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Unreal. I had to go back to the original Tweet to confirm that screenshot wasn’t faked.

The comment clearly says “Mirror’s the reference design’s”

I don’t know how they could try to spin that as anything other than having an LLM launder someone’s code as a “reference design”

Even if they try to argue that the “reference design” was Figma, the identical copy means they had to have copied Papermark into the reference design.

The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company. I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.

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.

Is that real? Imagine they've taken the code out if so, difficult to verify.

The era of chinese level competition is here.

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.

He was bragging about working on weekends and comparing his shitty little insurance company to the Manhattan Project a while back. Somewhere he claimed this company/industry is the most important application of AI in the world. I have no doubt they ripped it off, this guy is not trustworthy to say the least..

https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2061130574358773852?s=20

> 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

You can't make a clean-room implementation of an open source project using a frontier LLM because it has the original code in its weights.

Doubling down on the lie is all you need to know about Nico.

Does Design/Text count as intellectual property?

This absolutely needs to go to court. We badly need to know what the law even is, and this is the most perfectly blatant example we're going to get of bad behavior that might or might not be legal

> 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.

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

> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries

That would be my cynical response.

>they copied whole pages verbatim

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

> The screenshots clearly show they copied whole pages verbatim, both design and texts

The design is shadcn – which is an MIT license - very very popular design system. The text is pretty standard to what I'd expect with any DD solution.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He argues no code was copied.

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

that's quite the stretch

AI will generally err on the side of slavishly copying any reference. I'm having this problem at work lately. Teammates will be asked to implement a new module for <new data integration> into the codebase, and they'll just point Claude at it and say "integrate <new thing> into this codebase" in one shot and what it will do is create a function for function clone of the first data integration's client, down to implementing copies of the private utility methods.

clearly the indication they didn't just copy but improve upon /s

Its where the community is despite the loud minority online pretending thats not the case

because no alternative has ever reached the same level of engagement and most people don't care about misplaced virtue signalling

Design (output of designers) and copy (output of copywriters) are subject to the same copyright law as code (output of programmers). Programmers are not the only people whose intellectual property is protected.

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?

Yes he's trolling. His bio is "CEO at @IronGorillaAI - proudly replacing white collar work with autonomous AI agents, one job at a time. American emigrant." and look at one of his recent posts lmao

> THIS GUY ONLY WANTS 7 DAYS IN OFFICE.

> At @IronGorillaAI, we run on the French Republican Calendar.

> That’s 10 days a week.

> We mandate all 10 in the office.

> No hybrid. No remote. No negotiations.

> If that sentence triggers you, you were never built for this anyway.

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

Yes, written verbiage is subject to copyright. UI is also subject to copyright. The degree of similarity is astounding - this is not an edge case at all.

The lack of understanding of copyright on HN does astound me, however.

This isn't a case of convergent design (OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word), this is identical word-for-word with a simple s/room/dataroom:

> When enabled, folders uploaded to Rooms will be mirrored into 'All Documents' with the same structure. When disabled, all documents will be placed in a single folder named after the Room in 'All Documents!

> This action cannot be undone. - All documents and folders will be permanently removed - All links and viewer access will be revoked - All analytics, audit logs, and Q&A data will be lost - Group permissions and branding will be deleted

Those are clear copyright violations.

Not IPable.

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

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

That's not how licenses work, Papermark is AGPL

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

> Where’s the outrage over all basic pencils looking the same?

This would fall under patents (design patent at the very least), not copyright.

Furthermore, the English verbiage between the two are literally exactly the same. That's a clear copyright violation.

Its sounds like you are taking a side.

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