> 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. [...]
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
I'd say it's more like the fuzziness defeats most of the software-style "exploits" those types gravitate towards. The edges of the laws aren't impossibly sharp and executed by dumb machines, so you can't sneak though "gaps" that would be there if those things were true.
For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
A very clear example of this is the 'Sovereign Citizen', who have bizarre beliefs around how to interact with courts. As far as I understand it, there are some 'cheat codes' people believe (incorrectly) are effective in literally getting you out of jail free.
> Another common belief among sovereign citizens is that they can opt out of the purported contract, making themselves immune from the laws they do not wish to follow, by declining to "consent": when confronted by police officers or other officials, sovereign citizens typically attempt to negate their authority by saying, "I do not consent"
Like, why would this be true, and if it was, why would law enforcement and courts go along with it? I find it very odd.
They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"
Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.
I see that I was unclear - I did not mean "the law goes along with this, and I don't know why?" I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".
> I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".
It's an insane degree of self-delusion. No sane and rational person would believe that society had a loophole that allows people to opt-out of following laws by chanting magic invocations and then didn't close the hole after multiple people successfully exploited it.
Said more clearly: the only thing that makes you immune from following the law is wealth and status, and even then it's not guaranteed. You have to be unreasonable to think that as an ordinary joe-schmo you could beat the system in any significant fashion without those.
The worst part is that they manage to get cases dismissed by getting charged for actual crimes that are small and petty, then feel vindicated when charges get dropped, thus leading to perpetuation of their lunatic behavior. They fail to realize that they've been the lucky beneficiary of an overworked DA and a strained system and instead see proof that they were right the whole time. I know this because I hear them say how their cases always get dropped as they get arrested for refusing to provide a driver's license (a crime if operating a motor vehicle on state roads) and other petty crimes in YouTube bodycam videos.
I've been fascinated by this ideology for at least five or six years. Fortunately, people in government are wise to them now. Cops used to be genuinely confused by their babble, but cops and judges now call it out right away by the language and arguments. "I'm traveling" and "Who is the injured party by me not having registration? I move to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction!"
I wanted to drop some of my favorite bits about sovereign citizens here, but honestly most of what they believe requires a lot of explanation to really grasp. A quick glance of this seems a good place for the curious: https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/Sov%20ci...
> why would law enforcement and courts go along with it?
They don't want to deal with it. If someone has one of those SovCit license plates, you know pulling them over is guaranteed to result in frustrating verbal sparring match, which may result in the cop giving up (which is then shared as evidence for the SovCit movement's effectiveness!), or may escalate to a physical altercation.
Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.
> Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.
Probably more of them don't understand. I am very unfortunate to have one in my extended family, and they have fully lost their grip on reality and basic cause-and-effect. They skate by most of the time, which reinforces their beliefs, and then once the pile gets large enough, the whole thing collapses on them, and then cycle starts over.
Steel-manning the sovereign citizens movement (which I don't believe in): they believe authority comes from the consent of the populace, which is a true statement and in many countries founding documents, they mistakenly think that means the law doesn't apply to them when they as an individual do not consent.
They basically don't get that democracy is the tyranny of the many.
Social contract philosophy has always seemed oversimplified to me. Are people in China or Iran consenting? "I consent, so I won't be killed" seems more like coercion.
After reading that article, I still don't see how "shape rotator" types are more likely to prod and poke the grey areas of law.
It's entirely possible that most startup founders are like that (I found out to my own detriment, when a now-YC founder once tried to game the membership system of a community space I help run), and that YC actively looks for that as a trait they like.
This entire thread also reminds me of this PG article on being Relentlessly Resourceful:
> For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?
I got LinkedIn notifications for both Anthropic and OpenAI with my exact job description, but at 3-4x the pay. I said hell no. They would want me to actually work. The job I have now is easy. Plus, they're slated for mass layoffs when the market realigns. I work a gov job that's protected from market layoffs and the security of that is too good to give up.
They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~$1bn. So, they’re worth 3x the exit of the exact same company… because of what, AI? The fact that they’re cloning other software to release SaaS products is extremely bearish. Why are they wasting their time on this? A wildly successful $3bn startup would not spend their precious resources by launching a $10/m document sending SaaS. They’ll be doing down rounds soon enough. Could you imagine Paul Graham encouraging this?
A big part of the US VC operating model these days seems to be just rebuilding existing products with slight changes, then pushing all of their other startups to use that version of it. This is only going to accelerate with AI. Why pay some company you don't own to do thing for you, when you can just copy the company (maybe even improve it in some ways), seed it with with your large existing user base, then have it do the thing for you (while also generating profit from other customers and rapidly scaling in users and valuation itself).
The reality is most of what most tech startups are doing is not actually hard and has no moat. The moat is in getting users/customers - connections/marketing/sales - product quality also matters of course, but there are plenty hyperscaler unicorns who's product is dogshit and vice versa.
Listened to the founder on 20VC episode talk endlessly about sleeping and showering in the office and comparing their insurance company to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
Silicon Valley is just so disconnected from reality.
Would pay good money to see Silicon Valley complete their disconnection from reality and drift off into the void. The rest of us would get some semblance of normality back if they did.
Also, I should add, they’re growing fast because they will underwrite anyone for anything. They’re one “oops our AI underwriting has been taking on far too much risk” away from disaster. That they’re demanding 7 days a week from their employees while spending their time building a dataroom product instead of, I don’t know, improving their underwriting, is a bad sign.
Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims? I assume other YC startups are happy because a) they can’t get insurance anywhere with good underwriting b) they figure YC will bail Corgi out when it goes wrong because seemingly every YC startup depends on them.
“Policyholders should be aware that certain Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be admitted insurers in the state in which the insured risk is located. Policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurers, and certain other Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be subject to all of the insurance laws and regulations of your state. State insurance insolvency guaranty funds may not be available for policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurance companies, offshore insurers, or other non-admitted Specialty Insurance Carriers. In the event of the insolvency of such a carrier, policyholders may not have access to state guaranty fund protection and may bear the risk of the carrier's inability to pay claims.”
If this is the scenario, it's no wonder they're underwriting everyone & everything, and can do this competitively, because a broker would need to find either enough new clients and/or efficiencies to justify being the middleman between the customer and the actual insurer. That's typically been the strategy of every financial tech company; I don't see any secret sauce with Corgi beyond "'cause AI!". Move fast and break things is not what I'd want in my insurance company.
Lmao tech money is fake. Look at how much AI companies are throwing around. Musk is personally worth 1T now supposedly.
It's all virtual valuations. The stock market is poison but most people on here won't admit to that because they have their own interests in it. What a joke our species is lmao. We're still grabbing big sticks to hit each other with and worrying about our neighbors coming to take our rocks because we're all just monkeys still, even though we pretend we're not.
They're willing to admit "5 to 6 days a week" in writing [1]! Crazy stuff. Also a notably huge number of job openings, including for a head of HR [2]. Worrying signs, I would say.
He was bragging about working on weekends and comparing his shitty little insurance company to the Manhattan Project a while back. Somewhere he claimed this company/industry is the most important application of AI in the world. I have no doubt they ripped it off, this guy is not trustworthy to say the least..
Any long-distance bike ride/race fans here? the Tour Divide just completed and the record was shattered, not by riding for as long as possible, but with detailed planning, a dialed setup and getting a (relatively) lot of sleep & rest. Seems like this approach is applicable to many domains, but it's a lot more work than the obvious approach of "work more".
Kind of serious question: in tech circles is the Manhattan project generally seen as a _good_ thing, these days? Why use it as the example and not, say, Apollo? "We're working really hard so we can build things with the power to kill you all" is such weird messaging.
There is no such thing as "tech circles", tech is now a huge huge industry with 10M people in the US alone and no uniform political beliefs. There are the beliefs of some of the vocal billionaires and VCs which media likes to equate to "tech", but they are a tiny fraction of tech. Presumably he said it because he's a narcissist moron, I don't know.
If I had to describe it, the zeitgeist of VC/Founder tech now is kind of originated in "It's Time to Build" [1]. The diagnosis is that the nation is incapable of doing anything - too hamstrung by bureaucracy, laws, congress gridlock etc. The same kind of things that MAGA uses to justify authoritarianism. The movement now basically prescribes action, agency, urgency, conquest void of any reflection of what the goals should be, any question of morality or values etc.. just build (what you're being told/funded to build).
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.
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
I'm pretty sure that making new software that replicate the _functionality_ of other existing software is perfectly legal.
If not, how do you explain the thousands of Tetris clones? The thousands of Doom clones? The hundreds of Excel clones (forgot which was the first one, it's not Excel but that's besides the point, which is that's perfectly legal). Another commenter already mentioned Android SDK vs Java, which Oracle (fortunately) lost.
Yes, even the "copywriting" is fair game, unless it's pages and pages of text (e.g. don't copy/paste the documentation).
The design mustn't be identical but if it's essentially identical, that's legal - sometimes there aren't 10 ways to do something.
Now if the question is whether it's legal to publish software written by LLMs, given that they've been trained on other people's code - that's an entirely different question.
This absolutely needs to go to court. We badly need to know what the law even is, and this is the most perfectly blatant example we're going to get of bad behavior that might or might not be legal
The OSS team affected could contact major insurers and insurance industry trade orgs for legal and financial assistance. It's quite likeky this Laqua guy has made enemies and his "startup ethics" potentially has Corgi violating numerous laws and regulations in what is a fairly well regulated industry.
We’ve normalized stealing code en masse so this will pass as perfectly fine behavior - what LLMs put out is a spectrum of infringement, this is just in the more obvious end.
Which would bring you nowhere. If they didn't change this at some point, I remember at the time everyone was staring to use ChatGPT that OpenAI wrote in their terms that the user is responsible for the model's output. If they can do this, I expect other model providers doing this as well.
I think what you mean is that functional designs aren’t protected by copyright. Of course you could patent it.
But in this case they almost exactly copied the graphic design and copied the text verbatim which would maybe infringe copyright.
The law cares about the process you took to get something, not just the final output. Stealing something and then changing some stuff to try to make it not look identical doesn't invalidate the fact that you stole it. I can't download someone's song, strip out the bass line and record my own, and then pass off the new song combining the old music with my bass recording as an original song.
I don't know whether that's what happened here or claim to know exactly what the constraints of IP law for this specific instance are, but "some stuff was changed" does not necessarily seem sufficient as a defense in general. Depending on the exact type of IP law that covers this there are questions like whether the changes were substantial enough to make it an original work or whether the way that the old stuff was used constitutes fair use.
The legal ruling that makes what he does legal even if he didn't get permission (although he does) is about parodies; it's not clear why you think that would apply here. If all he did was change the title and the phrasing of some things, it's doubtful it would be.
The closest equivalent I can think of here would be starting from a blank slate, producing the layout manually to be roughly the same (similar to recording the music from scratch to match up with the original), and then come up with completely original wording that's about something unrelated to the original wording. That doesn't seem anywhere close to what anyone here is claiming.
That's debatable and would have to be proven in court. Weird Al's works aren't really critiques of the original songs so a parody defense would be very difficult to make. One could argue that the humor in his lyrics could have been set to another tune to the same effect, making his appropriation of copyrighted material unnecessary and therefore not fair use.
Weird that you don't mind misrepresenting that intention of mine. Or are you under the impression that you have a telepathic insight into the minds of others?
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!
One other Twitter comments reveals that they probably just asked an AI to copy Papermark. Evidenced by AI comments saying the page was aligned to the "reference"
Unreal. I had to go back to the original Tweet to confirm that screenshot wasn’t faked.
The comment clearly says “Mirror’s the reference design’s”
I don’t know how they could try to spin that as anything other than having an LLM launder someone’s code as a “reference design”
Even if they try to argue that the “reference design” was Figma, the identical copy means they had to have copied Papermark into the reference design.
The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company. I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.
> The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company.
I wish this were true, but the current political and corporate climate is that nearly anything is justifiable as long as you win, where winning is money or power. Fraud, corruption, extortion, etc.
> I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.
I find most b2b transactions are hostile, and the purpose of sales or customer success is to smooth over the hostility. Tremendously more true in the B2C space, and only accelerated by the aforementioned political and corporate climate.
In other words, as long as their staff is charismatic / crafty enough, this “scandal” will slough right off.
Can someone give a bit more of context on this thread? I have no idea who Nico is nor what Papermark is or does.
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?
I have the feeling that more than ever open source violations are flourishing everywhere without any major legal consequences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.
A startup raises ~$100m at a ~$3bn valuation and forms a team of 12 employees including their Head of Operations to build a clone of a product they pay less than $1,000/month for while they have more than 50 open roles they are hiring for.
Hmmm, yes, a very good use of available resources.
> Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.
I'm not up to date on Corgi, but from what I was reading about Delve, it was the "much more" (fabricating SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance) that caused them to get into trouble.
Thanks for the insight. So regarding what you explained above, is Corgi's fate supposed to be similar to Delve's? Or are those numbers so big/important for YC that they won't be banned?
Not necessarily. Delve did a lot of bad things, the primary reason for their removal was misrepresentations they made to other YC startups, i.e: YC startups paid them for security audits that turned out to be bunk which caused a big headache for their customers. Basically, the rest of YC wanted them gone for causing widespread chaos.
Delve’s first drama was around copying from other startups, it was later that their betrayal came out. Corgi is currently at the copying from other startups stage… one might choose to believe there is a path they’re following rather than this being a one off.
For example, I outlined in another comment how their product is not what it seems, it is not traditional insurance, it takes advantage of an esoteric piece of insurance regulation. They’re doing very aggressive underwriting without any of the traditional insurance regulatory protections applying to them.
it takes advantage of an esoteric piece of insurance regulation. They’re doing very aggressive underwriting without any of the traditional insurance regulatory protections applying to them.
elsewhere;
"Laqua, whose father is a lawyer for an insurance company"
Delve screwed over other YC startups, Corgi is stealing from a non-YC startup. Therefore, there will be no official censure from YC. This is a pretty well-established fact pattern historically. Just don't mess with the YC community if you want to stay in YC.
I don't think there's some sort of "line" that Delve crossed and Corgi has not, more likely the financial upside for YC wrt Corgi is much, much bigger. They're not going to mess with that even if the screw over a few of their other startups. YC absolutely loves to tout this family dynamic across all their companies and alumni, but there is no way the relationship between a few dozen startups looks anything like that between literally thousands of companies. It's a scaled up tech-hype startup machine now, and has attracted the same MBA-types they supposedly defeated 20+ years ago.
The last sentence is false: More than ever, YC is most seeking highly technical founders.
It's also false that YC will overlook IP theft for the sake of financial upside. One of the most fundamental principles that YC drums into startups is that they shouldn't breach software licenses. This comes from personal, painful experience for pg in the Viaweb days; a dispute over IP nearly killed their acquisition by Yahoo (or a major funding round soon before that). YC counsels startups to be super-prudent and upstanding about software licensing. Sure, sometimes startups will be cavalier about it and cross a line, in which case YC tells them to fix it immediately.
> 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?
yes. it's way easier to do now. edit -- plus a lot of new ai-only entrant devs don't understand/care that foss is about freedoms rather than free as in beer.
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.
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.
the original app dev was lucky there's only one main forum where people post things for this manufacturer, and the mods hate 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).
centralization has benefits... without that, the only alternative i see is a mass movement where everyone goes closed source to force a conversation about respecting the work of others. we've been running on an honour/community backlash system until now.
I've seen this same thing happen with MIT licenses...I would only consider it a real win or loss for FOSS when a court says something about it, and I don't consider facilitating online bullying to be something to be proud of. Just use the law like an adult, starting with a simple C&D.
Judges and governments are pro-business and anti-consumers, anti-citizens. Corporations are getting use to get away with anything and everything.
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.
With the new "laws are for losers" mentality we are in for a hard time.
No morals, no ethics. The other day I skimmed some of the countless vibe coding videos on YT and the vast, vast majority surfacing through a naive search are basically get rich quick crap.
Identify a one-feature app that (supposedly) makes money and vibe it up. Done is your "I vibe coded a 10M MAU app in 40 minutes" vid.
From crypto to NFT to vibez. Rotten to the core, the difference is that this time around LLM are actually useful in some areas.
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.
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.
The shared fiction of "intellectual property" is crumbling. People who grew up with normalized piracy at the consumer level and industrialized exploitation of artists' works at the corporate level don't see the value of it.
Add to that the fact that anyone can simply do what they want with the bits on their computer, and sharing anything over the internet means giving them a copy of those bits, the technical barriers are gone too.
From what I can tell, his argument seems to be that
1. no code was manually copied by a developer, and
2. all software in the same space copies off of each other
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.
ShadCN is the most popular design system that AI automatically reaches for 90%+ times on its own. It's also the default most platforms like lovable, etc.
He's talking about the layout & styles, not literally verbatim copy for copy of the 4 images. Shadcn is an open-source collection of reusable UI components for building modern web applications.
I know most people refer to the design system as shadcn, but I was floored when I learnt that shadcn is the handle of a (now-)Vercel employee, and the design system is properly called shadcn/ui.
I guess that is at the core of Google vs Oracle, they copied the API kept the implementation clean-room. It was definitvely ruled that this was fair use. If fair use applies to something as strict as re-implementing an API, I would argue it applies to something much more elusive, like cloning UI/layout.
they probably need to sue to enforce this, I think this is actually going to be a larger issue than just corgi. copyright with these models really is just a mess
What I don't understand is that if a lawsuit happens, then must the plaintiff produce their source code for verification ? Even so a git tree is trivial to change into some other arbitrary code even if a license violation has occurred. I also heard if proven the consequences are that they would lose all revenue starting from when the violation has occured
I used to have a lot of respect for YC and the kind of founders it used to attract. However, over the past few years, they have started attracting a certain type of founder that most people wouldn’t associate with.
The decline in the quality of YC's founder pool and founder reputation is tarnishing its brand, but I doubt anyone there realizes it, or is willing to publicly admit it.
It’s egregious that a portfolio company passed off clear AGPL code as its own and doubled down on defending their actions when there was clear evidence showing that they had indeed copied the code. Any well-meaning person should call this out, including anyone who cares deeply about YC and its reputation.
If a founder is willing to lie about something like this, imagine the other things he would lie about?
> However, over the past few years, they have started attracting a certain type of founder that most people wouldn’t associate with.
I don't follow YC acceptance enough to be able to see a trend, but there's one founder in one of 2025's batches that I feel the same way about: dodgy, questionable sense of ethics, never stops to consider whether they're in the wrong or how their actions may affect others detrimentally.
Then again, that could be a trait of a potentially successful founder. Or a psychopath.
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.
Their defence seems to be "well we asked an LLM to reproduce your work, so 'WE' never copied your code". Smells bad to me.
> Their defence seems to be "well we asked an LLM to reproduce your work, so 'WE' never copied your code".
A German court recently ruled that the runners of the agent are responsible for the agent's output. Not in your test environment, of course, but when it reaches the public.
Yeah. Like, you can do all this without LLMs. "Oh, I didn't copy this open source repo with a restrictive license, I just found an fork that was identical except for having removed the license. So we used that."
That's not how licenses work, and the license holder can absolutely tell you to get bent and/or pony up.
Peter is currently threatening me with a defamation suit, he seems to be quite the litigious man. My defamation suit is because I wrote a post summarizing my comments from this thread about Corgi: https://reticulating.substack.com/p/ycombinators-corgi-insur...
I guess when you're working 7 days a week you've gotta find something to fill the time with.
Peter Skaliy, Head of Legal at Corgi, same person who sent the cease and desist to people on Twitter, is filing a suit against me for defamation because of that Substack post.
"Corgi builds insurance structures that allow us to best serve the needs of our customers. For technology companies, operating a technology liability line through a Risk Retention Group is not unusual, improper, or exotic; it is a standard insurance structure for specialty liability risks where similarly situated businesses benefit from tailored underwriting, specialized coverage, and risk alignment. The suggestion that Corgi customers are unknowingly taking on “balance sheet risk,” member-assessment risk, or responsibility for unrelated insureds’ liabilities is false.
Your draft’s statement that “Corgi will help you share that risk,” combined with the question whether customers understand the risk of other companies in the group, does not merely describe RRGs in the abstract. It falsely implies that Corgi leaves customers exposed to open ended financial liability for other insureds. That implication is defamatory and false. RRGs are regulated insurance carriers subject to financial, reserve, governance, and regulatory requirements. They are not informal risk sharing clubs where policyholders unknowingly become responsible for each other’s balance sheets.
The RRG structure unique to Corgi. Major insurance groups use different insurer structures for different classes of risk because different risks are best served by different structures. Berkshire Hathaway, which the draft itself invokes, has affiliated insurance operations involving Risk Retention Groups in specialty liability markets, including medical and legal professional liability. That underscores the point: RRGs are a widely recognized insurance structure for specialty liability lines, and allow insurers to provide more tailored coverage options rather than issuing a generic policy.
The draft’s statement that Corgi “innovated with AI in a regulated industry by cutting corners” is also false and defamatory. Corgi raised millions pre-revenue and spent nearly two years building and obtaining regulatory approvals for its insurance operations, including approvals and requirements relating to reserves, pricing, liquidity, governance, and compliance. That is the opposite of “cutting corners.” Any allegation that Corgi used AI to evade regulatory approval, underwriting standards, reserve requirements, pricing controls, liquidity controls, or other compliance obligations is false.
Any article suggesting otherwise, including by implying that Corgi misleads customers, conceals the RRG structure, exposes policyholders to undisclosed balance-sheet risk, or uses RRGs and AI to evade proper underwriting or regulatory obligations, is false and highly damaging.
To be clear, if you publish these false statements or defamatory implications, Corgi will sue you personally and will pursue all available claims and remedies against you and any other responsible parties. Corgi has enforced its rights before and will do so again. You should not mistake this for an abstract legal reservation."
Blows my mind investors see this as normal behavior. The insurance market is by no means aware of twitter at all haha, such a bubble of people talking.
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
> Hey Nico,
> It looks like you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark's open source and enterprise-licensed code.
> We demand you take this copyright and license infringing product down immediately.
> It's not moving fast and breaking things, it's fraud.
> It makes the rest of your business questionable and the YC community look terrible.
I wonder if this is a bigger risk/more widespread in the AI era? Could a bad actor with a copy of someone else's proprietary source code train an LLM on it and come out with code that does not show enough evidence of theft?
Ahhh, that explains now why working 7 days a week is necessary for this Manhattan-project-level startup, he's not ‘Grindmaxxing’ by waking up with the 5 AM club every day!
What's with this response in the Twitter thread??:
"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"
Yes he's trolling. His bio is "CEO at @IronGorillaAI - proudly replacing white collar work with autonomous AI agents, one job at a time. American emigrant." and look at one of his recent posts lmao
> THIS GUY ONLY WANTS 7 DAYS IN OFFICE.
> At @IronGorillaAI, we run on the French Republican Calendar.
> That’s 10 days a week.
> We mandate all 10 in the office.
> No hybrid. No remote. No negotiations.
> If that sentence triggers you, you were never built for this anyway.
This is exactly the kind of legal gray area move that YC companies like to take advantage of. It's not technically illegal for Reddit to fake users, for Airbnb to piggyback off Craigslist, for OpenAI to be a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary, for PearAI to fork a competitor and relabel it as their own, for Flock to accidentally misidentify criminals, for Delve to fake SOCS compliance, or for Corgi to steal a competitor's product by having an LLM reproduce it instead of copying the code directly. If anything, YC will just help them with their legal defense.
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).
> it's pretty clear that YC does not care about a negative reputation.
Perhaps not what the general public thinks, but I assume YC cares a lot about its reputation among VC firms that fund its companies, because VCs don't like being scammed (directly, or indirectly through unknowingly funding scams)
Many YC companies do bad things, and I guess they do so independently. There may well be repercussions for the most egregious cases, but I suspect a lot of ill-behaviour simply flies under the radar.
For example only yesterday I got spam from an YC company, Polymath, and I replied back asking where they got my details from - no response yet. Once I get something I'll make a GDPR subject access request, then a deletion request. I hope the overhead of that causes them to rethink their spamming campaign.
I have also gotten spammed by a YC startup, but they spammed an email that I use in git commits, and lead with "I saw your fork of $POPULAR_PROJECT, pretty cool!" or something like that and then continued to pester me with their drip program even as I replied asking them to never email me again.
My comment was not about doing a generic bad thing - it was about scammy behavior in particular (which ties to the Delve incident). YC depends on the VC ecosystem to fund its companies, and no VC wants to be scammed. If a reputation of cultivating/condoning/obliviousness scammers takes root, that would be bad for business.
> But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.
I am not complaining, or even expecting a moral decision. I'm legitimately curious how this will shake out, for purely capitalistic, reputation-management reasons.
Good luck with referring to GDPR. Try clicking through YC startup list and see how many load GA and other trackers onto their landing pages without a consent banner or even a privacy policy sometimes. It’s baffling.
I didn't realise that one could forcibly require a competitor to disclose trade secrets.
Now, INAL of course, but I would think this sort of mechanism would be quite gameable from both sides ( i) a wealthy competitor legally forcing a promising upstart to reveal source ii) a copycat working out some kind of arrangement where the code itself is licensed to them via shell company based overseas.)
As with most legal hacks, the courts figured this one out long ago :).
If someone is trying to dig into their competitor's trade secrets via discovery, the court offers multiple ways to safeguard against that. The defendant can identify information as a trade secret and ask that it be protected in some way - for example, the documents may be restricted to "Attorneys' Eyes Only", so while the plaintiff's attorneys can review the material, the plaintiffs themselves are barred from reviewing it. Or the judge themselves may get involved in an in-camera session.
There are software engineers that specialise in source code analysis that lawyers will often use in these cases. The engineers will be given access to source code in secure environments where they're not allowed to bring any device in or out. They review, analyse, and write up a report using pen and paper, that can then be reviewed by the lawyers.
Absolutely. It was very similar to one of my first jobs: "Legal Technical Analyst". Not as much time doing deep source analysis, but basically translating things for lawyers: "So as far as this claim of copyright/plagiarism... this block here, that's CS 101 stuff, that block there, that's novel, and does x, y and z".
With LLMs being able to replicate simple SaaS tools we are going to see a lot of "you stole my idea" and regardless of it being right or wrong, the judgement of time tends to be defensibility.
I wouldn't bet on small scale software defensibility in the future. Just being practical...
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.
Yes, written verbiage is subject to copyright. UI is also subject to copyright. The degree of similarity is astounding - this is not an edge case at all.
The lack of understanding of copyright on HN does astound me, however.
This isn't a case of convergent design (OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word), this is identical word-for-word with a simple s/room/dataroom:
> When enabled, folders uploaded to Rooms will be mirrored into 'All Documents' with the same structure.
When disabled, all documents will be placed in a single folder named after the Room in 'All Documents!
> This action cannot be undone.
- All documents and folders will be permanently removed
- All links and viewer access will be revoked
- All analytics, audit logs, and Q&A data will be lost
- Group permissions and branding will be deleted
IP and Copyright are two different concepts. Protected IP tends to break into trade secrets (protected by secrecy) and patents (protected by disclosure).
Similarly, trade dress and trademarks are related but different, and in USA most Trademarks™ are not Registered® (although to get ® you generally use ™ along the way), and most trade dress is not either.
X is not even in the top 10 active user count. It ranked just above Quora and below Reddit. It's just not a super popular platform. X fans constantly have to denigrate everyone else as a "loud minority".
Clearly, "the community" is not all on X. If it were, why would we be having conversations here on Hacker News?
Anyways, the real answer you'll still see some X links here is that
1. A not insignificant amount of people in our industry are aligned with the X CEO and the positions he expresses through his accounts, Grok, etc., and
In general the art community - not just limited to pornographers - seems to have stuck by X despite all the AI stuff. When I see people posting art it's almost always an X link, even for artists who have accounts on bsky or instagram or whatever.
I believe you, but our personal experiences are simply the opposite here. I do see X links occasionally but Instagram, BlueSky, and even Tumblr seem dominant. (Often with some presence on at least one of Patreon, Substack, Cara, or Kofi).
If you drop a screenshot of a web page into something like Figma Make, you can get it to produce a strikingly close replica. I get that vibe from the screenshots. They are very similar but not exactly the same. That's probably also why a lot of the copy is the same.
Not getting your magic text generator to reword the copy for you is just sloppy.
AI will generally err on the side of slavishly copying any reference. I'm having this problem at work lately. Teammates will be asked to implement a new module for <new data integration> into the codebase, and they'll just point Claude at it and say "integrate <new thing> into this codebase" in one shot and what it will do is create a function for function clone of the first data integration's client, down to implementing copies of the private utility methods.
fraudulent people are gonna do more fraudulent shit. more news at 11.
once the money dries up, these people will be on the next 'wave' without retrospective of what led to failures before. the past gets buried like it never existed.
ehhhh I'm not a corgi stan but I'd bet they just took the design & copy, which is totally fine imo. Often better to just take another's design instead of spend a bunch of cycles figuring out flow. This is doubly true for secondary pages/layouts/features.
If I were them, I'd have changed copy and probably done some internal testing to smooth rough edges/improve where needed but sounds like they're moving as quickly as possible.
If they did just copy paste code, straight to jail...
Design (output of designers) and copy (output of copywriters) are subject to the same copyright law as code (output of programmers). Programmers are not the only people whose intellectual property is protected.
I'd be very surprised if the very-similar-looking design of corgi's product breaches any copyright law, copyright of design or layout is much more finicky than copyright of code. This seems like more of a moral issue than a legal one.
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 literally just stole Papermark's AGPL codebase and passed it off as vibe coding.
Short segments of popular works sure. Many UI pages with identical layouts and copy, essentially zero chance. The agent had access to the original code at inference time.
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.
Just ban users who comment without reading, I think that would go further to keep the quality of discussion high.
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.
"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.
Ideally yes, but we know people don't RTFA - there's a reason that initialism dates back to early Slashdot.
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.
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.
Naturally LLM technology has moved on since then. I don't remember any recent word for word reproductions of a copyright license.
There are a lot of people lauding the technology though because it occasionally one-shots a wildly impressive example of something which...already exists.
FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing with humans. Some later licenses made the license less amenable for sharing with corporations 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.
> Step out of the FOSS swamp, step in to human dignity.
"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.
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?
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?
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.
Human dignity when it comes to work and contribution is very simple:
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.
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.
Even so, what's wrong with this? They told you up front that they're going to discriminate. Students can use the code freely, businesses may struggle. People don't need to be fair.
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.
Or... Be nice and ask. People tell u what to do. Don't be rude here.
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.
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.
Has any group of workers ever "won" a long-term victory against a new technology? There are plenty of short-term concessions made in the face of powerful trade union opposition, but I can't think of any technology that was just stopped dead to appease workers with obsolete skills.
That assumes we're talking about technologies that are legal and in some way beneficial. AI is basically large-scale copyright infringement. If allowed to continue, human authors (I'm including programmers here) will eventually just stop publishing, because why feed the machine that's busy replacing you? You're not even getting paid for it, because the magic box can do the same thing you can for cheaper.
Thing is, everything AI produces is derivative; it cannot make anything truly original. Therefore widespread AI adoption will inevitably lead to scientific and cultural stagnation.
So we'll have our magic box that can perform our every wish. And we'll all be worse off for it.
The tweet was fine - it was directly addressing Corgi's claim that they had "vibe coded" DataRoom when they had copied and pasted it from Papermark. The problem is the OP chose to perform a contextectomy on the tweet and make it look like it's making a completely different argument.
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.
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.
If the UI was novel enough then there would be a software patent for it in this case. Anyway I’m not sure what your point is? Copyright is a dated concept and AI only reinforces that. Do you really believe the first one to prompt an AI in a specific way should be allowed to enforce exclusive ownership of the output? That’s insane.
It is, but this isn't competition. This just copyright infringement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. It's a sarcasm of the new reality. What is copying vs writing from scratch? The line is blurred now, non-existent. You can ask an LLM to re-write any open source to a degree where there is no definite way to say that it's a derivative.
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."
Yup, if we take OSI as defacto authority on open source definition
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> 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.
Well, if it's my memory at fault then I apologize. My memory of the comment I replied to didn't include the initial qualifying phrase with either word choice.
Copyright violation is not theft. Your effort to create something that can be effortlessly copied conveys to you no property. Society deems it beneficial to grant a time limited monopoly on copying it to spur innovation.
Stealing a car - or anything tangible - means... the owner is very literally deprived of the benefits of owning said car/thing. Can't really say the same for a copied pattern of bits.
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.
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?
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.
I do not see how it is clear and which license is affected. People mix up agpl license terms which is not clear if being violated here and copyright based on branding. agpl does not cover the looks, it is all about the copy-left nature and code availability. I use the same licensing but struggle to so how could you enforce it if the code is different (not sure if it is different here).
Their response:
> 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. [...]
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.
https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951
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.
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.
> It would be a clear cut rule, and extreme "shape rotator" types...
It had to look that slang up: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words.
> ...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.
I'd say it's more like the fuzziness defeats most of the software-style "exploits" those types gravitate towards. The edges of the laws aren't impossibly sharp and executed by dumb machines, so you can't sneak though "gaps" that would be there if those things were true.
For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
A very clear example of this is the 'Sovereign Citizen', who have bizarre beliefs around how to interact with courts. As far as I understand it, there are some 'cheat codes' people believe (incorrectly) are effective in literally getting you out of jail free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
> Another common belief among sovereign citizens is that they can opt out of the purported contract, making themselves immune from the laws they do not wish to follow, by declining to "consent": when confronted by police officers or other officials, sovereign citizens typically attempt to negate their authority by saying, "I do not consent"
Like, why would this be true, and if it was, why would law enforcement and courts go along with it? I find it very odd.
They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"
Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.
I see that I was unclear - I did not mean "the law goes along with this, and I don't know why?" I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".
> I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".
It's an insane degree of self-delusion. No sane and rational person would believe that society had a loophole that allows people to opt-out of following laws by chanting magic invocations and then didn't close the hole after multiple people successfully exploited it.
Said more clearly: the only thing that makes you immune from following the law is wealth and status, and even then it's not guaranteed. You have to be unreasonable to think that as an ordinary joe-schmo you could beat the system in any significant fashion without those.
The worst part is that they manage to get cases dismissed by getting charged for actual crimes that are small and petty, then feel vindicated when charges get dropped, thus leading to perpetuation of their lunatic behavior. They fail to realize that they've been the lucky beneficiary of an overworked DA and a strained system and instead see proof that they were right the whole time. I know this because I hear them say how their cases always get dropped as they get arrested for refusing to provide a driver's license (a crime if operating a motor vehicle on state roads) and other petty crimes in YouTube bodycam videos.
I've been fascinated by this ideology for at least five or six years. Fortunately, people in government are wise to them now. Cops used to be genuinely confused by their babble, but cops and judges now call it out right away by the language and arguments. "I'm traveling" and "Who is the injured party by me not having registration? I move to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction!"
I wanted to drop some of my favorite bits about sovereign citizens here, but honestly most of what they believe requires a lot of explanation to really grasp. A quick glance of this seems a good place for the curious: https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/Sov%20ci...
> why would law enforcement and courts go along with it?
They don't want to deal with it. If someone has one of those SovCit license plates, you know pulling them over is guaranteed to result in frustrating verbal sparring match, which may result in the cop giving up (which is then shared as evidence for the SovCit movement's effectiveness!), or may escalate to a physical altercation.
Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.
> Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.
Probably more of them don't understand. I am very unfortunate to have one in my extended family, and they have fully lost their grip on reality and basic cause-and-effect. They skate by most of the time, which reinforces their beliefs, and then once the pile gets large enough, the whole thing collapses on them, and then cycle starts over.
> Like, why would this be true
Steel-manning the sovereign citizens movement (which I don't believe in): they believe authority comes from the consent of the populace, which is a true statement and in many countries founding documents, they mistakenly think that means the law doesn't apply to them when they as an individual do not consent.
They basically don't get that democracy is the tyranny of the many.
Social contract philosophy has always seemed oversimplified to me. Are people in China or Iran consenting? "I consent, so I won't be killed" seems more like coercion.
What is tolerated is consented to in a sense. The alternative is rejection of the contract terms but you have to be willing to bet your life on it.
I don't see how that could be called consent. No one would say someone consented to sex, for example, because they weren't willing to die by refusing.
After reading that article, I still don't see how "shape rotator" types are more likely to prod and poke the grey areas of law.
It's entirely possible that most startup founders are like that (I found out to my own detriment, when a now-YC founder once tried to game the membership system of a community space I help run), and that YC actively looks for that as a trait they like.
This entire thread also reminds me of this PG article on being Relentlessly Resourceful:
https://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
> For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?
> I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?
I would imagine that those motions at least have some plausible legal merit.
A software engineer would file a literal truckload of motions that each say "poop", and feel very clever about their "expliot."
Obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/1494/
I never made it to the interview phase because on the phone screen they mentioned they all work 7 days a week in office. nope nope nope nope.
We should thank companies for warning us during the interview process that they are so separated from reality (especially in the AI era)
If AI can’t make them recognize a work life balance has value then it’s easy to see they don’t believe the “force multiplier” BS they are peddling
I got LinkedIn notifications for both Anthropic and OpenAI with my exact job description, but at 3-4x the pay. I said hell no. They would want me to actually work. The job I have now is easy. Plus, they're slated for mass layoffs when the market realigns. I work a gov job that's protected from market layoffs and the security of that is too good to give up.
They are worth 3 billion after two years so it seems like they are doing all right with their strategy although I'm old now and don't want to do that
They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~$1bn. So, they’re worth 3x the exit of the exact same company… because of what, AI? The fact that they’re cloning other software to release SaaS products is extremely bearish. Why are they wasting their time on this? A wildly successful $3bn startup would not spend their precious resources by launching a $10/m document sending SaaS. They’ll be doing down rounds soon enough. Could you imagine Paul Graham encouraging this?
A big part of the US VC operating model these days seems to be just rebuilding existing products with slight changes, then pushing all of their other startups to use that version of it. This is only going to accelerate with AI. Why pay some company you don't own to do thing for you, when you can just copy the company (maybe even improve it in some ways), seed it with with your large existing user base, then have it do the thing for you (while also generating profit from other customers and rapidly scaling in users and valuation itself).
The reality is most of what most tech startups are doing is not actually hard and has no moat. The moat is in getting users/customers - connections/marketing/sales - product quality also matters of course, but there are plenty hyperscaler unicorns who's product is dogshit and vice versa.
Listened to the founder on 20VC episode talk endlessly about sleeping and showering in the office and comparing their insurance company to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
Silicon Valley is just so disconnected from reality.
Would pay good money to see Silicon Valley complete their disconnection from reality and drift off into the void. The rest of us would get some semblance of normality back if they did.
Also, I should add, they’re growing fast because they will underwrite anyone for anything. They’re one “oops our AI underwriting has been taking on far too much risk” away from disaster. That they’re demanding 7 days a week from their employees while spending their time building a dataroom product instead of, I don’t know, improving their underwriting, is a bad sign.
Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims? I assume other YC startups are happy because a) they can’t get insurance anywhere with good underwriting b) they figure YC will bail Corgi out when it goes wrong because seemingly every YC startup depends on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_retention_group
“Policyholders should be aware that certain Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be admitted insurers in the state in which the insured risk is located. Policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurers, and certain other Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be subject to all of the insurance laws and regulations of your state. State insurance insolvency guaranty funds may not be available for policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurance companies, offshore insurers, or other non-admitted Specialty Insurance Carriers. In the event of the insolvency of such a carrier, policyholders may not have access to state guaranty fund protection and may bear the risk of the carrier's inability to pay claims.”
https://www.corgi.insure/disclaimers
> Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims?
Actually normally it’s fine because it’s rarely the startup selling insurance who’s doing the underwriting.
Corgi is more worrying because they’re (apparently) underwriting too.
My understanding is a normal insurance tech startup would be acting as a broker.
A rare but sensible insurance tech startup would use external underwriters and reinsurance and provide insolvency protection.
Corgi doesn’t have any external underwriters, doesn’t have any insolvency protection, doesn’t have any reinsurance.
I think they’re bad on all 3 points, not just the underwriting?
If this is the scenario, it's no wonder they're underwriting everyone & everything, and can do this competitively, because a broker would need to find either enough new clients and/or efficiencies to justify being the middleman between the customer and the actual insurer. That's typically been the strategy of every financial tech company; I don't see any secret sauce with Corgi beyond "'cause AI!". Move fast and break things is not what I'd want in my insurance company.
look at coalition or atbay as an example of how an insurtech starts underwriting and moves into capacity later successfully
Is that how things work now? Well then, I m worth five billion nd say things should stop working that way. Persuaded?
Lmao tech money is fake. Look at how much AI companies are throwing around. Musk is personally worth 1T now supposedly.
It's all virtual valuations. The stock market is poison but most people on here won't admit to that because they have their own interests in it. What a joke our species is lmao. We're still grabbing big sticks to hit each other with and worrying about our neighbors coming to take our rocks because we're all just monkeys still, even though we pretend we're not.
> Musk is personally worth 1T now supposedly.
Not after all the SpaceX "settling": https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2026/06/24/elon-musk-...
They're willing to admit "5 to 6 days a week" in writing [1]! Crazy stuff. Also a notably huge number of job openings, including for a head of HR [2]. Worrying signs, I would say.
[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/X...
[2]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/Y...
Why do you need 7 days a week from your engineers when AI easily replaces engineers?
didnt click Genuinely Just curious, did you write this with llm?
is "we didn't copy the code" NOTA
He was bragging about working on weekends and comparing his shitty little insurance company to the Manhattan Project a while back. Somewhere he claimed this company/industry is the most important application of AI in the world. I have no doubt they ripped it off, this guy is not trustworthy to say the least..
https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2061130574358773852?s=20
Any long-distance bike ride/race fans here? the Tour Divide just completed and the record was shattered, not by riding for as long as possible, but with detailed planning, a dialed setup and getting a (relatively) lot of sleep & rest. Seems like this approach is applicable to many domains, but it's a lot more work than the obvious approach of "work more".
VC startup world is not about intelligence. It’s about impressing investors.
Kind of serious question: in tech circles is the Manhattan project generally seen as a _good_ thing, these days? Why use it as the example and not, say, Apollo? "We're working really hard so we can build things with the power to kill you all" is such weird messaging.
There is no such thing as "tech circles", tech is now a huge huge industry with 10M people in the US alone and no uniform political beliefs. There are the beliefs of some of the vocal billionaires and VCs which media likes to equate to "tech", but they are a tiny fraction of tech. Presumably he said it because he's a narcissist moron, I don't know.
If I had to describe it, the zeitgeist of VC/Founder tech now is kind of originated in "It's Time to Build" [1]. The diagnosis is that the nation is incapable of doing anything - too hamstrung by bureaucracy, laws, congress gridlock etc. The same kind of things that MAGA uses to justify authoritarianism. The movement now basically prescribes action, agency, urgency, conquest void of any reflection of what the goals should be, any question of morality or values etc.. just build (what you're being told/funded to build).
[1] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
That thread was painful to read.
> It might not be enough to get sued
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.
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
Doubling down on the lie is all you need to know about Nico.
I'm pretty sure that making new software that replicate the _functionality_ of other existing software is perfectly legal.
If not, how do you explain the thousands of Tetris clones? The thousands of Doom clones? The hundreds of Excel clones (forgot which was the first one, it's not Excel but that's besides the point, which is that's perfectly legal). Another commenter already mentioned Android SDK vs Java, which Oracle (fortunately) lost.
Yes, even the "copywriting" is fair game, unless it's pages and pages of text (e.g. don't copy/paste the documentation).
The design mustn't be identical but if it's essentially identical, that's legal - sometimes there aren't 10 ways to do something.
Now if the question is whether it's legal to publish software written by LLMs, given that they've been trained on other people's code - that's an entirely different question.
You can't make a clean-room implementation of an open source project using a frontier LLM because it has the original code in its weights.
They didn't even attempt to make a clean-room implementation, they just had the LLM clone it for them with access to the source.
This absolutely needs to go to court. We badly need to know what the law even is, and this is the most perfectly blatant example we're going to get of bad behavior that might or might not be legal
The OSS team affected could contact major insurers and insurance industry trade orgs for legal and financial assistance. It's quite likeky this Laqua guy has made enemies and his "startup ethics" potentially has Corgi violating numerous laws and regulations in what is a fairly well regulated industry.
> It might not be enough to get sued. That doesn't make it right.
Perhaps that’s enough for them. Legal gray area worked for Uber, AirBnB and many more.
As a consumer in not happy though, I don’t like incentivizing companies with such creative approach to law.
We’ve normalized stealing code en masse so this will pass as perfectly fine behavior - what LLMs put out is a spectrum of infringement, this is just in the more obvious end.
> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries
That would be my cynical response.
Which would bring you nowhere. If they didn't change this at some point, I remember at the time everyone was staring to use ChatGPT that OpenAI wrote in their terms that the user is responsible for the model's output. If they can do this, I expect other model providers doing this as well.
Is there precedent where that clause was enforced?
No idea.
Does Design/Text count as intellectual property?
IANAL but UI is not protectable in the EU. I remember this was relevant when people copied MS offices ribbon ui for Delphi components.
I think what you mean is that functional designs aren’t protected by copyright. Of course you could patent it. But in this case they almost exactly copied the graphic design and copied the text verbatim which would maybe infringe copyright.
>they copied whole pages verbatim
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.
That's a weird thing to say in response to someone saying "the text was rewritten, so it's not actually a copy"
The law cares about the process you took to get something, not just the final output. Stealing something and then changing some stuff to try to make it not look identical doesn't invalidate the fact that you stole it. I can't download someone's song, strip out the bass line and record my own, and then pass off the new song combining the old music with my bass recording as an original song.
I don't know whether that's what happened here or claim to know exactly what the constraints of IP law for this specific instance are, but "some stuff was changed" does not necessarily seem sufficient as a defense in general. Depending on the exact type of IP law that covers this there are questions like whether the changes were substantial enough to make it an original work or whether the way that the old stuff was used constitutes fair use.
Are you familiar with "Weird Al Yankovic"?
The legal ruling that makes what he does legal even if he didn't get permission (although he does) is about parodies; it's not clear why you think that would apply here. If all he did was change the title and the phrasing of some things, it's doubtful it would be.
The closest equivalent I can think of here would be starting from a blank slate, producing the layout manually to be roughly the same (similar to recording the music from scratch to match up with the original), and then come up with completely original wording that's about something unrelated to the original wording. That doesn't seem anywhere close to what anyone here is claiming.
Weird Al asks permission from every artist he parodies.
Because he is polite, not because he is required to. The Supreme Court has confirmed this.
That's debatable and would have to be proven in court. Weird Al's works aren't really critiques of the original songs so a parody defense would be very difficult to make. One could argue that the humor in his lyrics could have been set to another tune to the same effect, making his appropriation of copyrighted material unnecessary and therefore not fair use.
On the first screen, the only "rewriting" done was s/dataroom/Room/g.
And the fixed version of that screen (a few tweets later), simply removes the copied text.
Which goes to show there was never any original work to fallback to.
"See, if I remove the detailed descriptions - and the LLM regurgitated the rest - nothing will have been copied."
Some people really want to defend "build me a copy of thing because I don't like the license" to be acceptable behavior.
You are intentionally misrepresenting my comment. I explained that it was not verbatim which refers to an exact copy.
Weird that you don't mind misrepresenting that intention of mine. Or are you under the impression that you have a telepathic insight into the minds of others?
I thought it was a pedantic remark on the use of the word "verbatim"
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!
> The screenshots clearly show they copied whole pages verbatim, both design and texts
The design is shadcn – which is an MIT license - very very popular design system. The text is pretty standard to what I'd expect with any DD solution.
Using the same design system doesn’t make you accidentally create the exact same UI screens.
One other Twitter comments reveals that they probably just asked an AI to copy Papermark. Evidenced by AI comments saying the page was aligned to the "reference"
https://xcancel.com/ffumarola/status/2070479755892371713#m
Unreal. I had to go back to the original Tweet to confirm that screenshot wasn’t faked.
The comment clearly says “Mirror’s the reference design’s”
I don’t know how they could try to spin that as anything other than having an LLM launder someone’s code as a “reference design”
Even if they try to argue that the “reference design” was Figma, the identical copy means they had to have copied Papermark into the reference design.
The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company. I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.
> The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company.
I wish this were true, but the current political and corporate climate is that nearly anything is justifiable as long as you win, where winning is money or power. Fraud, corruption, extortion, etc.
> I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.
I find most b2b transactions are hostile, and the purpose of sales or customer success is to smooth over the hostility. Tremendously more true in the B2C space, and only accelerated by the aforementioned political and corporate climate.
In other words, as long as their staff is charismatic / crafty enough, this “scandal” will slough right off.
I meant it's not a good sign for anyone considering working with the company.
If they refuse to back down and won't admit errors on something this obvious, I would not want to be dealing with them on an insurance claim.
Problem is law hasn't caught up with how easy this previously GOOJF practice became with LLMs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
You might be able to argue that using an AI trained on open source or source available code is not a clean room implementation. IANAL.
Funny enough, I just published this blog post yesterday:
The Discoverable Evidence of AI-Assisted Software Porting
https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-discoverable-evidence...
I wonder if this will get worse with so many firms now using agents.
You’re sharing your entire code base with a 3rd party you have to trust not to train on it.
If they do your competitor’s just to ask it to produce something using your business as a reference.
Good luck taking that one to court considering what happened to the publishing industry.
Is that real? Imagine they've taken the code out if so, difficult to verify.
The era of chinese level competition is here.
If it were, they would make it worse then in time make it better, not just copy verbatim
Can someone give a bit more of context on this thread? I have no idea who Nico is nor what Papermark is or does.
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?
I have the feeling that more than ever open source violations are flourishing everywhere without any major legal consequences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.
> Corgi were paying Dropbox thousands of dollars per month for DocSend.
That's like, nothing, for a company in the insurance business valued at 3b
turns out it was less than $1,000 per month.
A startup raises ~$100m at a ~$3bn valuation and forms a team of 12 employees including their Head of Operations to build a clone of a product they pay less than $1,000/month for while they have more than 50 open roles they are hiring for.
Hmmm, yes, a very good use of available resources.
https://xcancel.com/SergioGarc20223/status/20702512486962956...
Sounds like someone had an internal “team bonding” hackathon
> Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.
I'm not up to date on Corgi, but from what I was reading about Delve, it was the "much more" (fabricating SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance) that caused them to get into trouble.
Thanks for the insight. So regarding what you explained above, is Corgi's fate supposed to be similar to Delve's? Or are those numbers so big/important for YC that they won't be banned?
Not necessarily. Delve did a lot of bad things, the primary reason for their removal was misrepresentations they made to other YC startups, i.e: YC startups paid them for security audits that turned out to be bunk which caused a big headache for their customers. Basically, the rest of YC wanted them gone for causing widespread chaos.
Delve’s first drama was around copying from other startups, it was later that their betrayal came out. Corgi is currently at the copying from other startups stage… one might choose to believe there is a path they’re following rather than this being a one off.
For example, I outlined in another comment how their product is not what it seems, it is not traditional insurance, it takes advantage of an esoteric piece of insurance regulation. They’re doing very aggressive underwriting without any of the traditional insurance regulatory protections applying to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672328
Someone might believe that their conduct + very high risk product + exposure to a large number of YC companies means they’re very similar to Delve.
Plus the founders are at the top of another funnel… Forbes 30 under 30. 30u30 is practically a kiss of death.
it takes advantage of an esoteric piece of insurance regulation. They’re doing very aggressive underwriting without any of the traditional insurance regulatory protections applying to them.
elsewhere; "Laqua, whose father is a lawyer for an insurance company"
lol
Delve screwed over other YC startups, Corgi is stealing from a non-YC startup. Therefore, there will be no official censure from YC. This is a pretty well-established fact pattern historically. Just don't mess with the YC community if you want to stay in YC.
That's pretty lame. Startups that show this behavior to the OSS community should be equally punished, be under the YC umbrella or not.
I don't think there's some sort of "line" that Delve crossed and Corgi has not, more likely the financial upside for YC wrt Corgi is much, much bigger. They're not going to mess with that even if the screw over a few of their other startups. YC absolutely loves to tout this family dynamic across all their companies and alumni, but there is no way the relationship between a few dozen startups looks anything like that between literally thousands of companies. It's a scaled up tech-hype startup machine now, and has attracted the same MBA-types they supposedly defeated 20+ years ago.
The last sentence is false: More than ever, YC is most seeking highly technical founders.
It's also false that YC will overlook IP theft for the sake of financial upside. One of the most fundamental principles that YC drums into startups is that they shouldn't breach software licenses. This comes from personal, painful experience for pg in the Viaweb days; a dispute over IP nearly killed their acquisition by Yahoo (or a major funding round soon before that). YC counsels startups to be super-prudent and upstanding about software licensing. Sure, sometimes startups will be cavalier about it and cross a line, in which case YC tells them to fix it immediately.
Flock (YC S17) tells us that no, YC won't mind if you're building the Torment Nexus, as long as it whitelists other YC affiliates.
> 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?
yes. it's way easier to do now. edit -- plus a lot of new ai-only entrant devs don't understand/care that foss is about freedoms rather than free as in beer.
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.
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.
the original app dev was lucky there's only one main forum where people post things for this manufacturer, and the mods hate 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).
centralization has benefits... without that, the only alternative i see is a mass movement where everyone goes closed source to force a conversation about respecting the work of others. we've been running on an honour/community backlash system until now.
I've seen this same thing happen with MIT licenses...I would only consider it a real win or loss for FOSS when a court says something about it, and I don't consider facilitating online bullying to be something to be proud of. Just use the law like an adult, starting with a simple C&D.
Judges and governments are pro-business and anti-consumers, anti-citizens. Corporations are getting use to get away with anything and everything.
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.
With the new "laws are for losers" mentality we are in for a hard time.
No morals, no ethics. The other day I skimmed some of the countless vibe coding videos on YT and the vast, vast majority surfacing through a naive search are basically get rich quick crap.
Identify a one-feature app that (supposedly) makes money and vibe it up. Done is your "I vibe coded a 10M MAU app in 40 minutes" vid.
From crypto to NFT to vibez. Rotten to the core, the difference is that this time around LLM are actually useful in some areas.
Ahh yes, the AI influencers...
>the people who made fortunes during a gold rush weren't the miners, but the ones selling the shovels
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.
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.
The shared fiction of "intellectual property" is crumbling. People who grew up with normalized piracy at the consumer level and industrialized exploitation of artists' works at the corporate level don't see the value of it.
Add to that the fact that anyone can simply do what they want with the bits on their computer, and sharing anything over the internet means giving them a copy of those bits, the technical barriers are gone too.
This isn't a value judgement just an observation.
From what I can tell, his argument seems to be that
1. no code was manually copied by a developer, and
2. all software in the same space copies off of each other
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.
They're both boilerplate ShadCN from the looks of it: https://ui.shadcn.com/blocks
ShadCN is the most popular design system that AI automatically reaches for 90%+ times on its own. It's also the default most platforms like lovable, etc.
I looked at that link and was unable to find any blocks that matched the 4 images? "Replicate Room Folders" and all
He's talking about the layout & styles, not literally verbatim copy for copy of the 4 images. Shadcn is an open-source collection of reusable UI components for building modern web applications.
I know most people refer to the design system as shadcn, but I was floored when I learnt that shadcn is the handle of a (now-)Vercel employee, and the design system is properly called shadcn/ui.
I guess that is at the core of Google vs Oracle, they copied the API kept the implementation clean-room. It was definitvely ruled that this was fair use. If fair use applies to something as strict as re-implementing an API, I would argue it applies to something much more elusive, like cloning UI/layout.
> I would argue [fair use] applies to something much more elusive, like cloning UI/layout.
You would be very wrong in this argument. It's extremely well-established that corporate verbiage and UI are subject to copyright.
He argues no code was copied.
License in question: https://github.com/papermark/papermark?tab=License-1-ov-file It is AGPL, basically means:
You have to share the source code even when the user interacts over the network with the software.
The project which uses that code, must also be AGPL,
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
I am sure they could have found a way to design their product to be compliant, especially following past drama.
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
they probably need to sue to enforce this, I think this is actually going to be a larger issue than just corgi. copyright with these models really is just a mess
Just consider all model output AGPL. ;-)
What I don't understand is that if a lawsuit happens, then must the plaintiff produce their source code for verification ? Even so a git tree is trivial to change into some other arbitrary code even if a license violation has occurred. I also heard if proven the consequences are that they would lose all revenue starting from when the violation has occured
I used to have a lot of respect for YC and the kind of founders it used to attract. However, over the past few years, they have started attracting a certain type of founder that most people wouldn’t associate with.
The decline in the quality of YC's founder pool and founder reputation is tarnishing its brand, but I doubt anyone there realizes it, or is willing to publicly admit it.
It’s egregious that a portfolio company passed off clear AGPL code as its own and doubled down on defending their actions when there was clear evidence showing that they had indeed copied the code. Any well-meaning person should call this out, including anyone who cares deeply about YC and its reputation.
If a founder is willing to lie about something like this, imagine the other things he would lie about?
> However, over the past few years, they have started attracting a certain type of founder that most people wouldn’t associate with.
I don't follow YC acceptance enough to be able to see a trend, but there's one founder in one of 2025's batches that I feel the same way about: dodgy, questionable sense of ethics, never stops to consider whether they're in the wrong or how their actions may affect others detrimentally.
Then again, that could be a trait of a potentially successful founder. Or a psychopath.
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.
Their defence seems to be "well we asked an LLM to reproduce your work, so 'WE' never copied your code". Smells bad to me.
> Their defence seems to be "well we asked an LLM to reproduce your work, so 'WE' never copied your code".
A German court recently ruled that the runners of the agent are responsible for the agent's output. Not in your test environment, of course, but when it reaches the public.
Yeah. Like, you can do all this without LLMs. "Oh, I didn't copy this open source repo with a restrictive license, I just found an fork that was identical except for having removed the license. So we used that."
That's not how licenses work, and the license holder can absolutely tell you to get bent and/or pony up.
tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovation
that's been the case for decades.
everyone steals, you are a loser if you do it slow. just open the front door and take their tv.
There appears to have been a cease and desist issued by Corgi to Papermark: https://x.com/danielmerja/status/2070264877017350492?s=46
They want the tweet alleging copy to be deleted.
Peter is currently threatening me with a defamation suit, he seems to be quite the litigious man. My defamation suit is because I wrote a post summarizing my comments from this thread about Corgi: https://reticulating.substack.com/p/ycombinators-corgi-insur...
I guess when you're working 7 days a week you've gotta find something to fill the time with.
who is peter? why did they send you a cease and desist?
Peter Skaliy, Head of Legal at Corgi, same person who sent the cease and desist to people on Twitter, is filing a suit against me for defamation because of that Substack post.
"Corgi builds insurance structures that allow us to best serve the needs of our customers. For technology companies, operating a technology liability line through a Risk Retention Group is not unusual, improper, or exotic; it is a standard insurance structure for specialty liability risks where similarly situated businesses benefit from tailored underwriting, specialized coverage, and risk alignment. The suggestion that Corgi customers are unknowingly taking on “balance sheet risk,” member-assessment risk, or responsibility for unrelated insureds’ liabilities is false.
Your draft’s statement that “Corgi will help you share that risk,” combined with the question whether customers understand the risk of other companies in the group, does not merely describe RRGs in the abstract. It falsely implies that Corgi leaves customers exposed to open ended financial liability for other insureds. That implication is defamatory and false. RRGs are regulated insurance carriers subject to financial, reserve, governance, and regulatory requirements. They are not informal risk sharing clubs where policyholders unknowingly become responsible for each other’s balance sheets.
The RRG structure unique to Corgi. Major insurance groups use different insurer structures for different classes of risk because different risks are best served by different structures. Berkshire Hathaway, which the draft itself invokes, has affiliated insurance operations involving Risk Retention Groups in specialty liability markets, including medical and legal professional liability. That underscores the point: RRGs are a widely recognized insurance structure for specialty liability lines, and allow insurers to provide more tailored coverage options rather than issuing a generic policy.
The draft’s statement that Corgi “innovated with AI in a regulated industry by cutting corners” is also false and defamatory. Corgi raised millions pre-revenue and spent nearly two years building and obtaining regulatory approvals for its insurance operations, including approvals and requirements relating to reserves, pricing, liquidity, governance, and compliance. That is the opposite of “cutting corners.” Any allegation that Corgi used AI to evade regulatory approval, underwriting standards, reserve requirements, pricing controls, liquidity controls, or other compliance obligations is false.
Any article suggesting otherwise, including by implying that Corgi misleads customers, conceals the RRG structure, exposes policyholders to undisclosed balance-sheet risk, or uses RRGs and AI to evade proper underwriting or regulatory obligations, is false and highly damaging.
To be clear, if you publish these false statements or defamatory implications, Corgi will sue you personally and will pursue all available claims and remedies against you and any other responsible parties. Corgi has enforced its rights before and will do so again. You should not mistake this for an abstract legal reservation."
Blows my mind investors see this as normal behavior. The insurance market is by no means aware of twitter at all haha, such a bubble of people talking.
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
> Hey Nico,
> It looks like you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark's open source and enterprise-licensed code.
> We demand you take this copyright and license infringing product down immediately.
> It's not moving fast and breaking things, it's fraud.
> It makes the rest of your business questionable and the YC community look terrible.
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Both designs are nearly boilerplate ShadCN blocks/components, it looks nearly identical to this stuff: https://ui.shadcn.com/blocks
Isn't this always the case? Most of the time you just don't know where AI stole it from?
I like the contradiction on the copycat page:
> This action cannot be undone
> Freezing is reversible from this page
I assume being irreversible is an essential part of the freezing feature.
clearly the indication they didn't just copy but improve upon /s
I wonder if this is a bigger risk/more widespread in the AI era? Could a bad actor with a copy of someone else's proprietary source code train an LLM on it and come out with code that does not show enough evidence of theft?
> Sorry for the delayed response to this, I just woke up
Posted 7:52 am
https://x.com/i/status/2070158170937581951
Ahhh, that explains now why working 7 days a week is necessary for this Manhattan-project-level startup, he's not ‘Grindmaxxing’ by waking up with the 5 AM club every day!
(Context for folks not terminally online: https://x.com/i/status/2061139112426623054)
What's with this response in the Twitter thread??:
"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"
-- https://xcancel.com/jacobhartmannx/status/207012600834729596...
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.
Besides - who is this guy, and why does he think he's owed sight of any legal paperwork?
He seems to be a bullshitter and partially fake. Just take a look at his LinkedIn profile.
Yes he's trolling. His bio is "CEO at @IronGorillaAI - proudly replacing white collar work with autonomous AI agents, one job at a time. American emigrant." and look at one of his recent posts lmao
> THIS GUY ONLY WANTS 7 DAYS IN OFFICE.
> At @IronGorillaAI, we run on the French Republican Calendar.
> That’s 10 days a week.
> We mandate all 10 in the office.
> No hybrid. No remote. No negotiations.
> If that sentence triggers you, you were never built for this anyway.
Look at his other tweets, he seems to be a sociopathic extremist
Or a troll? I'm so confused.
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I hope YC does the right thing here and pull funding of these ass wipes.
This is exactly the kind of legal gray area move that YC companies like to take advantage of. It's not technically illegal for Reddit to fake users, for Airbnb to piggyback off Craigslist, for OpenAI to be a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary, for PearAI to fork a competitor and relabel it as their own, for Flock to accidentally misidentify criminals, for Delve to fake SOCS compliance, or for Corgi to steal a competitor's product by having an LLM reproduce it instead of copying the code directly. If anything, YC will just help them with their legal defense.
And incinerate a nearly $3 billion valuation? Easier to mutter "great artists steal" to oneself and move on.
Classic YC startup move
Customer aquisitions and retention has always been the moat over code. As much as this forum might have a hard time accepting that
What a scumbag. The replies from Nico are insane:
“Team effort”
“:praying-hands (x2)”
And so on… The audacity and complete shamelessness…
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).
I am curious how this will play out legally.
Surely UI enough isn't enough to prove that source code was plagiarised?
In the event Papermark chooses to sue how will the defendant defend themselves short of presenting their own (possibly) closed source?
> I am curious how this will play out legally
I am curious if/how YC will handle this to get ahead of earning a reputation of being a den of scammers - a few months after the Delve scandal
>I am curious if/how YC will handle this to get ahead of earning a reputation of being a den of scammers
flock is a YC company, so it's pretty clear that YC does not care about a negative reputation. as long as it makes money, nothing else matters.
> it's pretty clear that YC does not care about a negative reputation.
Perhaps not what the general public thinks, but I assume YC cares a lot about its reputation among VC firms that fund its companies, because VCs don't like being scammed (directly, or indirectly through unknowingly funding scams)
Let's recall that YC used to be run by Sam Altman of all people, which confirms what you are saying.
Many YC companies do bad things, and I guess they do so independently. There may well be repercussions for the most egregious cases, but I suspect a lot of ill-behaviour simply flies under the radar.
For example only yesterday I got spam from an YC company, Polymath, and I replied back asking where they got my details from - no response yet. Once I get something I'll make a GDPR subject access request, then a deletion request. I hope the overhead of that causes them to rethink their spamming campaign.
But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.
I have also gotten spammed by a YC startup, but they spammed an email that I use in git commits, and lead with "I saw your fork of $POPULAR_PROJECT, pretty cool!" or something like that and then continued to pester me with their drip program even as I replied asking them to never email me again.
> Many YC companies do bad things,
My comment was not about doing a generic bad thing - it was about scammy behavior in particular (which ties to the Delve incident). YC depends on the VC ecosystem to fund its companies, and no VC wants to be scammed. If a reputation of cultivating/condoning/obliviousness scammers takes root, that would be bad for business.
> But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.
I am not complaining, or even expecting a moral decision. I'm legitimately curious how this will shake out, for purely capitalistic, reputation-management reasons.
Good luck with referring to GDPR. Try clicking through YC startup list and see how many load GA and other trackers onto their landing pages without a consent banner or even a privacy policy sometimes. It’s baffling.
Most likely, Papermark would compel Corgi to disclose the source code during discovery.
I didn't realise that one could forcibly require a competitor to disclose trade secrets.
Now, INAL of course, but I would think this sort of mechanism would be quite gameable from both sides ( i) a wealthy competitor legally forcing a promising upstart to reveal source ii) a copycat working out some kind of arrangement where the code itself is licensed to them via shell company based overseas.)
As with most legal hacks, the courts figured this one out long ago :).
If someone is trying to dig into their competitor's trade secrets via discovery, the court offers multiple ways to safeguard against that. The defendant can identify information as a trade secret and ask that it be protected in some way - for example, the documents may be restricted to "Attorneys' Eyes Only", so while the plaintiff's attorneys can review the material, the plaintiffs themselves are barred from reviewing it. Or the judge themselves may get involved in an in-camera session.
There are software engineers that specialise in source code analysis that lawyers will often use in these cases. The engineers will be given access to source code in secure environments where they're not allowed to bring any device in or out. They review, analyse, and write up a report using pen and paper, that can then be reviewed by the lawyers.
Absolutely. It was very similar to one of my first jobs: "Legal Technical Analyst". Not as much time doing deep source analysis, but basically translating things for lawyers: "So as far as this claim of copyright/plagiarism... this block here, that's CS 101 stuff, that block there, that's novel, and does x, y and z".
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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?
With LLMs being able to replicate simple SaaS tools we are going to see a lot of "you stole my idea" and regardless of it being right or wrong, the judgement of time tends to be defensibility.
I wouldn't bet on small scale software defensibility in the future. Just being practical...
Missing context.
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.
Yes, written verbiage is subject to copyright. UI is also subject to copyright. The degree of similarity is astounding - this is not an edge case at all.
The lack of understanding of copyright on HN does astound me, however.
This isn't a case of convergent design (OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word), this is identical word-for-word with a simple s/room/dataroom:
> When enabled, folders uploaded to Rooms will be mirrored into 'All Documents' with the same structure. When disabled, all documents will be placed in a single folder named after the Room in 'All Documents!
> This action cannot be undone. - All documents and folders will be permanently removed - All links and viewer access will be revoked - All analytics, audit logs, and Q&A data will be lost - Group permissions and branding will be deleted
Those are clear copyright violations.
IP and Copyright are two different concepts. Protected IP tends to break into trade secrets (protected by secrecy) and patents (protected by disclosure).
Similarly, trade dress and trademarks are related but different, and in USA most Trademarks™ are not Registered® (although to get ® you generally use ™ along the way), and most trade dress is not either.
See also:
- clean room design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
- trade dress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
Amusingly, the packaging of a dress is trade dress, but the dress design itself isn't protected.
Not IPable.
Why are people using what used to be Twitter in seriousness?
Its where the community is despite the loud minority online pretending thats not the case
X is not even in the top 10 active user count. It ranked just above Quora and below Reddit. It's just not a super popular platform. X fans constantly have to denigrate everyone else as a "loud minority".
Clearly, "the community" is not all on X. If it were, why would we be having conversations here on Hacker News?
Anyways, the real answer you'll still see some X links here is that
1. A not insignificant amount of people in our industry are aligned with the X CEO and the positions he expresses through his accounts, Grok, etc., and
2. Pornography
Are you confusing X with Bluesky? I hardly see any porn on Twitter, but all the time on Bluesky.
In general the art community - not just limited to pornographers - seems to have stuck by X despite all the AI stuff. When I see people posting art it's almost always an X link, even for artists who have accounts on bsky or instagram or whatever.
I believe you, but our personal experiences are simply the opposite here. I do see X links occasionally but Instagram, BlueSky, and even Tumblr seem dominant. (Often with some presence on at least one of Patreon, Substack, Cara, or Kofi).
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because no alternative has ever reached the same level of engagement and most people don't care about misplaced virtue signalling
"Vibe coded" is the new "I built this from scratch" except with more git blame
If you drop a screenshot of a web page into something like Figma Make, you can get it to produce a strikingly close replica. I get that vibe from the screenshots. They are very similar but not exactly the same. That's probably also why a lot of the copy is the same.
Not getting your magic text generator to reword the copy for you is just sloppy.
AI will generally err on the side of slavishly copying any reference. I'm having this problem at work lately. Teammates will be asked to implement a new module for <new data integration> into the codebase, and they'll just point Claude at it and say "integrate <new thing> into this codebase" in one shot and what it will do is create a function for function clone of the first data integration's client, down to implementing copies of the private utility methods.
What's the cost/benefit analysis on Papermark being open-source?
Yuck, a little vomit just came up :(
fraudulent people are gonna do more fraudulent shit. more news at 11.
once the money dries up, these people will be on the next 'wave' without retrospective of what led to failures before. the past gets buried like it never existed.
Ah another YC popcorn fest
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."
https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditio...
ehhhh I'm not a corgi stan but I'd bet they just took the design & copy, which is totally fine imo. Often better to just take another's design instead of spend a bunch of cycles figuring out flow. This is doubly true for secondary pages/layouts/features.
If I were them, I'd have changed copy and probably done some internal testing to smooth rough edges/improve where needed but sounds like they're moving as quickly as possible.
If they did just copy paste code, straight to jail...
Design (output of designers) and copy (output of copywriters) are subject to the same copyright law as code (output of programmers). Programmers are not the only people whose intellectual property is protected.
I'd be very surprised if the very-similar-looking design of corgi's product breaches any copyright law, copyright of design or layout is much more finicky than copyright of code. This seems like more of a moral issue than a legal one.
Hey Claude, copy XYZ, make no mistakes.
The meme keeps on memeing.
What a wonderful world we live in where we can blame machines and extremely dilluted processes for all things we might do wrong.
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 literally 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.
Short segments of popular works sure. Many UI pages with identical layouts and copy, essentially zero chance. The agent had access to the original code at inference time.
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.
Just ban users who comment without reading, I think that would go further to keep the quality of discussion high.
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.
"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.
An honest title would be “Corgi didn’t vibe code it, they stole Papermark’s AGPL code”.
Sure, people should read links, but when a writer posts ragebait for engagement, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
You’re giving me too much credit if you think i was being sensationalist and trying to make it more clickworthy, i couldnt succeed in that if i tried
I was mostly fighting the title character limit
Ideally yes, but we know people don't RTFA - there's a reason that initialism dates back to early Slashdot.
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.
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.
That’s a lot of rage for something that does not impact you at all. Who cares? You don’t get to control everything around you online.
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.
Naturally LLM technology has moved on since then. I don't remember any recent word for word reproductions of a copyright license.
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.
Rabble rabble rabble
Same thing https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
Vibe stole it?
Probably just stole it by the looks of those screenshots.
Yeah I mean like git clone the repo then "hey LLM rip off this code, make no mistakes"
I'd suggest replacing that link with https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095
And maybe reword the submission title while they're there, though the current one is well chosen for maximizing engagement I'm sure.
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Plot twist, they both vibe coded it and now are pointing the finger at each other. /s
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that's quite the stretch
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What a load of crock.
FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing with humans. Some later licenses made the license less amenable for sharing with corporations 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.
> Step out of the FOSS swamp, step in to human dignity.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Not humans who are using AI tools?
Human dignity when it comes to work and contribution is very simple:
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.
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.
The 'spirit of free software' is bullshit. It's software authoritarianism disguised as a noble cause.
Even so, what's wrong with this? They told you up front that they're going to discriminate. Students can use the code freely, businesses may struggle. People don't need to be fair.
Don't use it.
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.
Or... Be nice and ask. People tell u what to do. Don't be rude here.
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.
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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> rob your house while leaving it untended
Yeah, that's nonsense - licenses exist precisely to solve this problem. Read up on it - do everyone a favor.
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AI is busy destroying my art and my livelihood. Fighting back is about as psychotic as drapetomania[0] was.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Has any group of workers ever "won" a long-term victory against a new technology? There are plenty of short-term concessions made in the face of powerful trade union opposition, but I can't think of any technology that was just stopped dead to appease workers with obsolete skills.
That assumes we're talking about technologies that are legal and in some way beneficial. AI is basically large-scale copyright infringement. If allowed to continue, human authors (I'm including programmers here) will eventually just stop publishing, because why feed the machine that's busy replacing you? You're not even getting paid for it, because the magic box can do the same thing you can for cheaper.
Thing is, everything AI produces is derivative; it cannot make anything truly original. Therefore widespread AI adoption will inevitably lead to scientific and cultural stagnation.
So we'll have our magic box that can perform our every wish. And we'll all be worse off for it.
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.
>> This doesn't appear to be AI posturing, did you read the tweet? It is about one product blatantly, directly ripping off another.
Then it shouldn't reference AI or Vibe coding.
The tweet was fine - it was directly addressing Corgi's claim that they had "vibe coded" DataRoom when they had copied and pasted it from Papermark. The problem is the OP chose to perform a contextectomy on the tweet and make it look like it's making a completely different argument.
Gonna have to see the agent trace on that one.
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.
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.
> Where’s the outrage over all basic pencils looking the same?
This would fall under patents (design patent at the very least), not copyright.
Furthermore, the English verbiage between the two are literally exactly the same. That's a clear copyright violation.
Changing a few words is thus enough to clear this case. What's the point of this exercise exactly?
Both products are so incredibly derivative and boring that I find it very, very hard to care about this "case".
If the UI was novel enough then there would be a software patent for it in this case. Anyway I’m not sure what your point is? Copyright is a dated concept and AI only reinforces that. Do you really believe the first one to prompt an AI in a specific way should be allowed to enforce exclusive ownership of the output? That’s insane.
Its sounds like you are taking a side.
Don't care. Competition is good for consumers.
It is, but this isn't competition. This just copyright infringement.
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.
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.
When it plays fair, sure. Not when it steals.
Stealing is the opposite of competition. It's in the same category as straight killing your competitors.
I think it's important to care about these things though. You want competition but you also want fair competition
When competition has no rules it resorts to people banging each other over their heads with clubs.
People argue for less regulations until they are the ones eating crow.
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
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.
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.
Close your source if you don't want it to be read by LLM
That's not how licenses work, Papermark is AGPL
I agree. It's a sarcasm of the new reality. What is copying vs writing from scratch? The line is blurred now, non-existent. You can ask an LLM to re-write any open source to a degree where there is no definite way to say that it's a derivative.
"If Disney wants to retain their rights to Mickey they really shouldn't be showing any images of him to the world."
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
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
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> 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.
https://opensource.org/osd
> Unless you don't copy the license terms
You edited your comment while I was replying, and merely copying the license does not cover many other possible restrictions.
I didn't edit anything.
I did choose the wrong word, though. Comply, not copy.
Well, if it's my memory at fault then I apologize. My memory of the comment I replied to didn't include the initial qualifying phrase with either word choice.
So, by definition, you did edit it to change the typo.
>So, by definition, you did edit it to change the typo.
their comment still says "copy". the comment you are replying to clarifies that they meant to type "comply", not copy.
since the wrong word is still there, 'by definition' they have not edited it.
Ahh, I misread it.
Papermark is AGPL; Corgi must release all its changes.
That means they're not complying with the license terms. Which would be stealing. Like I said it would be.
Copyright violation is not theft. Your effort to create something that can be effortlessly copied conveys to you no property. Society deems it beneficial to grant a time limited monopoly on copying it to spur innovation.
You wouldn’t steal a car!
But I would download one.
Stealing a car - or anything tangible - means... the owner is very literally deprived of the benefits of owning said car/thing. Can't really say the same for a copied pattern of bits.
Thats not what you said. You said "copy the license terms". Copying a license isn't the same as complying with one.
Though it looks like in this case they didn't do either.
So we're in violent agreement then?
Brutally violent agreement. kicks shin, shakes hand
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.
A cursory look reveals they aren't complying. So, as you say, they are stealing. What's the point of this comment?
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?
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.
The English verbiage is identical. That's a clear copyright violation even if the codebase is otherwise unique.
I do not see how it is clear and which license is affected. People mix up agpl license terms which is not clear if being violated here and copyright based on branding. agpl does not cover the looks, it is all about the copy-left nature and code availability. I use the same licensing but struggle to so how could you enforce it if the code is different (not sure if it is different here).