing 2-3 hours of homework, having 2 hours of after-school activities every evening, and a tutor two or three hours a week. And it's been like that for several years now. Admittedly, she lives in one of the hyper-competitive communities of the very wealthy in Connecticut - so I don't know if her experience is typical.
But she never learned how to entertain herself, or use her imagination. She needs constant entertainment from the world around her, and will whine and eventually scream if she doesn't get it. She is very maladjusted, and her parents have had to medicate her as a result (after normal therapy options apparently failed entirely). Her parents now fight a nightly battle with her to do her homework, she seems miserable, the family seems miserable, she's been diagnosed with "early onset bipolar disorder" since she was in second grade, and I fear that when she's old enough to be more independent, her life will spiral out of control. Oh, and she's been tested and is clearly intellectually well above-average, so that has nothing to do with it. The family has been totally enervated by this entire process.
This is not the way childhood is supposed to be. I'm not saying you should insulate children as they get older from the harsh realities of the world, but I do believe there is a balance. I think those in the upper middle and upper ends of the social spectrum have forgotten about this in the face of hyper-competitive college admissions process, which seems to have had an "arms race" effect, moving this competitive spirit farther and farther down the chain to younger children. Planned activities seem to dominate the time of even extremely young children. Homework and school competitiveness starts at a far younger age, when it's not clear that the brain has matured sufficiently to function in that framework without dysfunction.
Clearly most kids don't suffer from the kinds of problems that my cousin does. However, I keep reading article after article about the increasing frequency of childhood psychiatric disorders like "early onset bipolar disorder" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Maybe if we gave young kids a bit more time to be kids, fewer of them would break down and fall apart entirely.
Maybe not such a weird transformation. For example, see the Centum-Satem isoglass. Proto-Indo-European fractured at some point along a similar transformation (and oddly enough, English, with the word "hundred" is a "centum" language).
A lot of words of Latin root were reimported into the English language around 1066 with the Norman Conquest. Some of these seem to have moved from hard-c to soft-c in their modern English usage (century, circus, circa, percent, recipe, basically any Latin-derived word with a c preceding an i or e rather than an a). I'm guessing this was something that happened during the mixing of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman languages in the 11th and 12th centuries, maybe an artifact of how "Church Latin" had evolved over the years and how Church-style pronunciations (c as ch) as voiced by the upper class Norman conquerers sounded to Anglo-Saxon listeners? That would be my best guess.
Nothing like the true spirit of bipartisanship! Sometimes it seems like fucking over the citizenry is the only thing that the Democrats and the Republicans can actually agree on.
I don't know about the law in Australia, but in the US, if you grab something out of somebody's hands or come in contact with the person in any way during a theft, it's probably considered battery, and thus a "violent" crime. All it would take is one letter from a lawyer in your area to make such a case, I'm sure. I don't know about "violent entry" since I don't even understand what that phrase would mean, but even a mediocre lawyer or law student aid group or similar should be able to write up a letter for you and get Dell to honor their end of the deal.
I don't know, that wasn't crystal clear to me. Can you cite the exact line in the article that says that the court decided that the information she provided was not true? I think it's unclear from the article whether or not the surgeon's claims that the photos were misleading were true.
The only thing that was clear to me is that the court decided he was a limited purpose public figure in this case, and that the website failed to meet the standard of "actual malice" in the posting of this information. As such, they weren't defamatory.
While SIP is clearly a steaming pile of dog crap, IAX is just as good as or better than Skype in terms of client application usability.
A company could trivially set up an Asterisk-based server infrastructure and distribute an IAX-based client that works just as well and is just as user-friendly as Skype is (i.e. IAX auto-traverses firewalls, uses a single port, no separate RTP stream, and has no crazy setup procedures required, all completely unlike SIP-based soft and hardphones).
There is no particular technical reason I can think of that one should use the proprietary Skype protocol over IAX. Obviously, IAX/Asterisk weren't as mature when Skype was started. But the point is that there is no motivation for Skype to open things up, and no company has come along yet and said "Hey, we're just like Skype, only we're using an open protocol, IAX". I don't really think doing so would be a great business to invest in either.
Seems like they have a spider looking for names of artists or properties they represent auto-DMCAing Youtube on any dictionary search matches. Apparently Viacom has an artist named Leon Redbone. Anyway, they chose poorly in this case, as the video poster is a former Berkman Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Looks like Viacom has succeeded in bringing attention from legal academic circles to the DMCA takedown process. This will probably be a good thing in the long run, it will just air out more problems with the DMCA and clarify the need for more protections from malicious use of this tool.
Ya know, I keep seeing these complicated theories about people wanting to frame Putin by making it look like he ordered the assassination while it was actually an opponent who had done so. But if somebody was trying to frame Putin, you'd figure that Putin's government would be eager to extradite the killer and prove their actual innocence and disavow any protection of the murderers.
In fact, the Russian government has been absolutely, unequivocally refusing extradition, and they have been doing so since well before any killer was identified. This strongly implies to me that Putin actually did order this.
Perhaps it was one of his inner circle who's being protected - but whether it was him personally or not isn't terribly relevant. If he's protecting them after the fact it's essentially the same thing as endorsing the act itself.
Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled
Yeah, it's labeled all right. About the time you see a writhing vulva on your screen, and a mega-penis thrusting repeatedly into it using the latest in animated gif technology, you may notice a small blurb of text that says "Please proceed only if you are 18 years of age or older".
Maybe women tend to choose careers that will allow them more flexibility to have families and be mothers? That's a biological reality (women bear the children), and it's a cultural and biological reality that women tend to be more directly responsible for child-rearing.
Given that, a woman choosing a career like an elementary school teacher, where they have schedules that tend to mesh with those of their own children makes a lot of sense.
Though I think this explains some of the discrepancy between men and women in careers, to be honest, I think the reason more women don't end up in engineering fields is that they aren't instilled from a young age with the desire to understand how things work, to tinker, to build things, etc.
Of the women I know who are engineers, most of them had fathers who were engineers, and they were raised with these values from an early age in a way that very few women are.
Also - there is a strong social imperative on men to choose careers that will pay well, since that tends to be a substantial factor in how women select their mates. On the contrary, it's relatively rare for men to select their mates based on those criteria.
See my reply on this. I am aware of the Windows mobile devices of course, but Microsoft is a special case as they can freely tell anybody to stuff it apparently. Smaller/less powerful companies, like Palm, have not been able to do this.
Nobody said Timbaland shouldn't be able to use somebody else's tune. Just that he should give credit where it's due and give a portion of the profits from his use to the original source (pay royalties).
DJ Danger Mouse always gave credit where it was due (Grey Album was a mash-up of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatle's White Album - this was prominently mentioned all over the Grey Album web site).
The problem is that the owners of the rights for the Beatles (surviving members + estates of deceased members) refuse to grant permissions for remixes and other similar usage.
And, to top it all off, the Grey Album was for free download - thus profits == 0. Paying royalties on that is tough. The issue was that some people considered the Grey Album a great new work of art. Admittedly derivative, and based on the great work of others, but with its own artistic merit. Declaring it illegal and trying to block it was committing artistic murder.
Nobody is trying to block Timbaland from distributing his song with its borrowed beats. The original artist is just saying "hey, give me some credit and a portion of the profits you made from my work".
So morally, these two situations are not at all comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
As a member of the company's advisory board and a long-time Slashdotter, I can assure you that ReputationDefender does not engage in any illegal activities, pretexting, cracking, etc. in the process of getting information removed from the web. I recognize that some of the marketing copy on the site is less than crystal clear, but in a busy startup, getting the website copy rewritten isn't always the top priority.
In any case, services range from sending polite requests on customers behalf (automated and manual depending on context), search engine optimization techniques, arranging for legal intervention in certain cases, and more. You can find much of this information on our Frequently Asked Questions page. Many of our customers have found our techniques effective and feel like we've provided them with excellent value for their money.
Nobody can make bad content posted repeatedly by a determined adversary disappear entirely, obviously, and we would be foolish to claim that we could do the impossible.
I should also mention that we hold ourselves to a very high ethical standard regarding the types of intervention we perform and the types of clients we will take on, and we are very sensitive to First Amendment issues and not trying to interfere with the dissemination of genuinely newsworthy content. However, there are a lot of people out there who've faced crazy stalkers and people trying to unfairly bash them, or just chunks of stale information out there that they really didn't want to be public, and having a service offering to track down that information, figure out who's responsible for it, and attempt to get it removed, or in some cases reduce its impact, is quite valuable to many people.
Every article about this on Slashdot seems to feature claims about this, and people with experience flying (as pilots or passengers) on non-commercial airplanes usually step up and clarify that this is not correct.
The people writing the article you reference may not have been any GSM reception in a particular place with a particular phone above 2100ft, but I've gotten reception from substantially higher altitudes than that on a private plane from my GSM Treo (a device that doesn't have the best reception to begin with).
Excellent, you're right, I see that now. Ignore my post above. :)
The article makes it sound to me like an angry former tenant, embittered about an eviction in which some of their personal belongings left behind were disposed of, decided to get back at their landlord by having her home (i.e. not the rental property in question) stripped of its belongings.
But the article really isn't crystal clear.
That's definitely not true. Not sure where this sort of thing comes from.
Finding compounds that are potentially active against some disease, especially compounds with relatively new mechanisms of action, is considered "basic research" - academia does a good job in this area, because it makes for good papers, PhD dissertations and academic plaudits.
Taking those compounds and ensuring they are safe to administer in humans (rather than just animal models), and that they are as efficacious or more efficacious than other existing treatments is a costly, time-consuming process that requires managing a huge staff, coordinating clinics and hospitals, managing information systems, etc. This is not something universities or most research labs are set up to do properly.
If you eliminated patents, you clearly wouldn't stop the scientists, but you'd put a huge damper on industry and financiers wanting to back the latter part of this process. This would result in far fewer drugs getting through the FDA approval process.
It may be the case that there is a more societally efficient way to do this than the current system, but I'm not sure what it is. One problem with the current system is that one effect of it is that the US effectively subsidizes other countries drug availability, because drug companies expect to earn a large portion of their profits here, and have to deal with centrally negotiated pricing and other issues in foreign markets. But I don't see how you'd think that eliminating patents entirely would help the situation.
These people who flap their mouths have never really seen somebody waste away and die from cancer, I guarantee it. I mean *really* see it. Like watch every single day as they get thinner, and thinner, and weaker, and weaker, and go through surgery and chemotherapy and spend months in hospitals, wasting away, getting pumped full of valium and zofran (supposed the most effective anti-emetic they have) to keep the nausea at bay while they try futilely to stave off the cancer.
If you had seen it like I have, and somebody told you that smoking pot made them feel even 10% better and able to keep food down and maybe as a result just live a few months longer than they would have otherwise, or be strong enough to walk instead of lying in bed awaiting their death, you'd be growing a fucking cannabis farm for them. Or giving them whatever the hell they want, public policy stupidity be damned.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
* Benjamin Franklin, "Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor", November 11, 1755; as cited in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, p. 242, Leonard W. Labaree, ed. (1963)
Yup.
Dell does offer Linux on their machines - specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is offered on their server machines. This is a non-story. They don't support Linux as a desktop platform - probably because there either isn't enough of a market, or those who want to use Linux as their desktop are for the most part hobbyists or tech professionals who already know what they're doing.
I ordered several Dell servers and actually chose the no-OS option instead of RHEL and put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on our Poweredge 2950 servers.
And you can get no-OS desktop-ish machines if you want to roll your own low end personal Linux box.
What do you people expect from Dell? It seems to me like they are making sane, economically rational decisions and offering products where there's enough market to justify it.
Jimbo Wales: heroic porn provider.
>>"(for example, the Command and Conquer 3 demo is completely playable but crashes after
>>several minutes)."
>I think it's this definition of "completely playable" that keeps people away from Linux.
This article is talking about a group of people here who don't think they've overclocked their computer high enough until the CPU will POST about 80% of the time. I think this group would define "completely playable" in roughly the same terms.
I don't really remember receiving much homework at all when I was in first and second grade. Definitely by sixth grade, a reasonable amount. I came out just fine - didn't turn me into some sort of lazy, whining wimp that I didn't have much homework when I was a little kid.
Things are different in highly competitive private schools and top public school districts these days. I see my little cousin in fourth grade doing 2-3 hours of homework, having 2 hours of after-school activities every evening, and a tutor two or three hours a week. And it's been like that for several years now. Admittedly, she lives in one of the hyper-competitive communities of the very wealthy in Connecticut - so I don't know if her experience is typical.
But she never learned how to entertain herself, or use her imagination. She needs constant entertainment from the world around her, and will whine and eventually scream if she doesn't get it. She is very maladjusted, and her parents have had to medicate her as a result (after normal therapy options apparently failed entirely). Her parents now fight a nightly battle with her to do her homework, she seems miserable, the family seems miserable, she's been diagnosed with "early onset bipolar disorder" since she was in second grade, and I fear that when she's old enough to be more independent, her life will spiral out of control. Oh, and she's been tested and is clearly intellectually well above-average, so that has nothing to do with it. The family has been totally enervated by this entire process.
This is not the way childhood is supposed to be. I'm not saying you should insulate children as they get older from the harsh realities of the world, but I do believe there is a balance. I think those in the upper middle and upper ends of the social spectrum have forgotten about this in the face of hyper-competitive college admissions process, which seems to have had an "arms race" effect, moving this competitive spirit farther and farther down the chain to younger children. Planned activities seem to dominate the time of even extremely young children. Homework and school competitiveness starts at a far younger age, when it's not clear that the brain has matured sufficiently to function in that framework without dysfunction.
Clearly most kids don't suffer from the kinds of problems that my cousin does. However, I keep reading article after article about the increasing frequency of childhood psychiatric disorders like "early onset bipolar disorder" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Maybe if we gave young kids a bit more time to be kids, fewer of them would break down and fall apart entirely.
Maybe not such a weird transformation. For example, see the Centum-Satem isoglass. Proto-Indo-European fractured at some point along a similar transformation (and oddly enough, English, with the word "hundred" is a "centum" language).
A lot of words of Latin root were reimported into the English language around 1066 with the Norman Conquest. Some of these seem to have moved from hard-c to soft-c in their modern English usage (century, circus, circa, percent, recipe, basically any Latin-derived word with a c preceding an i or e rather than an a). I'm guessing this was something that happened during the mixing of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman languages in the 11th and 12th centuries, maybe an artifact of how "Church Latin" had evolved over the years and how Church-style pronunciations (c as ch) as voiced by the upper class Norman conquerers sounded to Anglo-Saxon listeners? That would be my best guess.
Nothing like the true spirit of bipartisanship! Sometimes it seems like fucking over the citizenry is the only thing that the Democrats and the Republicans can actually agree on.
I don't know about the law in Australia, but in the US, if you grab something out of somebody's hands or come in contact with the person in any way during a theft, it's probably considered battery, and thus a "violent" crime. All it would take is one letter from a lawyer in your area to make such a case, I'm sure. I don't know about "violent entry" since I don't even understand what that phrase would mean, but even a mediocre lawyer or law student aid group or similar should be able to write up a letter for you and get Dell to honor their end of the deal.
I don't know, that wasn't crystal clear to me. Can you cite the exact line in the article that says that the court decided that the information she provided was not true? I think it's unclear from the article whether or not the surgeon's claims that the photos were misleading were true.
The only thing that was clear to me is that the court decided he was a limited purpose public figure in this case, and that the website failed to meet the standard of "actual malice" in the posting of this information. As such, they weren't defamatory.
While SIP is clearly a steaming pile of dog crap, IAX is just as good as or better than Skype in terms of client application usability.
A company could trivially set up an Asterisk-based server infrastructure and distribute an IAX-based client that works just as well and is just as user-friendly as Skype is (i.e. IAX auto-traverses firewalls, uses a single port, no separate RTP stream, and has no crazy setup procedures required, all completely unlike SIP-based soft and hardphones).
There is no particular technical reason I can think of that one should use the proprietary Skype protocol over IAX. Obviously, IAX/Asterisk weren't as mature when Skype was started. But the point is that there is no motivation for Skype to open things up, and no company has come along yet and said "Hey, we're just like Skype, only we're using an open protocol, IAX". I don't really think doing so would be a great business to invest in either.
Seems like they have a spider looking for names of artists or properties they represent auto-DMCAing Youtube on any dictionary search matches. Apparently Viacom has an artist named Leon Redbone. Anyway, they chose poorly in this case, as the video poster is a former Berkman Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
John Palfrey, the director of the Berkman Center, weighs in with several relevant blog posts.
Looks like Viacom has succeeded in bringing attention from legal academic circles to the DMCA takedown process. This will probably be a good thing in the long run, it will just air out more problems with the DMCA and clarify the need for more protections from malicious use of this tool.
Yeah, I mean Harvard and MIT have never contributed anything to phys... oh, never mind.
Ya know, I keep seeing these complicated theories about people wanting to frame Putin by making it look like he ordered the assassination while it was actually an opponent who had done so. But if somebody was trying to frame Putin, you'd figure that Putin's government would be eager to extradite the killer and prove their actual innocence and disavow any protection of the murderers.
In fact, the Russian government has been absolutely, unequivocally refusing extradition, and they have been doing so since well before any killer was identified. This strongly implies to me that Putin actually did order this.
Perhaps it was one of his inner circle who's being protected - but whether it was him personally or not isn't terribly relevant. If he's protecting them after the fact it's essentially the same thing as endorsing the act itself.
Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled
Yeah, it's labeled all right. About the time you see a writhing vulva on your screen, and a mega-penis thrusting repeatedly into it using the latest in animated gif technology, you may notice a small blurb of text that says "Please proceed only if you are 18 years of age or older".
Maybe women tend to choose careers that will allow them more flexibility to have families and be mothers? That's a biological reality (women bear the children), and it's a cultural and biological reality that women tend to be more directly responsible for child-rearing.
Given that, a woman choosing a career like an elementary school teacher, where they have schedules that tend to mesh with those of their own children makes a lot of sense.
Though I think this explains some of the discrepancy between men and women in careers, to be honest, I think the reason more women don't end up in engineering fields is that they aren't instilled from a young age with the desire to understand how things work, to tinker, to build things, etc.
Of the women I know who are engineers, most of them had fathers who were engineers, and they were raised with these values from an early age in a way that very few women are.
Also - there is a strong social imperative on men to choose careers that will pay well, since that tends to be a substantial factor in how women select their mates. On the contrary, it's relatively rare for men to select their mates based on those criteria.
See my reply on this. I am aware of the Windows mobile devices of course, but Microsoft is a special case as they can freely tell anybody to stuff it apparently. Smaller/less powerful companies, like Palm, have not been able to do this.
Please read my reply on this.
Nobody said Timbaland shouldn't be able to use somebody else's tune. Just that he should give credit where it's due and give a portion of the profits from his use to the original source (pay royalties).
DJ Danger Mouse always gave credit where it was due (Grey Album was a mash-up of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatle's White Album - this was prominently mentioned all over the Grey Album web site).
The problem is that the owners of the rights for the Beatles (surviving members + estates of deceased members) refuse to grant permissions for remixes and other similar usage.
And, to top it all off, the Grey Album was for free download - thus profits == 0. Paying royalties on that is tough. The issue was that some people considered the Grey Album a great new work of art. Admittedly derivative, and based on the great work of others, but with its own artistic merit. Declaring it illegal and trying to block it was committing artistic murder.
Nobody is trying to block Timbaland from distributing his song with its borrowed beats. The original artist is just saying "hey, give me some credit and a portion of the profits you made from my work".
So morally, these two situations are not at all comparable.