"I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put grass on the ground without a fence, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The noblemen with a thousand cows seem to agree."

And that, my friends, is how you kill the commons - by ignoring the social context surrounding its maintenance and insisting upon the most punitive ways of avoiding abuse.

Context is important, but isn’t HN’s social context, in particular, that the site is entirely public, easily crawled through its API (which apparently has next to no rate limits) and/or Algolial, and has been archived and mirrored in numerous places for years already?

Signal and information are not grass.

Grass and property require upkeep. Radio waves and electromagnetic radiation do not.

I don't want your dog to piss on my lawn and kill my grass. But what harm does it cause me if you take a picture of my lawn? Or if I take a picture of your dog?

If I spend $100M making a Hollywood movie - pay employees, vendors, taxes - contribute to the economic growth of the country - and then that product gets stolen and given away completely for free without being able to see upside, that's a little bit different.

But my Hacker News comment? It's not money.

I think there are plausible ways to draw lines that protect genuine work, effort, and economics while allowing society and innovation to benefit from the commons.