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- Hacker News
- tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovationby fantasizr
- 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.
by bilekas - 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?
by retornam - 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.
by NikxDa - 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
by blourvim - 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.
by liendolucas - 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"by goobatrooba
- 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.
by lorey