> 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.
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.
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 mess
What I don't understand is that if a lawsuit happens, then must the plaintiff produce their source code for verification ? Even so a git tree is trivial to change into some other arbitrary code even if a license violation has occurred. I also heard if proven the consequences are that they would lose all revenue starting from when the violation has occured
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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".
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"
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.
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.
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.
I know I RTFA, and I know I'm not interested in discussing things with people who don't. Maybe others feel differently, because more people is better or something. Information pollution is a serious, persistent, growing problem and I'm just not inclined to be tolerant about it anymore. Mistakes are one thing, deliberate stupidity is another.
If you come to book club without reading the book, and you derail the conversation into something completely irrelevant, you're not getting invited back.
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.
FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing with humans. Some later licenses made the license less amenable for sharing with corporations because some authors didn't feel like they were being treated fairly. Some authors today have similar feelings about their code being used by Gen AI. It is perfectly fine for authors to want to place restrictions on how they want others to use their work.
> Step out of the FOSS swamp, step in to human dignity.
"Spirit" means nothing when it comes to legal - or even community - compliance. Either something is allowed, or it isn't, and if a license doesn't do everything that a user of said license desires then they should change that license. Just as licenses were made that explicitly made sharing with corporations less amenable, so should licenses re Gen AI usage. Only then is it worth making a case.
I’m old and I don’t recall FOSS being about truly free, truly open, just not for some categories of use.
In fact I seem to recall FOSS advocates denouncing licenses that put limits on who could use the software or for what purpose. This “it was always only for humans” take is new to me.
Human dignity when it comes to work and contribution is very simple:
Software developers should charge a fair price for their products from their users. That's dignified and beneficial for everybody involved. And it doesn't invite "code stealers" or anybody who wants to reap what they didn't sow.
Just like any type of work. Fair compensation is the key. Not working for free for people who don't care about you and then complain that they didn't give you anything.
Even so, what's wrong with this? They told you up front that they're going to discriminate. Students can use the code freely, businesses may struggle. People don't need to be fair.
Yo! Open Source Software works within copyright law. Your software should comply with the OSS licence you are forking/redistributing from. If you don't comply, OSS freedoms are void and it defaults back to being copyrighted material for you. Comply with licences. And enjoy the freedoms. Otherwise, you are copying from a copyrighted material. Which is illegal. Comply or write it from scratch.
Or... Be nice and ask. People tell u what to do. Don't be rude here.
I remember this Video editor software which didn't comply properly with OSS licence of FFMPEG(?). And people told author what to do. It's always cheap to be kind. Or win dumb prizes.
FOSS doesn't mean you give up all rights to your work. In this case, the software is AGPL licensed, which imposes huge list of requirements on copies - including attribution and sharing back changes.
This person is so dangerous that if I offer them to stay in my shaded yard in the middle of the excruciating sun, they will demand that I let them take my house as well.
Has any group of workers ever "won" a long-term victory against a new technology? There are plenty of short-term concessions made in the face of powerful trade union opposition, but I can't think of any technology that was just stopped dead to appease workers with obsolete skills.
That assumes we're talking about technologies that are legal and in some way beneficial. AI is basically large-scale copyright infringement. If allowed to continue, human authors (I'm including programmers here) will eventually just stop publishing, because why feed the machine that's busy replacing you? You're not even getting paid for it, because the magic box can do the same thing you can for cheaper.
Thing is, everything AI produces is derivative; it cannot make anything truly original. Therefore widespread AI adoption will inevitably lead to scientific and cultural stagnation.
So we'll have our magic box that can perform our every wish. And we'll all be worse off for it.
The tweet was fine - it was directly addressing Corgi's claim that they had "vibe coded" DataRoom when they had copied and pasted it from Papermark. The problem is the OP chose to perform a contextectomy on the tweet and make it look like it's making a completely different argument.
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."
Yup, if we take OSI as defacto authority on open source definition
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
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.
Copyright violation is not theft. Your effort to create something that can be effortlessly copied conveys to you no property. Society deems it beneficial to grant a time limited monopoly on copying it to spur innovation.
Stealing a car - or anything tangible - means... the owner is very literally deprived of the benefits of owning said car/thing. Can't really say the same for a copied pattern of bits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you do for a living? For most of us in the tech industry, information being worth something (because it takes creative and intellectual labor to produce) puts food on our tables.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951
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.
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.
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
Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.
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
The meme keeps on memeing.
> 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.
“Team effort”
“:praying-hands (x2)”
And so on… The audacity and complete shamelessness…
I wonder what narrative they tell themselves.
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?
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
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.)
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.
"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?!
Besides - who is this guy, and why does he think he's owed sight of any legal paperwork?
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.
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.
I was mostly fighting the title character limit
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.
If you come to book club without reading the book, and you derail the conversation into something completely irrelevant, you're not getting invited back.
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.
FOSS licenses were obviously written in the spirit of sharing with humans. Some later licenses made the license less amenable for sharing with corporations because some authors didn't feel like they were being treated fairly. Some authors today have similar feelings about their code being used by Gen AI. It is perfectly fine for authors to want to place restrictions on how they want others to use their work.
> Step out of the FOSS swamp, step in to human dignity.
What is that even supposed to mean?
In fact I seem to recall FOSS advocates denouncing licenses that put limits on who could use the software or for what purpose. This “it was always only for humans” take is new to me.
That may be true, but I don't think it's obvious. What don't I know about the history of OSS?
Not humans who are using AI tools?
Software developers should charge a fair price for their products from their users. That's dignified and beneficial for everybody involved. And it doesn't invite "code stealers" or anybody who wants to reap what they didn't sow.
Just like any type of work. Fair compensation is the key. Not working for free for people who don't care about you and then complain that they didn't give you anything.
The 'spirit of free software' is bullshit. It's software authoritarianism disguised as a noble cause.
Or... Be nice and ask. People tell u what to do. Don't be rude here.
I remember this Video editor software which didn't comply properly with OSS licence of FFMPEG(?). And people told author what to do. It's always cheap to be kind. Or win dumb prizes.
FOSS != public domain.
Yeah, that's nonsense - licenses exist precisely to solve this problem. Read up on it - do everyone a favor.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Thing is, everything AI produces is derivative; it cannot make anything truly original. Therefore widespread AI adoption will inevitably lead to scientific and cultural stagnation.
So we'll have our magic box that can perform our every wish. And we'll all be worse off for it.
Then it shouldn't reference AI or Vibe coding.
The most widely used definitions of “open source” do not allow such a prohibition.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
https://opensource.org/osd
I did choose the wrong word, though. Comply, not copy.
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.
Though it looks like in this case they didn't do either.
A cursory look reveals they aren't complying. So, as you say, they are stealing. What's the point of this comment?
https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditio...
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.
What do you do for a living? For most of us in the tech industry, information being worth something (because it takes creative and intellectual labor to produce) puts food on our tables.
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.