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.

> 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.

> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries

That would be my cynical response.

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.

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.

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.

>they copied whole pages verbatim

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

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.

> 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

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

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.

Same thing https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/

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

"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...

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

Its sounds like you are taking a side.

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

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).

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?

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

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.

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

Vibe stole it?

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."

Papermark is AGPL; Corgi must release all its changes.

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

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

That's not how licenses work, Papermark is AGPL

We should thank companies for warning us during the interview process that they are so separated from reality (especially in the AI era)

If AI can’t make them recognize a work life balance has value then it’s easy to see they don’t believe the “force multiplier” BS they are peddling

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

Or a troll? I'm so confused.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Rabble rabble rabble

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.

He argues no code was copied.

> I am curious how this will play out legally

I am curious if/how YC will handle this to get ahead of earning a reputation of being a den of scammers - a few months after the Delve scandal

Most likely, Papermark would compel Corgi to disclose the source code during discovery.

It’s an intentionally misleading title, using “you” to imply that the reader is guilty of theft.

An honest title would be “Corgi didn’t vibe code it, they stole Papermark’s AGPL code”.

Sure, people should read links, but when a writer posts ragebait for engagement, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Probably just stole it by the looks of those screenshots.

> they may forbid using derivative works for commercial purposes

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

> Unless you don't copy the license terms

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

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.

Ideally yes, but we know people don't RTFA - there's a reason that initialism dates back to early Slashdot.

The paraphrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting to convert it to ragebait. Had the OP gone with something like "you didn't vibe code it, you plagiarized Papermark's open source project" (may need some editing to fit under the character limit) it would have at least been more true to the original tweet.

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

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

Short segments of popular works sure. Many UI pages with identical layouts and copy, essentially zero chance. The agent had access to the original code at inference time.

You’re giving me too much credit if you think i was being sensationalist and trying to make it more clickworthy, i couldnt succeed in that if i tried

I was mostly fighting the title character limit

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.

They are worth 3 billion after two years so it seems like they are doing all right with their strategy although I'm old now and don't want to do that

Many YC companies do bad things, and I guess they do so independently. There may well be repercussions for the most egregious cases, but I suspect a lot of ill-behaviour simply flies under the radar.

For example only yesterday I got spam from an YC company, Polymath, and I replied back asking where they got my details from - no response yet. Once I get something I'll make a GDPR subject access request, then a deletion request. I hope the overhead of that causes them to rethink their spamming campaign.

But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.

I didn't realise that one could forcibly require a competitor to disclose trade secrets.

Now, INAL of course, but I would think this sort of mechanism would be quite gameable from both sides ( i) a wealthy competitor legally forcing a promising upstart to reveal source ii) a copycat working out some kind of arrangement where the code itself is licensed to them via shell company based overseas.)

Brutally violent agreement. kicks shin, shakes hand

LLMs produce about 95% of the code at my company and review about 70% of it for 3 years now. Our team has downsized from 40 to 8 people in this time. My creative labor is spent writing harnesses and wrappers. When there is enough of a data distribution on this, the LLMs will be able to do that as well.

I have saved up a buffer in funds and bonds because it's going to be over at some point when the company moves from explore to exploit.

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).

I didn't edit anything.

I did choose the wrong word, though. Comply, not copy.

You wouldn’t steal a car!

Also, I should add, they’re growing fast because they will underwrite anyone for anything. They’re one “oops our AI underwriting has been taking on far too much risk” away from disaster. That they’re demanding 7 days a week from their employees while spending their time building a dataroom product instead of, I don’t know, improving their underwriting, is a bad sign.

Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims? I assume other YC startups are happy because a) they can’t get insurance anywhere with good underwriting b) they figure YC will bail Corgi out when it goes wrong because seemingly every YC startup depends on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_retention_group

“Policyholders should be aware that certain Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be admitted insurers in the state in which the insured risk is located. Policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurers, and certain other Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be subject to all of the insurance laws and regulations of your state. State insurance insolvency guaranty funds may not be available for policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurance companies, offshore insurers, or other non-admitted Specialty Insurance Carriers. In the event of the insolvency of such a carrier, policyholders may not have access to state guaranty fund protection and may bear the risk of the carrier's inability to pay claims.”

https://www.corgi.insure/disclaimers

Well, if it's my memory at fault then I apologize. My memory of the comment I replied to didn't include the initial qualifying phrase with either word choice.

They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~$1bn. So, they’re worth 3x the exit of the exact same company… because of what, AI? The fact that they’re cloning other software to release SaaS products is extremely bearish. Why are they wasting their time on this? A wildly successful $3bn startup would not spend their precious resources by launching a $10/m document sending SaaS. They’ll be doing down rounds soon enough. Could you imagine Paul Graham encouraging this?

As with most legal hacks, the courts figured this one out long ago :).

If someone is trying to dig into their competitor's trade secrets via discovery, the court offers multiple ways to safeguard against that. The defendant can identify information as a trade secret and ask that it be protected in some way - for example, the documents may be restricted to "Attorneys' Eyes Only", so while the plaintiff's attorneys can review the material, the plaintiffs themselves are barred from reviewing it. Or the judge themselves may get involved in an in-camera session.

So, by definition, you did edit it to change the typo.

But I would download one.

I have also gotten spammed by a YC startup, but they spammed an email that I use in git commits, and lead with "I saw your fork of $POPULAR_PROJECT, pretty cool!" or something like that and then continued to pester me with their drip program even as I replied asking them to never email me again.

Sounds expensive. *(sleaze ball hands)*

There are software engineers that specialise in source code analysis that lawyers will often use in these cases. The engineers will be given access to source code in secure environments where they're not allowed to bring any device in or out. They review, analyse, and write up a report using pen and paper, that can then be reviewed by the lawyers.

>So, by definition, you did edit it to change the typo.

their comment still says "copy". the comment you are replying to clarifies that they meant to type "comply", not copy.

since the wrong word is still there, 'by definition' they have not edited it.

Absolutely. It was very similar to one of my first jobs: "Legal Technical Analyst". Not as much time doing deep source analysis, but basically translating things for lawyers: "So as far as this claim of copyright/plagiarism... this block here, that's CS 101 stuff, that block there, that's novel, and does x, y and z".

Ahh, I misread it.

Listened to the founder on 20VC episode talk endlessly about sleeping and showering in the office and comparing their insurance company to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

Silicon Valley is just so disconnected from reality.

Would pay good money to see Silicon Valley complete their disconnection from reality and drift off into the void. The rest of us would get some semblance of normality back if they did.