I don't see a huge difference between this and music/movie piracy. I feel it's down to the financial/commercial nature of the infringement and also the scale. I think this is fairly consistent with the legal viewpoint, if the copyright owner was suing for damages what could they reasonably claim?
It's one thing for somebody to copy a DVD for a few friends or family members, worse if they put it on BitTorrent, and worse still if they start selling bootleg copies.
I don't think there would be such a big outcry over this if it was a personal website getting a few hundred hits a month, or even if it was a moderately successful non-commercial project. Curebit had already received funding from Y-combinator and I assume their team were working on it full time, so in my opinion that's rather different to somebody cutting a few corners on a weekend project.
It's one thing for somebody to copy a DVD for a few friends or family members, worse if they put it on BitTorrent, and worse still if they start selling bootleg copies.
I don't think there would be such a big outcry over this if it was a personal website getting a few hundred hits a month, or even if it was a moderately successful non-commercial project. Curebit had already received funding from Y-combinator and I assume their team were working on it full time, so in my opinion that's rather different to somebody cutting a few corners on a weekend project.