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Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

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Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#161

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 sour…

> 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.

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#162
post #91

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…

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

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#163
post #91

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…

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 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.

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#164
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#166
post #95

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.

Not IPable.

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#167
post #130

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.

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.

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#168
post #91

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…

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

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#169

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 sour…

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 in…

> Corgi were paying Dropbox thousands of dollars per month for DocSend.

That's like, nothing, for a company in the insurance business valued at 3b

Re: Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

#170
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 Cor…

> 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?

Actually normally it’s fine because it’s rarely the startup selling insurance who’s doing the underwriting.

Corgi is more worrying because they’re (apparently) underwriting too.

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