Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

https://twitter.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095

by mmunj • 27 days ago

620 267 27 days ago

twitter.com

https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095

NickNaraghi• 27 days ago

Gonna have to see the agent trace on that one.

kleiba2• 27 days ago

Missing context.

xyzsparetimexyz• 27 days ago

Don't care. Competition is good for consumers.

irdc4• 27 days ago

When it plays fair, sure. Not when it steals.

bogwog• 27 days ago

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.

dgb23• 27 days ago

When competition has no rules it resorts to people banging each other over their heads with clubs.

Eufrat3• 27 days ago

People argue for less regulations until they are the ones eating crow.

Eufrat3• 27 days ago

Let’s not even talk about the feature. Copying the entire visual design itself with superficial tweaks is pretty brazen and, frankly, incredibly lazy.

augment_me2• 27 days ago

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.

weregiraffe• 27 days ago

Stealing is the opposite of competition. It's in the same category as straight killing your competitors.

onel• 27 days ago

I think it's important to care about these things though. You want competition but you also want fair competition

lenerdenator5• 27 days ago

Unless you don't copy the license terms, it's impossible to "steal" open-source code. That's... sort of the point.

irdc4• 27 days ago

Papermark is AGPL; Corgi must release all its changes.

lenerdenator5• 27 days ago

That means they're not complying with the license terms. Which would be stealing. Like I said it would be.

gryfft3• 27 days ago

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."

lenerdenator5• 27 days ago

Unless you don't copy the license terms

tzs• 27 days ago

they may forbid using derivative works for commercial purposes

The most widely used definitions of “open source” do not allow such a prohibition.

exo762• 27 days ago

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.

samtheprogram• 27 days ago

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?

jobs_throwaway• 27 days ago

You didn't code it, you stole it from open source OS and compiler maintainers

rzmmm• 27 days ago

"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...

irdc4• 27 days ago

I'd suggest replacing that link with https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095

tom_• 27 days ago

And maybe reword the submission title while they're there, though the current one is well chosen for maximizing engagement I'm sure.

olluk2• 27 days ago

Close your source if you don't want it to be read by LLM

goldenarm• 27 days ago

That's not how licenses work, Papermark is AGPL

olluk2• 27 days ago

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.

ActionHank• 27 days ago

"If Disney wants to retain their rights to Mickey they really shouldn't be showing any images of him to the world."

qwertytyyuu• 27 days ago

Stealing it for your use case would take more effort vibe coding. The term is fine as is

wolttam• 27 days ago

Folks... read the actual tweet. They literally didn't vibe code it - they copy-pasted another project.

john_strinlai3• 27 days ago

wait just a second, that's not how to use HN. youre supposed to read the title -> get upset and write a comment -> argue.

mdjxnxnxnd• 27 days ago

Rabble rabble rabble

dools2• 27 days ago

Vibe stole it?

josephg2• 27 days ago

Probably just stole it by the looks of those screenshots.

Sanzig5• 27 days ago

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.

jknoepfler2• 27 days ago

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.

IshKebab• 27 days ago

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.

panny• 27 days ago

Same thing https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/

pydry• 27 days ago

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.

bix6• 27 days ago

Ah another YC popcorn fest

feverzsj• 27 days ago

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.

Aurornis3• 27 days ago

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.

aboardRat4• 27 days ago

It is not possible to steal something which doesn't obey conservation laws. Don't try to scam physics, is always wins.

blourvim2• 27 days ago

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

rwarren634• 27 days ago

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

blourvim2• 27 days ago

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

m4rtink• 27 days ago

Just consider all model output AGPL. ;-)

Chris2048• 27 days ago

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?!

andor• 27 days ago

Look at his other tweets, he seems to be a sociopathic extremist

greyb• 27 days ago

Or a troll? I'm so confused.

roryirvine• 27 days ago

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?

WA• 27 days ago

He seems to be a bullshitter and partially fake. Just take a look at his LinkedIn profile.

slopinthebag• 26 days ago

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.

dwaltrip• 27 days ago

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.

Sanzig5• 27 days ago

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).

civet_java2• 27 days ago

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?

lorey• 27 days ago

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

nfw24• 27 days ago

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.

throwawalien• 27 days ago

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.

palmotea2• 26 days ago

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.

johndhi• 26 days ago

is "we didn't copy the code" NOTA

philipdavis• 26 days ago

didnt click Genuinely Just curious, did you write this with llm?

charcircuit2• 27 days ago

they copied whole pages verbatim

Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.

saidnooneever• 27 days ago

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!

ncruces2• 27 days ago

You might be surprised to learn that the work of a copywriter is also copyrighted.

thih9• 27 days ago

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.

dzhiurgis2• 27 days ago

Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries

That would be my cynical response.

GTP2• 26 days ago

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.

wongarsu• 27 days ago

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

smallnix• 27 days ago

IANAL but UI is not protectable in the EU. I remember this was relevant when people copied MS offices ribbon ui for Delphi components.

echoangle• 27 days ago

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.

reactordev• 26 days ago

Doubling down on the lie is all you need to know about Nico.

zaptheimpaler2• 26 days ago

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

jszymborski• 26 days ago

That thread was painful to read.

skeeter20203• 26 days ago

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".

throwyawayyyy• 26 days ago

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.

bushido3• 26 days ago

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.

layer8• 26 days ago

Using the same design system doesn’t make you accidentally create the exact same UI screens.

conartist6• 26 days ago

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

elphinstone• 26 days ago

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.

zamalek• 26 days ago

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.

chabons• 26 days ago

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.

snihalani2• 26 days ago

Does Design/Text count as intellectual property?

LastTrain2• 26 days ago

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.

OrangeMusic• 26 days ago

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.

Vaslo• 27 days ago

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.

moralestapia• 26 days ago

Not IPable.

nerdsniper5• 26 days ago

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.

Terretta2• 26 days ago

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.

fantasizr• 27 days ago

tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovation

jimmydoe• 26 days ago

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.

dcow2• 27 days ago

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.

lelanthran• 27 days ago

Its sounds like you are taking a side.

nerdsniper5• 26 days ago

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.

fsddfsdfssdf• 26 days ago

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".

dcow2• 26 days ago

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.

contentkraft• 27 days ago

Hey Claude, copy XYZ, make no mistakes.

The meme keeps on memeing.

b3lvedere• 27 days ago

What a wonderful world we live in where we can blame machines and extremely dilluted processes for all things we might do wrong.

bilekas• 27 days ago

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.

PurelyApplied• 26 days ago

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.

alsetmusic3• 25 days ago

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.

CodesInChaos• 27 days ago

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.

PunchyHamster• 27 days ago

clearly the indication they didn't just copy but improve upon /s

NikxDa• 27 days ago

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.

LoganDark• 27 days ago

He argues no code was copied.

i000• 26 days ago

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.

nerdsniper5• 26 days ago

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.

bushido3• 26 days ago

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.

fouc• 26 days ago

I looked at that link and was unable to find any blocks that matched the 4 images? "Replicate Room Folders" and all

ValentineC4• 26 days ago

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.

LunicLynx• 27 days ago

Isn't this always the case? Most of the time you just don't know where AI stole it from?

Glyptodon• 27 days ago

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?

liendolucas3• 27 days ago

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.

Frieren• 27 days ago

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.

manwithopinions8• 27 days ago

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.

liendolucas3• 27 days ago

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?

fg137• 26 days ago

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

ValentineC4• 26 days ago

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.

PeterStuer• 27 days ago

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.

oefrha• 27 days ago

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.

dijksterhuis• 27 days ago

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.

argee• 26 days ago

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.

gherkinnn• 26 days ago

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.

nijave• 26 days ago

Ahh yes, the AI influencers...

the people who made fortunes during a gold rush weren't the miners, but the ones selling the shovels

hamdingers2• 26 days ago

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.

sublimefire2• 27 days ago

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.

nerdsniper5• 26 days ago

The English verbiage is identical. That's a clear copyright violation even if the codebase is otherwise unique.

sublimefire2• 26 days ago

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).

steveBK123• 26 days ago

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?

jadar• 26 days ago

Plot twist, they both vibe coded it and now are pointing the finger at each other. /s

an0malous2• 26 days ago

Classic YC startup move

bushido3• 26 days ago

Both designs are nearly boilerplate ShadCN blocks/components, it looks nearly identical to this stuff: https://ui.shadcn.com/blocks

dzonga• 26 days ago

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.

boesboes• 26 days ago

I hope YC does the right thing here and pull funding of these ass wipes.

handfuloflight• 26 days ago

And incinerate a nearly $3 billion valuation? Easier to mutter "great artists steal" to oneself and move on.

an0malous2• 26 days ago

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.

goobatrooba• 26 days ago

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

davidpapermill• 26 days ago

Is that real? Imagine they've taken the code out if so, difficult to verify.

Aurornis3• 26 days ago

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.

Terretta2• 26 days ago

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

datsci_est_20152• 26 days ago

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.

snihalani2• 26 days ago

The era of chinese level competition is here.

gchamonlive• 26 days ago

If it were, they would make it worse then in time make it better, not just copy verbatim

Lio• 26 days ago

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.

williamcotton• 26 days ago

Funny enough, I just published this blog post yesterday:

The Discoverable Evidence of AI-Assisted Software Porting

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-discoverable-evidence...

itomato• 26 days ago

Why are people using what used to be Twitter in seriousness?

claydugo• 26 days ago

Its where the community is despite the loud minority online pretending thats not the case

lynndotpy2• 26 days ago

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

stronglikedan• 26 days ago

because no alternative has ever reached the same level of engagement and most people don't care about misplaced virtue signalling

nerdix• 26 days ago

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.

viccis• 26 days ago

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.

summarybot• 26 days ago

What's the cost/benefit analysis on Papermark being open-source?

mmonaghan• 26 days ago

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...

nlitened• 26 days ago

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.

probabletrain• 26 days ago

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.

tsunamifury2• 26 days ago

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...

tsunamifury2• 26 days ago

Customer aquisitions and retention has always been the moat over code. As much as this forum might have a hard time accepting that

arlattimore• 26 days ago

Yuck, a little vomit just came up :(

euio757• 26 days ago

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)

kshacker• 26 days ago

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.

manwithopinions8• 26 days ago

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.

rwarren634• 24 days ago

who is peter? why did they send you a cease and desist?

retornam• 26 days ago

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?

ValentineC4• 26 days ago

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.

zftnb666• 26 days ago

"Vibe coded" is the new "I built this from scratch" except with more git blame

Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

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