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- Hacker News
- Isn't this always the case? Most of the time you just don't know where AI stole it from?by LunicLynx
- Both designs are nearly boilerplate ShadCN blocks/components, it looks nearly identical to this stuff: https://ui.shadcn.com/blocksby bushido
- 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.
by kshacker - 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.
- 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.
by Aurornis - tech will do anything to normalize theft and call it innovationby fantasizr
- 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.
by jimmydoe - 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 - > 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.
by alsetmusic - 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.
- 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 - > 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.
by ValentineC - 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 - He argues no code was copied.by LoganDark
- 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.by i000
- 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.
by bushido - 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 - 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 messby rwarren63
- 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 - 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.
by hamdingers - 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.by oefrha
- 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.by PeterStuer
- 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.
by gherkinnn - 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.
by Frieren - > 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.
by dijksterhuis - 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.
- 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
- The era of chinese level competition is here.by snihalani
- Is that real? Imagine they've taken the code out if so, difficult to verify.
- 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.
by Lio