alt Hacker NewsHey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark
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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovation
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.
Hey Claude, copy XYZ, make no mistakes.
The meme keeps on memeing.
Missing context.
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.
Ah another YC popcorn fest
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.
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?!
Folks... read the actual tweet. They literally didn't vibe code it - they copy-pasted another project.
I'd suggest replacing that link with https://xcancel.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095
Gonna have to see the agent trace on that one.
Unless you don't copy the license terms, it's impossible to "steal" open-source code. That's... sort of the point.
You didn't code it, you stole it from open source OS and compiler maintainers
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.
Close your source if you don't want it to be read by LLM
Don't care. Competition is good for consumers.
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.
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.