Their response:<p>> The team that made dataroom has stated that they did not use any of papermark’s code and that dataroom was made from scratch with inspiration from existing document sharing softwares, and that this post’s allegations of us stealing code are false. [...]<p>The screenshots clearly show they copied whole pages verbatim, both design and texts. The founder, Nico Laqua, basically responding with "we didn't copy _code_" and not taking any responsibility says a lot about his and his company's moral code. It might not be enough to get sued. That doesn't make it right.<p><a href="https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951</a>
I did an interview a couple years ago when Corgi was first hiring engineers. Nico and I ... did not click and it was probably the least smooth interview I've ever had despite it just being a phone screen.<p>I wouldn't be that surprised if Nico genuinely thinks "we didn't copy the code" is a reasonable defense. It would be a clear cut rule, and extreme "shape rotator" types often have trouble with the fuzziness of things like law. In reality, copyright infringement is often more like the porn test, you know it when you see it.
IANAL but UI is not protectable in the EU. I remember this was relevant when people copied MS offices ribbon ui for Delphi components.
> It might not be enough to get sued<p>Mostly because open source projects rarely sue. If you did this to a more litigious company there's a decent chance they would sue, and I'd give them about a 50/50 chance of winning.<p>Hard to say whether this would be ruled as copying the creative and artistic elements, or just the methods of operation. Copying features is fine, wholesale copying UX quickly becomes copyright infringement
> It might not be enough to get sued. That doesn't make it right.<p>Perhaps that’s enough for them. Legal gray area worked for Uber, AirBnB and many more.<p>As a consumer in not happy though, I don’t like incentivizing companies with such creative approach to law.
> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries<p>That would be my cynical response.
>they copied whole pages verbatim<p>Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.
You might be surprised to learn that the work of a copywriter is also copyrighted.
yes and besides the whole thing that is happening lets not suddenly pretend css and html are code either. There might be bad things going on but we need to maintain our standards!
Can someone give a bit more of context on this thread? I have no idea who Nico is nor what Papermark is or does.<p>As an aside thought not related to the thread: Is it my perception or people are getting more used to not only vibe code things from existing solutions/projects but also "steal" open source code and do whatever the heck they want without complying morally/ethically/legally to the whole premise of open source?<p>I have the feeling that more than ever open source violations are flourishing everywhere without any major legal consequences.
> Is it my perception or people are getting more used to not only vibe code things from existing solutions/projects but also "steal" open source code and do whatever the heck they want without complying morally/ethically/legally to the whole premise of open source?<p>yes. it's way easier to do now.<p>i work on a GPL3 library that parses a hardware audio sampler's binary data files. someone built an app so people can do "stuff" on top of my library, following GPL3 license.<p>someone recently posted an entirely vibe-coded clone of that app, full website with purchase links for $60 odd. completely obvious clone too; the UI was exactly the same minus the different colour scheme. no GPL3 conditions adhered to at all. mods delisted the thread. banned the clone's dev. forum community expressed their support for the original app dev. dmca takedowns were sent out. clone's website went down a few days later.<p>the original app dev was lucky there's only one main forum where people post things for this manufacturer, and the mods <i>hate</i> ai stuff too, which is kind of ironic cos the original app dev vibe codes all his stuff lol. without that forum and those mods, the original app dev would have been fucked tbh (and so would i as the GPL3 library maintainer).<p>centralization has benefits... without that, the only alternative i see is a mass movement where everyone goes closed source until these people learn to respect the work of others.
Judges and governments are pro-business and anti-consumers, anti-citizens. Corporations are getting use to get away with anything and everything.<p>Move fast and break things have changed to be about technology and it is now about the law. Uber popularized the trend, now everybody does the same. AI breaking copyright law is just part of that trend.<p>With the new "laws are for losers" mentality we are in for a hard time.
When the biggest thieves are on track to trillion dollar valuations, what do you expect. Everything on the Internet is free for all now, don’t kid yourself.
If you are convinced this is a winner takes all race to ASI, and ASI results in absolute world dominance, then of course you are never going to feel restricted by current laws, especially not simple IP rules. Because the only way to make 100% sure you lose is not to play.
If you’re a business that deals in documents from external customers / partners, you use a data room like DocSend (by Dropbox) to share and receive documents with access management, analytics, auditing etc.<p>Papermark is an open source alternative to DocSend. Papermark is very popular, as it is a much more cost effective alternative to DocSend — self-host or hosted.<p>Corgi is a YC backed insurance startup that sells insurance to other YC startups. Nico is a founder. Recently they raised $100m at a ~$3bn valuation. They’re one of the darlings of YC right now, endless fawning over them.<p>Since insurance underwriting involves lots of documents, Corgi were paying Dropbox thousands of dollars per month for DocSend. For some reason, Corgi ostensibly formed a team of 12 to build their own DocSend alternative, called Dataroom. And Corgi decided to make it into a SaaS product, pitched as a cheaper DocSend from just $10/month, in an already crowded space.<p>Papermark noticed immediately that Corgi’s Dataroom used a lot of identical language and structure that Papermark’s open source product does. Papermark assumed that Corgi had taken Papermark’s work without attribution. Corgi have denied it, claiming it is just a coincidence that there are word for word matches between the products.<p>Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.
From what I can tell, his argument seems to be that<p>1. no code was manually copied by a developer, and<p>2. all software in the same space copies off of each other<p>But the big giveaway here is the exact same layout/copywriting on both products. Telling an LLM "write this product and build a 1:1 clone" is still copying by all sensible definitions. The fact that he argues nothing was copied is ridiculous.
If we take what they're saying as fact and that they didn't copy and paste the code, but for all intents and purposes the LlM basically did reproduce the same code based on its crawling of the repo and not respecting the license. It would make a great civil case for the courts to decide.<p>Their defence seems to be "well we asked an LLM to reproduce your work, so 'WE' never copied your code". Smells bad to me.
License in question: <a href="https://github.com/papermark/papermark?tab=License-1-ov-file" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/papermark/papermark?tab=License-1-ov-file</a>
It is AGPL, basically means:<p>You have to share the source code even when the user interacts over the network with the software.<p>The project which uses that code, must also be AGPL,<p>There are ways to separate it and go around it, for example, using an AGPL auth server shouldn't affect the code where your business logic lives<p>I am sure they could have found a way to design their product to be compliant, especially following past drama.<p>This is assuming the code is indeed copied, since we don't know that for sure, it does look very similar but I am not sure how that is enforced
tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovation
I like the contradiction on the copycat page:<p>> This action cannot be undone<p>> Freezing is reversible from this page<p>I assume being irreversible is an essential part of the freezing feature.
Isn't this always the case? Most of the time you just don't know where AI stole it from?
Since the Tweet is small enough and a lot of people aren’t reading it (Twitter links don’t work well for those without an account some times) I’ll quote it here<p>> Hey Nico,<p>> It looks like you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark's open source and enterprise-licensed code.<p>> We demand you take this copyright and license infringing product down immediately.<p>> It's not moving fast and breaking things, it's fraud.<p>> It makes the rest of your business questionable and the YC community look terrible.
Is this related to the post where someone copied a UI and said as long as they changed 3% it's fine or totally unrelated?
Missing context.
What a scumbag. The replies from Nico are insane:<p>“Team effort”<p>“:praying-hands (x2)”<p>And so on… The audacity and complete shamelessness…<p>I wonder what narrative they tell themselves.
I wonder if Nico will be feeling so cocky when Papermark gets their general counsel involved. The public Twitter shaming was clearly an attempt to resolve this without litigation, but hey, if that's how Nico truly feels, guess he gets to see what's behind door #2 (a massive bill for a legal retainer).
Hey Claude, copy XYZ, make no mistakes.<p>The meme keeps on memeing.
Ah another YC popcorn fest
What's with this response in the Twitter thread??:<p>"This ain't what a C&D looks like. Implies you don't actually have a leg to stand on. Upload a copy of your official legal demand (from a lawyer) or I'll forever see your company as one who attempts to bully the competition in public"<p>-- <a href="https://xcancel.com/jacobhartmannx/status/2070126008347295967#m" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/jacobhartmannx/status/207012600834729596...</a><p>Is this just trolling?!
What a bizarre complaint! It's not bullying to first try to resolve the matter informally rather than jumping straight into legal action.<p>Besides - who is this guy, and why does he think he's owed sight of any legal paperwork?
Look at his other tweets, he seems to be a sociopathic extremist
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The X link has screenshots where the two products have lots of identical pages. Is that IPable? Honestly don't know since I seem to use a lot of products that look like other products (LibreOffice, etc). But the pages for obscure things looking identical is kind of sus.
Folks... read the actual tweet. They literally didn't vibe code it - they copy-pasted another project.
Yeah, the title that the OP chose is so sufficiently misleading that I think this one will need to be get changed by the mods. Seitz isn't opining on the ethics of vibe coding in his tweet, he's pointing out that Corgi <i>literally</i> just stole Papermark's AGPL codebase and passed it off as vibe coding.
They may have been vibe coding and not realised it was an exact copy. AI sometimes makes verbatim copies of things in its training set.
It's nearly word-for-word the content of the tweet. Right at the top. It isn't misleading unless you literally don't even bother to open the linked content.<p>Just ban users who comment without reading, I think that would go further to keep the quality of discussion high.<p>The number of bots/trolls responding to the title without reading the content and missing the point entirely is astounding, honestly, and I don't think any of those posts are contributing to high quality discussion. We could do without those users.<p>"but but but I can't/won't open twitter links" - then don't flap your yak-hole. Ignoring for a moment that the content has been reproduced in full in this thread, and another user has provided an alternative xcancel link.
It’s an intentionally misleading title, using “you” to imply that the reader is guilty of theft.<p>An honest title would be “Corgi didn’t vibe code it, they stole Papermark’s AGPL code”.<p>Sure, people should read links, but when a writer posts ragebait for engagement, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Ideally yes, but we know people don't RTFA - there's a reason that initialism dates back to early Slashdot.<p>The paraphrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting to convert it to ragebait. Had the OP gone with something like "you didn't vibe code it, you plagiarized Papermark's open source project" (may need some editing to fit under the character limit) it would have at least been more true to the original tweet.
I know I RTFA, and I know I'm not interested in discussing things with people who don't. Maybe others feel differently, because more people is better or something. Information pollution is a serious, persistent, growing problem and I'm just not inclined to be tolerant about it anymore. Mistakes are one thing, deliberate stupidity is another.<p>If you come to book club without reading the book, and you derail the conversation into something completely irrelevant, you're not getting invited back.
I remember a few cases when asking an LLM to do something in the early days yielded not only the code but an author and a COPYRIGHT license.<p>Naturally LLM technology has moved on since then. I don't remember any recent word for word reproductions of a copyright license.<p>There are a lot of people lauding the technology though because it occasionally one-shots a wildly impressive example of something which...already exists.
wait just a second, that's not how to use HN. youre supposed to read the title -> get upset and write a comment -> argue.
Vibe stole it?
Same thing <a href="https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/</a>
I'd suggest replacing that link with <a href="https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095</a>
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What a load of crock.<p>FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing <i>with humans</i>. Some later licenses made the license less amenable for sharing <i>with corporations</i> because some authors didn't feel like they were being treated fairly. Some authors today have similar feelings about their code being used by Gen AI. It is perfectly fine for authors to want to place restrictions on how they want others to use their work.<p>> Step out of the FOSS swamp, step in to human dignity.<p>What is that even supposed to mean?
"Spirit" means nothing when it comes to legal - or even community - compliance. Either something is allowed, or it isn't, and if a license doesn't do everything that a user of said license desires then they should change that license. Just as licenses were made that explicitly made sharing with corporations less amenable, so should licenses re Gen AI usage. Only then is it worth making a case.
I’m old and I don’t recall FOSS being about truly free, truly open, just not for some categories of use.<p>In fact I seem to recall FOSS advocates denouncing licenses that put limits on who could use the software or for what purpose. This “it was always only for humans” take is new to me.
Surely "only for humans" is the obvious default given that there were no AI megacorps when these licenses were written?<p>Surely it's always been obvious that the person doing the sharing is the one to decide on the terms of the sharing? Maybe I want to share my cake with you but not with someone I don't like? How is that not my decision to make?<p>I'm absolutely fine with people having different sharing philosophies. Different licenses with different nuances are a thing. But I don't like this take that everything that was shared is automatically retconned to be included in AI training data. That's not the spirit in which I shared my stuff. Maybe that's the spirit in which you shared yours, and I respect that.
> FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing with humans.<p>That may be true, but I don't think it's obvious. What don't I know about the history of OSS?
>written in the spirit of sharing with humans.<p>Not humans who are using AI tools?
Human dignity when it comes to work and contribution is very simple:<p>Software developers should charge a fair price for their products from their users. That's dignified and beneficial for everybody involved. And it doesn't invite "code stealers" or anybody who wants to reap what they didn't sow.<p>Just like any type of work. Fair compensation is the key. Not working for free for people who don't care about you and then complain that they didn't give you anything.
Developers gave their code out for free, but want to discriminate against people they don't like from using it in ways they dislike.<p>The 'spirit of free software' is bullshit. It's software authoritarianism disguised as a noble cause.
Yo! Open Source Software works within copyright law. Your software should comply with the OSS licence you are forking/redistributing from. If you don't comply, OSS freedoms are void and it defaults back to being copyrighted material for you. Comply with licences. And enjoy the freedoms. Otherwise, you are copying from a copyrighted material. Which is illegal. Comply or write it from scratch.<p>Or... Be nice and ask. People tell u what to do. Don't be rude here.<p>I remember this Video editor software which didn't comply properly with OSS licence of FFMPEG(?). And people told author what to do. It's always cheap to be kind. Or win dumb prizes.
FOSS doesn't mean you give up all rights to your work. In this case, the software is AGPL licensed, which imposes huge list of requirements on copies - including attribution and sharing back changes.<p>FOSS != public domain.
This person is so dangerous that if I offer them to stay in my shaded yard in the middle of the excruciating sun, they will demand that I let them take my house as well.
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AI is busy destroying my art and my livelihood. Fighting back is about as psychotic as drapetomania[0] was.<p>0. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania</a>
No, read the post. This is directly copying another product. "Vibe coding" which may or may not have happened is not the point here.
No. The Unity script reference and documentation probably did not have a license that required you to attribute the original source.
Did you do that for personal use or for billions upon billions of dolars?
This doesn't appear to be AI posturing, did you read the tweet? It is about one product blatantly, directly ripping off another.
Gonna have to see the agent trace on that one.
You didn't code it, you stole it from open source OS and compiler maintainers
"before Bison version 1.24, Bison-generated parsers could be used only in programs that were free software."<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditions.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditio...</a>
Unless you don't copy the license terms, it's impossible to "steal" open-source code. That's... sort of the point.
Many open source licenses levy restrictions upon the acceptable use of the software. Those restrictions may include attribution requirements, up to and including a requirement to include the license when redistributing the code; they may forbid using derivative works for commercial purposes; they may require the downstream project to utilize the same license. Open source is not the same thing as "anybody can do anything they want forever."
> they may forbid using derivative works for commercial purposes<p>The most widely used definitions of “open source” do not allow such a prohibition.
Yup, if we take OSI as defacto authority on open source definition<p>> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor<p>> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.<p><a href="https://opensource.org/osd" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/osd</a>
> Unless you don't copy the license terms
Papermark is AGPL; Corgi must release all its changes.
Copyleft is still a thing. Right to attribution is still a thing. Please, read about it and you will discover that there is a lot of nuance to the open-source code.
It's really hard to not assume this is intentional ragebait.<p>A cursory look reveals they aren't complying. So, as you say, they are stealing. What's the point of this comment?
Stealing it for your use case would take more effort vibe coding. The term is fine as is
LLM generated code could have very similar pattern to existing code with stricter license it trained on. So, it's better to keep them to yourself instead of bothering the public.
It is not possible to steal something which doesn't obey conservation laws. Don't try to scam physics, is always wins.
Don't care. Competition is good for consumers.
It is, but this isn't competition. This just copyright infringement.<p>Competition would be if these people created their own software, possibly innovating and improving it in the process. That would encourage Papermark to improve their own offering, and would create an environment where these businesses are economically incentivized to improve the product or service.<p>Nobody is incentivized to improve the software in question here. If copyright law doesn't protect anything, then improving your product is helping the competition and potentially hurting your business. Same is true if you're the people who did the infringement.
I think it's important to care about these things though. You want competition but you also want fair competition
When it plays fair, sure. Not when it steals.
Let’s not even talk about the feature. Copying the entire visual design itself with superficial tweaks is pretty brazen and, frankly, incredibly lazy.
Who cares if the consumer buys it and uses it? Information is worth nothing anymore, attention is, so if they manage to capture a larger audience somehow, they win.
> Information is worth nothing anymore<p>What do you do for a living? For most of us in the tech industry, information being worth something (because it takes creative and intellectual labor to produce) puts food on our tables.
LLMs produce about 95% of the code at my company and review about 70% of it for 3 years now. Our team has downsized from 40 to 8 people in this time. My creative labor is spent writing harnesses and wrappers. When there is enough of a data distribution on this, the LLMs will be able to do that as well.<p>I have saved up a buffer in funds and bonds because it's going to be over at some point when the company moves from explore to exploit.
This laissez-faire logic is insane, but I think it is telling that a lot of folks here seem to have this mindset and makes me empathize with increasingly nihilistic people.
Stealing is the opposite of competition. It's in the same category as straight killing your competitors.
When competition has no rules it resorts to people banging each other over their heads with clubs.
Close your source if you don't want it to be read by LLM
That's not how licenses work, Papermark is AGPL
"If Disney wants to retain their rights to Mickey they really shouldn't be showing any images of him to the world."
When everyone is using LLMs to suggest IA, build basic UIs, dump out your startup in a day, etc. everything will look the same, even the source code. There will be no way to litigate this. Does it benefit society to force two companies to make their products look different? Where’s the outrage over all basic pencils looking the same? Let the market decide which pencils it prefers.
Being a bot of a devils advocate here. What I do not understand if it just looks similar, or implements the same features, or the code is actually copied and modified, i.e. the source is obviously from papermark. I think interfaces can be copied, thinking along the lines of implementing a protocol or a feature, so that would be legit. The UI looks very similar but if this is a totally different code then what? is it copyright infringement on the look and feel of the papermark brand?<p>Clearly it should be an issue for the investors anyway as it “looks” like a copy in the tweet alone, it might mean this code will eventually become available from download to comply with agpl, which in turn wipes out any moat.