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Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

If Eric goes on to create a billion dollar business, has he not created more value that benefits society by creating jobs and overall economic value? Would you argue all of that value creation isn't worth the meager amount that he got out of hanging around AOL?

Steve Jobs dropped out of college and attended classes free of charge. Would you argue that he should never have started Apple, despite getting a free ride on a few classes?

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You could attempt to argue for all sorts of horrific behavior from that basis. Your rationalization falls apart very quickly under any scrutiny.

If I rob a gas station, steal a thousand dollars, and invest that into Las Vegas Sands when it's $1 / share in 2009, ride it up to $60, liquidate out, and then help children that are dying from cancer, surely it's perfectly OK given the benefit to society.

AOL did not suffer from this. They explicitly encourage entrepreneurship, and if they really are so stringent that they don't want a scrappy entrepreneur getting a few free meals, they should have tightened up their security. Eventually they realized their own flaw, and eventually Eric moved on. I just can't get behind the folks who want to villify Eric and call it "theft" considering it was a discovery of a great hack in the system that didn't hurt anyone and will likely create net greater value.

Let's say someone hotwires your car and uses it without your permission to run a delivery business. According to your logic, if you didn't want a scrappy entrepreneur getting a few free rides you should have tightened up your vehicle's security? Maybe upgraded the doors so that they couldn't be opened with a slim jim? Installed aftermarket locks which are unpickable? After all, it's a great hack of the system and didn't hurt anyone and the delivery business will likely create net greater value, right?

To make a comparison more directly to AOL's stature, it'd be like saying I had an enormous fleet of cars and I wouldn't even notice one missing. I'm not conflating Eric's situation and encouraging everyone to be a criminal, but I'm not going to call Eric a criminal and get behind people's attitude that he has an awful moral compass because of petty theft (which is still unclear to me; did AOL not give him a badge? Did it not continue working?).

AOL is probably going to up their security because of this. It was something they should have done in the first place if Eric was allowed to do this the whole time. He's an entrepreneur, he got a few free meals and lifted some metal weights around at AOL's petty expense. I think people need to lighten up and appreciate the resilience and creativity, rather than scrutinize the individual who wasn't doing any real harm.

So you don't mind if anyone grabs a dollar from your pocket when you walk out of your house? What if everyone grabbed one?

This is the same argument everyone else is trying to make, and it's conflating unnecessarily. Eric broke a rule that didn't matter. Nobody was harmed from this.

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