Since a few people have brought up similar points, I'd like to address them here. My gut instinct was to tell the patent troll to fuck off. I still wish we had done that. But that would set a terrible precedent and turn us into something that I hate: the App Store
Pretty much everyone here hates how arbitrary and opaque the approval system is in the App Store. It seems like there's a post on HN almost every day ranting about this. If we don't have a clear set of guidelines for what we will and won't allow, how can any of our customers trust our service?
Another example: many of us are worried that Google might randomly shut down our accounts. This would be devastating. I'm sure that Google normally only shuts down accounts with good cause, but they still are developing a reputation for being a company you can't trust. We can't afford to give our customers a reason to worry about that happening with our service.
So the question is, is there a way to tell the patent troll to go screw himself without jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?
When you run a business, you have to regard yourself as a building block for other people to rely on to build their productivity, their own business, or their own ideas. If customers have to be fearful of pissing off the owner of a service they're using, that has a chilling effect on progress.
However, when a customer's actions or business model directly threatens those ideals you're trying to uphold -- helping people to improve their own productivity or offer better products or services themselves -- then I think you have ethical grounds to ban them as long as you have a human process to handle mistakes.
The main complaint about Google and Apple is that interacting with them is Kafkaesque. An occasional false positive is acceptable if the company has a process to resolve them fairly... a process that doesn't require the customer to get blogtweetHN traction before the company opens a dialogue.
To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen a story where someone complained about an App Store rejection, and that story led to an approval. Typically the story is accompanied by other action, such as actually talking to the App Store review board, and it's the other action that leads to the approval.
Can you turn away an account based on their “religious” beliefs,
however ridiculous, hateful, or exploitative you may find them?
Shut down? Answer: No.
I would refuse service based on the actions of the organization.
From that standpoint I think you ultimately made the wrong decision based on providing service to the patent troll. You should reconsider.
So the question is, is there a way to tell the
patent troll to go screw himself without
jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?
The question should be: "Is there a polite way to decline service?"
Yes. Its easy and you can explaining it nicely in a few short paragraphs that don't tell anyone to go screw them-self. (Much shorter than a blog post I suspect).
Your blog post, by the way, basically told me your company has no moral compass.
Your blog post could have been an explanation of your reasoning and moral outrage, making you look better while providing transparency for your customers to trust.
Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently.
We will definitely re-evaluate the decision though. This is a tough one, and we're not in love with our current solution.
(further down in this thread you also said):
"Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently."
Doesn't need to be "justifiable". "Justifiable" to?
You are, as was said by the sheriff played by Roy Schieder In Jaws "the Chief of Police". And you're not a large corporation (yet) where you have to issue a memo which says "don't sell to patent trolls " either.
You can do whatever you want to deflect or keep any business and nobody needs to know about it. You can simply be passive aggressive with any customer. You don't return phone calls. You don't setup demo dates. You don't get back to them without pricing or details or answers to questions they have. Almost everyone will leave and just think you are a typical non-responsive business and they will go elsewhere. Or you can quote them a high price to scare them away. There are dozens of "not in the book" ways you can get people to not give you business. Bad service is only one. It's not that hard. And you don't have to announce it to the world or justify it to anyone. It's done quietly.
This happens everyday in business for many reasons (that don't even have to do with anything objectionable). A salesman will spend his time with someone who is going to give him more business and be lackadaisical with someone that appears to be a trifler. Lawyers will build their business with any client then they will thin those clients by being less responsive and/or jacking up billing rates. The clients leave. They don't announce "you are not important anymore". It just happens.
Added: "jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers"
The point is to do it where the other customers don't know you are doing this. I'm assuming there are many things in your business everyday that you don't reveal to current customers.
If there were lots of competing App Stores with their own beliefs, filters, prejudices, ideologies, etc - no problem. Of course this is exactly the case in the CRM industry.
So your conscience should be patting itself on the back, not beating itself up, when it tells a patent troll to go fsck a porcupine. This is exactly the purpose of a conscience: telling you to do what's right, regardless of the official structure of law in your era and country. Patent trolls aren't illegal, but they're evil, and it's wrong to collaborate voluntarily with evil. If the powers that be force you to collaborate, of course, that's something else...
If you use Douglas Crockford's JSON library, then arguably its license could make you turn them down on legal grounds: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions =)
1. Should you ever refuse service to someone because you disapprove of their lawful activities? 2. If so, where do you draw the line? 3. If so, how do you deal with the fact that you can only enforce the policy when a customer's activities are specifically brought to your attention?
To answer #1, I'd make an analogy to the social responsibility rules some companies voluntarily impose on themselves. (Some companies say they will only buy from vendors who meet certain fair labor standards. Others say they will only buy from environmentally friendly vendors. Et cetera.)
Refusing service based on an ethical principle is very similar to these types of policies, except you're declining to sell something instead of buy. Companies that follow these rules are generally lauded for it. Likewise, companies that are perceived as not doing so are criticized. (Think of Apple's relationship with Foxconn.)
So I think it's pretty safe from a P.R. standpoint to refuse service based on ethical principles. You might have to ditch a handful of paying customers, but if your business model is about volume, it's probably not going to matter.
As for the ethical imlications of refusing service, I say that nobody is entitled to use your service any more than you're entitled to customers. So I don't see a problem there.
Question #2 is harder. Where do you draw the line? I'd say that's up to each company to decide, but here are some reasonable examples of things you might forbid:
- Patent trolls
- Hate groups
- Technically lawful but sleezy stuff, e.g. certain infoproducts
The exact list a company chooses would of course depend on the subjective ethical beliefs of its leadership. Which is fine--it's their company. In any case, it's very important to clearly state these rules in the TOS. You really don't want to be seen as capricious, and it's not fair to your customers, even the evil ones.
Question #3 is probably the hardest. As the OP pointed out, you can't just dig through your customers' data, looking for possible violations. So you'd have to wait until something was brought to your attention. And then, as the OP said, you'd have de facto tolerance for offenders who don't speak up. Which seems kind of unfair.
But here, I'd make an analogy to the TOS rules concerning criminal activity. There must be tons of people using legitimate web services for crime. Occassionally, some of these are discovered, and their accounts are terminated. The rest get away with it.
I doubt anyone would say you should ignore reports of criminal activity just because some other crime goes unreported. So I think the same applies to these ethical restrictions.
Google and Facebook ban people's accounts all the time for doing things they find disagreeable, and they certainly aren't lauded for it. Instead, we all live in a constant state of fear that Google might ban our accounts because we didn't use our real name, or we're showing a middle finger in our profile picture, etc.
The "lower level" mods among us mostly tried to keep the peace without disciplinary actions, then: we would just say, "hey, this discussion is getting too heated: cool down, come back tomorrow, we're all humans here." This wasn't too bad, but some of our mods had these sorts of "itching-for-a-showdown" personalities, and I guess people always were a little worried about the powers we technically held. In the end it was gaining a reputation for being too abrasive, which meant good-hearted religious people didn't come by anymore. It reminded me of nothing so much as Sartre's statement, "we have the war we deserve."
I guess the lesson that I'm trying to articulate is that, especially in Internet communities, transparency is necessary to alleviate fear, but inaction can lead to your community passively falling astray from its goals, discouraging the members who you want.
When community is at stake, as it is in Facebook and Google, there is a higher-order priority. You have to decrease worldsuck and foster awesome[1]. That is a somewhat arbitrary priority, and creating rules and transparency around it can seem like an impossible task.
[1] Cheers, nerdfighters.
Likewise, if you have clear TOS terms regarding prohibited activities like patent trolling, then patent trolls should just refrain from signing up. I don't see what would cause the "state of fear" provided customers are clear on what the rules are.
I guess one approach is to have a Terms of Service, but in this case, what would it say? "You agree not to do anything we disapprove of." Seems like a tough road to go down.
And no, I don't recommend any kind of checks at the front gate. Like I said, you'd just have to enforce your policy when something was brought to your attention.
Yeah, thinking you have to be able to catch/notice everything before you should try to catch/notice anything in the domain of ethics... is a more stark and literal case of making perfection an enemy of the good possible?
Try the thinking outside of the ethical/legal domains altogether... don't bother trying to learn to play an instrument, there is no way you can get every note right.
This is a rationalization for resignation, not sound practical reasoning.
I don't see why you can't just tell the patent troll to go away. Are they being punished for telling you what they do? Yes, but if patent trolls have to operate furtively, not telling anyone what they do, on pain of being denied service in many places, the world is a better place. Make the world a better place.
I don't see why you are obligated to lend a helping hand to evil that happens to be legal. I'm not saying to throw a punch at someone doing something legal that you don't like; I'm saying that you are not obligated ethically or morally to do business with them. Or if the law has something to do with ethics in your world, then consider that since it's legal to deny service to patent trolls, it must be all right, right?
And I don't see what's unethical about one adult selling another adult neuroactive pharmaceuticals, but let's leave that aside for now.
Drawing the line around what's "legal" says to me, "We'd rather not think about ethics, so we're going to draw the line somewhere defensible that we don't have to think about." In another world this might make sense, but not in a country that criminalizes marijuana and has, well, patent trolls. To respect that line, and not try to promote good or retard evil any further than that, is just an abdication of ethics.
With that said, I respect Less Annoying CRM for trying to think about the issue at all and post about it, which most companies don't. I mean, they got the wrong answer, but most companies don't even try or think at all, so this blog post actually does rate LACRM in the top 10% of all companies in my book.
This would be a much easier decision if we sold a discrete product. A grocery store or Amazon.com can deny someone service and then they can go shop somewhere else. No big deal. Our users store their most important business data with us for years. How can our legitimate users trust us if they think they might wake up one day and be banned?
Thanks for the comment, this is definitely an interesting discussion.
By the way, I can tell you that I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone using the software for something illegal but not necessarily unethical (like selling drugs). The problem is that as soon as they tell you they're doing that, you're effectively assisting them in the illegal activity which makes me a criminal. That's the main reason why we have to take action when someone tells us they're using the CRM to do something illegal (not that it's ever happened).
Using the phrase "primary responsibility" doesn't change the fact that helping unethical people do unethical things puts evil into the world. It sounds like you (and Less Annoying) are subconsciously reasoning with the goal of never being held responsible for evil. That's different from minimizing evil.
A clearer way to make your case would be to say that taking a stand is too expensive (vs not-my-problem.) Maybe the company's resources are better spent assisting ethical customers. Maybe this assistance yields more revenue, further increasing the ability to assist ethical customers. Now you have an exponential growth rate of net good, so you have a big-O notation argument for not policing evil. (... actually, exponential growth rates of small business revenue are really sigmoidal, not exponential, so it will probably be better to switch back to thinking about ethics when you approach market saturation)
I don't feel like I owe sympathy to people who are concerned with culpability rather than with utility, and I doubt you do either.
I understand your reluctance, of course, but a company whose business model that abuses the legal system at the expense of companies that produce software seems like a reasonable thing for a software company to avoid dealings with. How can your users trust you if they think they might wake up one day and your product is gone because of spurious patent litigation?
It's not clear that this is the thinking they were using, and it's a false dichotomy. There might be any number of easy rules to follow that do a better job of approximating ethical judgement than "is it legal." A possible reason not to try for one of these might be because it's impractical. Less Annoying employees are people, and people tend to have irrationally-strongly-held beliefs about ethics. They are in the habit of not questioning the law or other peoples' religions, but this would step outside those boundaries. You end up with a company full of people who think it's their duty to force the company's ethics to be consistent with their own.
The best course would be to ban hate activity on the site, but it would be impossible to know hate activity without violating privacy. And what is hate activity anyway? Who decides? The KKK seems like an obvious group, but what about the Black Panthers, certain religious groups and even so-called Civil Rights groups like La Raza. It's very difficult to determine hate activity in an objective and business-defensible way.
The law is the clearest standard rather than nebulous ethics. Besides free speech should apply to everyone, even if we disagree with the content.
The funny thing about principles is they're easy to have when they're not being tested. For example:
"'I really don’t want this guy’s money,' Tyler said at one point. We’re glad not to have it."
That's a lot easier to say when the offer of money is no longer on the table. I'm not sure at what point that was actually said, but in the article it comes after giving this guy a demo of the system, making genuine recommendations about his entire process, and doing actual customization work for the guy.
Patent trolling aside, using the law of the land to justify going against your personal conscience is a horrible idea.
I don't see it that way at all. Their personal consciences recoiled at providing support for a patent troll and they recoiled at imposing censorship based on the content of a client's messages. They had to reconcile these two opposing attacks of conscience.
The line is less clear when the company is in a position of great power (e.g. Google in search, Apple in smartphones) but it's clear that e.g. restaurant can have a dress code (which is frivolous) and refuse service if you don't comply with that dress code and an insignificant crm business can refuse you service for any reason whatsoever. It's not censorship because there's another restaurant just around the corner and another crm product a click away.
The article is framed as some epic battle of ethics but all I get from it is that $10/month is deciding factor in their decisions. They don't want the money from patent trolls but they'll take it if given.
Edit: Didn't really wrap up my final thought.
what, in short, is so bad about being faithful to what you feel?
I suppose one consideration would be a legal one. We're not legal experts, and for some entities, turning them away for being distasteful or what they believe -- based on what we feel -- could be considered discrimination.
And finally, we think having some consistency is pretty important. Sure, we could just do this case-by-case and that, frankly, would be pretty nice. But it's also not really fair to our users, I think, who should know that we work with some kind of framework in making decisions so that they don't have to worry about us getting pissed off and shutting down their account for (what they see as) insufficient reason.
i'm not a legal expert either, but i am pretty sure that legislation related to discrimination is based on specific attributes (race, color, religion, sex or national origin for the us civil rights act). and being a spammer is very unlikely to be a reason for protection under such laws.
consistency is important if you're doing this enough for it to be noticed. if it's one person in the history of your firm, you could have quietly stalled and no-one would have been any the wiser. instead, you decide to support a spammer and profit from hits on your blog. from that viewpoint you don't come across as a great company, to me...
You are in the position of (some) power. By knowingly choosing to to help someone do something unethical, you contribute to furthering unethical behavior. Also, what is the difference between "a jerk ... speaking up" and "an asshole"? Is an asshole still an asshole if their business is legal?
I think you should reconsider your sign. It shouldn't say We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, it should say Greed is good. Remember, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with making money, but don't try and rationalize your ethics away.
Technically, no. Jury nullification is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that juries are not required to explain their reasoning. But it can only happen when a jury ignores a judge's instructions (which will say to base the decision on the existing law).
> it should say Greed is good. [...] Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with making money, but don't try and rationalize your ethics away.
Maybe you read a different article than I did? In the article you read, the employees at LessAnnoying got together by the water cooler and talked about how they'd LOVE to eject EvilTroll, but couldn't make payroll at the end of the month without his business. In the one I read, they didn't give a hoot about EvilTroll's money, but wanted to avoid engaging in content-based censorship.
It's a slightly different situation when dealing with other people whose views or activities you might not entirely concur with. In most cases their activities won't be directly harming your industry.
That's another interesting place to draw the line, though -- self-preservation, or at least protection of your own industry. It's pretty compelling, although it still feels a bit odd to be protective of only one's own industry, while being okay with things that might be destructive to others. Hm.
Arguably this could be justified the same way you would justify refusing to support drug dealers, even though you disagree with the War on Some Drugs. Your only justification for turning down such business (as I understand it) is that you can't accept the risk of having the whole company shut down by law enforcement. Not many people would take you to task for that reasoning, I suspect, and it would be easy to dismiss those who do.
It's easy to argue that software patents carry the same existential threat as law enforcement would. At first blush it seems reasonable to write this into your TOS: I agree that I will not assert any patent claims as a non-practicing entity. I agree that my account with lessannoyingcrm.com will be terminated without recourse if I assert any such claims in a court of law, or threaten to do so.
The problem is, you've only narrowed your ethical dilemma -- you haven't eliminated it. What if the patent troll in question was instead offering to buy your company for 100x revenue? What if the patent troll in question was (e.g.) Google or Apple? Would you have the fortitude to tell them to pound sand then? Google may be a good example, in fact, because they've probably already found it necessary (or soon will) to threaten other companies like Microsoft and Oracle with patents that they don't practice, but have purchased for defensive purposes.
If you had turned down the patent troll's business, you would indeed have found yourself in an even murkier ethical swamp, so in that sense you did the right thing. Out of all of the entrepreneurs I've known in a long career spent in and around small companies, I only know one founder with the personal fortitude to tell a patent troll to get bent. I don't expect to meet any others, because I'm not sure you can build a large, successful company around strong personal convictions in the general case.
So you're objective until someone makes you mad. Got it.
I see your point, however, and I won't pretend that there's not a little bit of cognitive dissonance there.
Pharmacists refusing to sell the morning-after pill
Refusing to sell computer equipment to HFT firms
Banning a child not vaccinated against polio from a swimming pool
Cutting off the water supply to your local homeopathy practitioner
I don't see a problem with the other three. In fact, the third I actively encourage.
You would think so, but remember that in the US, religion is the third rail of politics. Play the Jeebus card, and you can dodge almost all of the other rules and regulations in polite society. (See http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Judge-Washington-stat... ).
My ToS would have an ethics clause in it, that if it becomes known to us you are doing something I may find unscrupulous then me and my staff have a right to refuse to help you on a personal basis. I'd hate to make any of my people have to help someone they find unethical.
It is a hard question to answer though, but I think harder to answer after you are established, and therefore should be asked by every new startup that wasn't planning on having an ethics portion to their ToS.
OR
Allowing for each employee to be able to make that call can find you some middle ground.
Lets take your political campaign example, if a democratic pro-choice advocacy group wanted to use your CRM, but your support guy/girl doing that gets the call is pro-life, she/he should be allowed to say, hey I'm sorry but someone else needs to take this for me, I can't do this. Now really that should be every company, but let it be known in your ToS that you reserve the right to not force an employee to do something they don't find agreeable with their ethics.
If it happens that ALL of your employees hate patent trolls to the extent that none of them will help then simply tell the customer that they won't be able to get help.
I can appreciate how hard of a question it is, censorship versus ethics. But, maybe it'll help to think of it this way, as a company you don't want to censor your customers, but at what point do you realize that in violating your own ethics you are allowing someone else to censor you.
It's a tough call either way, I don't begrudge you the choice you made as it seems you put a lot of thought into it.
> What we did when a patent troll asked for our help?
I gave the patent troll a demo of our system, complete
with genuine recommendations about how he could best
track his entire process from start to end. ... While
we did set up customization for him, ..."Oh hey look, we have patent trolls using our product"
I would snapcancel that account but not snoop around in data and actively try to find people that offend me to boot them.
If they tell you they do something that you have ethical objections against shut down their account. Just imagine how you'd feel if he'd use your system to troll 5k people.
I think the law shouldn't be your ultimate guideline it should be your moral and ethical standards in combination with the law.
The framers of the Constitution didn't want people putting up pornographic billboards on every carriage path. They just didn't trust the government to be the ones making the call.
Instead, they entrusted the ethics of society to ... society at large. If somebody says something that we feel is offensive, it's not censorship to speak out, or even to refuse that person the use of your resources to facilitate his speech.
So I think that this was an incorrect decision. The OP has abdicated his right and responsibility to act as a moral member of our society, instead electing to follow a libertine philosophy of "if I can do it, there's no reason I shouldn't".
As a thought experiment: Suppose Oracle and Google show up and want the service. Oracle is known to be an aggressive company with respect to business and so the company denies Oracle... but accepts Google since Google is friendlier. Does Oracle have grounds for suing ? I don't know. IANAL. But if I was in their position, I would be concerned until I consulted a lawyer.
What about other entities: political parties you disagree with? activist groups you disagree with? businesses who have unsavoury practices?
Put anther way, what can you legally say 'no' to, and what will get you sued for denying them?
If you can provide a straightfoward notice "no patent trolls" (enforceable in court), does that insulate you?
Again, I don't know. But it would give me pause to ponder if (when?) I am in the position of providing services.
--- more thoughts---
If you take the onus of determining who is moral onto your shoulders, you take responsibility for the inevitable screwup. And with that, you ensure that you will be arbitrary when you notice that one entity is an exception to your existing rules. You have to modify the rules, and that angers people (notice Blizzard's forums anytime changes come
Where the line? Where the exceptions? How to handle it? out!) This is a scaling problem.
Can you get away with not overthinking it and simply kicking the odiousness to the curb and hope that the scaling problem won't manifest?
There is some variation in the meaning of "patent troll", but an original owner practicing the patent promptly going after people who infringe is not a patent troll under most accepted definitions.
This is kind of the point of the post though. We hated the idea of letting this person use our software, but is it really our place to make those decisions? Things are rarely black and white.
Having said that, I'm really glad this guy didn't stick around.
Edit: Turning away illegal businesses and helping unethical businesses is probably rational, even if it is not good. I don't think we can expect a higher standard from people who set out to make a business.
1. We reject customers who speak harshly about our software. They hurt our feelings, and we simply won't stand for that.
2. We welcome customers who rob and kill as a matter of business. If it satisfies minimum legal requirements, we are happy to make a buck.
3. We are so proud of our reasoning ability that we are going on record to say that we welcome patent trolls and the Ku Klux Klan.
If you had spontaneously canceled his account, without having stipulated what kind of behaviour you find unacceptable in the Terms of Service beforehand, he could rightfully accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. As a customer, that kind of action on your part would definitely make me think twice before signing up. Even though I'm not a patent troll, what if you some day decided that what I was using it for was also unacceptable? Speaking of the letter of the law, the ToS that you both agreed to didn't mention anything about patent trolling being out of bounds.
What I would do in future is maintain a list of un-OK uses as a schedule to the ToS, but grandfather existing clients into the old ToS (perhaps with a 30 day grace period, allowing customers to export all of their data). In the case of customers using the software to do things you don't like, rather than terminate their account, just politely ask them to take their custom elsewhere (with no obligation to do so). I think you'll find that most people would rather be where they're wanted.
Caveat: IANAL. You might not be able to do that sort of thing (although I'm nearly sure you can).
You backed down. That's fine, and - being no business owner or part of a startup myself, I'm clueless - maybe required. Maybe you just can't afford to alienate customers, especially as a small shop.
That said: You asked for an opinion. The idealist in me (see previous paragraph's disclaimer) would boot all of your imaginary customers. I DO believe, naively, that most people are good - or maximum chaotic neutral. In the grand scheme of things there aren't so many assholes to ignore and kick out.
But the list you presented, including the patent troll? Yeah, all of them should go. Politely, with recommendations maybe/help with the migration. No problem. But no, you cannot stay. We're sorry, but our company codex doesn't allow that.
Now THAT would've impressed me.
What's the point of "believing", when you don't act on it . This whole story paints a picture of a company without any conviction.
So unless the latter exception applies, your thought experiment is broken early in the chain. You are free to apply your own free speech limitations as long as you are within the bound of other laws, e.g. you're not discriminating in some other way that is illegal.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Ro...
Personally, I prefer a bad decision based on reason than a good one based on emotion. So you get an informal +1 in my book.
Also, it might help you (and apparently a lot of posters) to develop multiple means to achieve desired ends. Does everyone with whom one disagrees deserve the banhammer?
Certain groups have darkened and stained the pages of history with their rigid ways of dealing with undesirables. Divide the world into black and white at your own peril.
http://www.plymouth.k12.wi.us/OldSite/Staff%20Home%20Pages/H...
Because if it's the former it's obvious that it applies to all the examples.
Oh. Okay. That's good, I guess.
This is just absurd. They are not bound by the first amendment and are entirely free to make judgements about the hosted content.