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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
by lorey 3mo ago
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 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 https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951
- nfw2 3mo agoI 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.
- throwawalien 3mo agoI 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.
- cmgriffing 3mo agoWe 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
- nfw2 3mo agoThey 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
- manwithopinions 3mo agoThey’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?
- mlnj 3mo agoListened 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.
- FridgeSeal 3mo agoWould 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- aleqs 3mo agoA big part of the US VC operating model these days seems to be just rebuilding existing products with slight changes, then pushing all of their other startups to use that version of it. This is only going to accelerate with AI. Why pay some company you don't own to do thing for you, when you can just copy the company (maybe even improve it in some ways), seed it with with your large existing user base, then have it do the thing for you (while also generating profit from other customers and rapidly scaling in users and valuation itself). The reality is most of what most tech startups are doing is not actually hard and has no moat. The moat is in getting users/customers - connections/marketing/sales - product quality also matters of course, but there are plenty hyperscaler unicorns who's product is dogshit and vice versa.
- rafram 3mo agoThey're willing to admit "5 to 6 days a week" in writing [1]! Crazy stuff. Also a notably huge number of job openings, including for a head of HR [2]. Worrying signs, I would say. [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/X7cxVWI-senior-software-engineer-trucking-insurance https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/X... [2]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/YdccyAk-head-of-people https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/Y...
- LastTrain 3mo agoWhy do you need 7 days a week from your engineers when AI easily replaces engineers?
- palmotea 3mo ago> It would be a clear cut rule, and extreme "shape rotator" types... It had to look that slang up: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words. > ...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. I'd say it's more like the fuzziness defeats most of the software-style "exploits" those types gravitate towards. The edges of the laws aren't impossibly sharp and executed by dumb machines, so you can't sneak though "gaps" that would be there if those things were true. For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
- sseagull 3mo agoObligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/
- gilleain 3mo agoA very clear example of this is the 'Sovereign Citizen', who have bizarre beliefs around how to interact with courts. As far as I understand it, there are some 'cheat codes' people believe (incorrectly) are effective in literally getting you out of jail free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement > Another common belief among sovereign citizens is that they can opt out of the purported contract, making themselves immune from the laws they do not wish to follow, by declining to "consent": when confronted by police officers or other officials, sovereign citizens typically attempt to negate their authority by saying, "I do not consent" Like, why would this be true, and if it was, why would law enforcement and courts go along with it? I find it very odd.
- nailer 3mo ago> Like, why would this be true Steel-manning the sovereign citizens movement (which I don't believe in): they believe authority comes from the consent of the populace, which is a true statement and in many countries founding documents, they mistakenly think that means the law doesn't apply to them when they as an individual do not consent. They basically don't get that democracy is the tyranny of the many.
- johndhi 3mo agois "we didn't copy the code" NOTA
- philipdavis 3mo agodidnt click Genuinely Just curious, did you write this with llm?
- charcircuit 3mo ago>they copied whole pages verbatim Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.
- saidnooneever 3mo agoyes and besides the whole thing that is happening lets not suddenly pretend css and html are code either. There might be bad things going on but we need to maintain our standards!
- ncruces 3mo agoYou might be surprised to learn that the work of a copywriter is also copyrighted.
- handoflixue 3mo agoThat's a weird thing to say in response to someone saying "the text was rewritten, so it's not actually a copy"
- Kwpolska 3mo agoOn the first screen, the only "rewriting" done was s/dataroom/Room/g.
- ncruces 3mo agoAnd the fixed version of that screen (a few tweets later), simply removes the copied text. Which goes to show there was never any original work to fallback to. "See, if I remove the detailed descriptions - and the LLM regurgitated the rest - nothing will have been copied." Some people really want to defend "build me a copy of thing because I don't like the license" to be acceptable behavior.
- saghm 3mo agoThe law cares about the process you took to get something, not just the final output. Stealing something and then changing some stuff to try to make it not look identical doesn't invalidate the fact that you stole it. I can't download someone's song, strip out the bass line and record my own, and then pass off the new song combining the old music with my bass recording as an original song. I don't know whether that's what happened here or claim to know exactly what the constraints of IP law for this specific instance are, but "some stuff was changed" does not necessarily seem sufficient as a defense in general. Depending on the exact type of IP law that covers this there are questions like whether the changes were substantial enough to make it an original work or whether the way that the old stuff was used constitutes fair use.
- thih9 3mo ago> 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.
- dzhiurgis 3mo ago> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries That would be my cynical response.
- GTP 3mo agoWhich would bring you nowhere. If they didn't change this at some point, I remember at the time everyone was staring to use ChatGPT that OpenAI wrote in their terms that the user is responsible for the model's output. If they can do this, I expect other model providers doing this as well.
- wongarsu 3mo ago> 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
- smallnix 3mo agoIANAL but UI is not protectable in the EU. I remember this was relevant when people copied MS offices ribbon ui for Delphi components.
- echoangle 3mo agoI 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.
- reactordev 3mo agoDoubling down on the lie is all you need to know about Nico.
- zaptheimpaler 3mo agoHe 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 https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2061130574358773852?s=20
- jszymborski 3mo agoThat thread was painful to read.
- skeeter2020 3mo agoAny long-distance bike ride/race fans here? the Tour Divide just completed and the record was shattered, not by riding for as long as possible, but with detailed planning, a dialed setup and getting a (relatively) lot of sleep & rest. Seems like this approach is applicable to many domains, but it's a lot more work than the obvious approach of "work more".
- bckr 3mo agoVC startup world is not about intelligence. It’s about impressing investors.
- throwyawayyyy 3mo agoKind of serious question: in tech circles is the Manhattan project generally seen as a _good_ thing, these days? Why use it as the example and not, say, Apollo? "We're working really hard so we can build things with the power to kill you all" is such weird messaging.
- zaptheimpaler 3mo agoThere is no such thing as "tech circles", tech is now a huge huge industry with 10M people in the US alone and no uniform political beliefs. There are the beliefs of some of the vocal billionaires and VCs which media likes to equate to "tech", but they are a tiny fraction of tech. Presumably he said it because he's a narcissist moron, I don't know. If I had to describe it, the zeitgeist of VC/Founder tech now is kind of originated in "It's Time to Build" [1]. The diagnosis is that the nation is incapable of doing anything - too hamstrung by bureaucracy, laws, congress gridlock etc. The same kind of things that MAGA uses to justify authoritarianism. The movement now basically prescribes action, agency, urgency, conquest void of any reflection of what the goals should be, any question of morality or values etc.. just build (what you're being told/funded to build). [1] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
- bushido 3mo ago> 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.
- layer8 3mo agoUsing the same design system doesn’t make you accidentally create the exact same UI screens.
- conartist6 3mo agoThis 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
- elphinstone 3mo agoThe OSS team affected could contact major insurers and insurance industry trade orgs for legal and financial assistance. It's quite likeky this Laqua guy has made enemies and his "startup ethics" potentially has Corgi violating numerous laws and regulations in what is a fairly well regulated industry.
- zamalek 3mo agoYou 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.
- chabons 3mo agoThey didn't even attempt to make a clean-room implementation, they just had the LLM clone it for them with access to the source.
- snihalani 3mo agoDoes Design/Text count as intellectual property?
- LastTrain 3mo agoWe’ve normalized stealing code en masse so this will pass as perfectly fine behavior - what LLMs put out is a spectrum of infringement, this is just in the more obvious end.
- OrangeMusic 3mo agoI'm pretty sure that making new software that replicate the _functionality_ of other existing software is perfectly legal. If not, how do you explain the thousands of Tetris clones? The thousands of Doom clones? The hundreds of Excel clones (forgot which was the first one, it's not Excel but that's besides the point, which is that's perfectly legal). Another commenter already mentioned Android SDK vs Java, which Oracle (fortunately) lost. Yes, even the "copywriting" is fair game, unless it's pages and pages of text (e.g. don't copy/paste the documentation). The design mustn't be identical but if it's essentially identical, that's legal - sometimes there aren't 10 ways to do something. Now if the question is whether it's legal to publish software written by LLMs, given that they've been trained on other people's code - that's an entirely different question.