Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#31

Post by klustregrif » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #26

klustregrif wrote: post #24

Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.

Is the name Victor trademarkable?

Is office?

There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#32

Post by metalcrow » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #27

ralferoo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source. Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy…

Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.

This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#33

Post by krzkaczor » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

popcorncowboy wrote: post #15

Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to t…

I don't get it, what OP actually reverse engineered? OpenClaw itself? Of did Viktor team created their own OpenClaw like agent?

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#34

Post by skeledrew » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #6

redfloatplane wrote: post #2

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure… --- The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai: Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish. The ToS for Viktor.ai include the follow…

Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.

According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#35

Post by skeledrew » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:26 PM UTC

redfloatplane wrote: post #5

zggf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?

You could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet. I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty…

They have to let it happen. There's no stopping the tide here.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#36

Post by pessimizer » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

klustregrif wrote: post #31

croes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the name Victor trademarkable?

Is office? There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.

Yes, there's no way that somebody could have a product called OpenOffice that is literally an Open Source version of Office. Impossible.

The legal purpose of trademarks is to serve the same purpose as a signature: in order that one company cannot do business pretending to be another company without showing a clear intention to defraud - an intention made clear by the attempt to fake a signature, or imitate a mark. It is not to own words or sounds. It is a mark that you trade under.

This is a product that is openly hostile to the other product, and is adding a well-established prefix to indicate the reason for that hostility.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#37

Post by petterroea » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

Is this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#38

Post by ralferoo » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

metalcrow wrote: post #32

cycomanic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.

This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)

This would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-...

That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code."

So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#39

Post by empath75 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

I just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself.

I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#40

Post by layer8 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #26

klustregrif wrote: post #24

Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.

Is the name Victor trademarkable?