Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month

First off, let me get this out of the way - I am not a lawyer. If you want a legal advice talk to a lawyer.

Second, I am sorry this is happening to you.

Third, based on GitHub's reply, specifically

> we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201

they took your submission as 17 U.S. Code § 1201 takedown notice. Maybe you specifically stated this. Maybe it was implied. This is likely not what you want and GitHub's response is likely correct. The reason for this is that § 1201 prohibits circumventing a technological measure. The JS you host on your public site, even if obfuscated, very likely does not qualify for this protection. Another detail - the reason it took long (a month later according to your post) is that after the youtube-dl fiasco, they committed to manual review, legal and technical, of every 1201 takedown notice [0].

Fourth, if you believe these copies are sufficiently reproducing your copyrighted work, what you likely want to do is file a standard copyright infringement 17 U.S Code § 512(c) takedown notice. This still goes through the same DMCA report flow but it should result in a less stringent review process and a faster response.

Fifth and finally, consider asking your favorite LLM to get more context around these laws. Good luck!

[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/s...

I use photopea for years and really respect what you did. I disabled the adblocker. I hope they remove that.

Hey guys, thank you all very much for your comments! I just woke up, I did not really believe my post would get this much attention, so thanks!

Honestly, I was a hoping that giving attention to this problem here at HN might lead to someone from Github actually noticing my problem and looking into it.

I think I will try solving it with a lawyer. But it would be really cool if I could spend my days writing code instead of dealing with lawyers and stuff.

Is there a ticket code or other contact you've been in touch with?

As for DMCA filings, we publish all of them here: https://github.com/github/dmca

I see two from Photopea, one from 2022 (https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/d97814f268e07e62aabe8b5c...) and one from 2024 (https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/d97814f268e07e62aabe8b5c...) - could you point to the recent filing?

I work at GH, but am not involved in DMCA filings, and can in no way answer or judge this case, but potentially follow up internally.

You should discuss this with an attorney that is experienced with IP law to see what your options really are. IP law is very complex and sometimes very surprising. You need expert legal advice, not advice from the HN crowd.

As an aside, I thought that "cracked" software meant software that has had the copy protection or other access control bypassed or removed, not the alteration of the software functionality itself. If your software was actually cracked then you may have some fairly heavy law in your favor. For better or worse, bypassing access controls (even weak or simple access controls) gets special legal attention.

I think we're going to see a lot more of this going forward.

I think we're also going to see the strategy to be to remove the processing and magic sauce from the client and move it to the server where it can't be decompiled and rebuilt with AI.

Man, some of the comments this is getting are absolutely wild.

OP, I’m sorry this is happening to you. It must be incredibly frustrating to have people ripping off something you’ve worked on for many years and pass it off as their own work. I would be furious in your position.

I wish I could do something directly to help you but the best I can offer is to echo the best advice others have already given you: it’s time to get a lawyer. That is the one guaranteed route to get GitHub to sit up and take the action they should already have taken on your behalf.

I accidentally stumbled upon malware disguised as Roblox hacks some three hours after the repo was created. It took Github 25 days to take it down. Granted, the initial automatic reply admitted they were "experiencing high volumes".

Can you post the actual link of the repo? You'd get responses with more context.

You had commented on the photocraft post prior, so if it's that, then it's a bit muddled. It's a LLM based re-implementation and not a copy of the code made open. So the argument would be weaker there, and you'd really need specific code samples to make a case of copyright infringement. Photocraft not "piracy" as is normally understood, which is the exact same binary, optionally with the license protection removed.

By the way, are you really allowed to deeplink to Imgur to host most of your templates?

(I only noticed because your site is not blocked in the UK but most of the templates are.)

I'd recommend to DM github's VP of dev relations:

https://github.com/martinwoodward

before starting heavy artillery with lawyers.

(Martin also often posts on HN).

I am in the same situation where people are hosting copies of the software for commercial use in companies. Even as big as Tencent. That is not allowed with my license and they also went to remove the code that does the license check on application startup. GitHub’s response so far: “please give an explanation how they can become conformant so that the users can fix this.”

A talk with a lawyer would be advised. But this is money you may not want to invest. You could just go on, keep your product improving and proof this way that your solution is more worth than the copycats out there. You just realized how it is to be a valuable target.

It sounds like you might have a case for copyright infringement. Resolving the situation yourself has failed. Your next step is to talk to a lawyer.

> Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We've reviewed the information you've provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201.

Did they actually republish you code or were they just creating wrappers that download/cache the code from your website to run locally?

Wow, was not expecting this to be about Photopea! What an amazing piece of software I used it all the time! Less with AI these days, but still lots!

It wasn't stolen or copied, it was used as inspiration by AI. Good luck fighting that.

Yes you need a lawyer. You may not have filed the DMCA request correctly. You may not be understanding the law correctly.

I think what you want is a legal avenue, like Trademark, Design rights, or patent.

If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.

I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.

I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.

Sorry this happened to you dude. I don’t want to be harsh but, out of the crimes ignored in this era of AI clean rooming, book destroying distilleries and a despondent ostrich adjacent legal system you do seem to be one amongst a deluge of cheated individuals.

Hope you manage to get it sorted but I have no idea how that would go down at this point. I’m sure at least one of them could claim they copied it off the other ones and then you’re shit out of luck.

Is this about Photocrea?

On the bright side, I now know about your product. Had never heard of it prior to this.

Regardless of what you do now, I think you should be prepared for the upcoming reality that LLMs are going to be able to reproduce software, feature-perfect, in a way that does not currently violate copyright law.

Right now, the settled law is that such an LLM reproduction is 100% legal.

If you really want to protect your software in the years to come, you might have to seriously consider starting some sort of popular political movement to address this issue in copyright law.

Current models can already do a full reproduction of anything with source code available (e.g. JavaScript...), and there's already been some poor-quality Photoshop knockoffs.

It is not illegal to build a service with the same functionality.

So you are going to have to prove their code is a copy of yours, not just a copy of the functionality.

In Google vs Oracle, APIs also aren’t necessarily copyright able:

“So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical”

To sum it up; get a lawyer.

I just wanted to comment to say I love Photopea and have been using it for 6 years I think. Best piece of software imo.

Related:

Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730

> based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201

Sorry GitHub, that's not for you to determine, as you are not a US judge. They should never have replied like this IMO and this behavior opens them up to liability for not properly handling DMCA procedures.

Proper DMCA 512(h) notices (assuming OP's was proper) require the host (github) to remove or disable the content first without even attempting to verify the claims.

Then the repo owner has a chance to challenge the notice. If they choose to do, they're basically required to publicly doxx themselves first, by nature of just going through the motions of the judicial court system.

If there was no challenge after a set period of time, then the content stays down.

If there was a challenge, it stays down until a court decides what happens next.

Oh jeez. I'm not automatically assuming that the Chinese did this, but Chinese IP thieves did crap like this for decades, and most of the victims were unable to do anything. There were posts right here on HN like "Chinese company stole my app/game" and with AI this will be an even bigger problem.

Meanwhile AI refuses to touch photos that contain anything that remotely looks like Mickey Mouse.

Shit was never on the Common Folk's side.

> What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world?

Use a trademark.

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you wrote a complete product in javascript, and people wildly copy the code?

My reply is that you now own a customer list, brandname and trademark, and that is about it.

There are 100s of web based photo editors, paid and open source. How do you know they are taking yours, not someone else's or making their own with Ai?

I would imagine they all converge on common features and core implementation foundation

Couldn't have happened to a nicer target.

You want to sue people for blocking ads? Did I read this correctly?

If you want to make proprietary software that's cool, but client-side JavaScript was a terrible choice. The cat is out of the bag.

There's a reason software for which you purchase a license key generally doesn't give you source code outside rock-solid legal agreements.

I was like oh cool... until you mentioned the ads.

I would not fork or re-release proprietary code. I would ask my LLM to write a very rigorous end to end test suite for your tool, delete all the code, then have a clean context LLM re-write the code to pass all the same tests. Then I could publish it under an open license.

Ads are a cancer, and it is a matter of weeks before someone does the above where you have zero recourse.

I suggest open sourcing the code properly without ads yourself before someone does it for you. If you do that someone might donate to you instead of paying for the tokens to clone your work.

Software is no longer a moat and DMCA means nothing anymore.

I would suggest that, instead of trying to complain about the people copying your products, which I think is practically impossible to avoid, and even from your own experience preventing it has led nowhere so far, you should focus on making sure that your version of the product is the best one. So that the people will naturally use it instead of those repackaged versions.

> take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it

I would assume that this might be one of the reasons why people are modifying and repackaging your product. I would suggest to remove that incentive. So that the people will have no reason to repackage your product because it has annoying features. And so that they could use it directly and be happy about it.

Wow the entitlement is strong on this one.

Wonder how many even built a popular free product supported by ads?

It's quite difficult and you need to provide even more value than a paid product (if that makes sense) for users to come back constantly.

There is nothing new now with people copying software. It's just that much MORE of the masses have access to this now than before.

And thus thieves multiply exponentially.