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Ask HN: A company used my source code for their product. What can I do?

• meh2frdf 8y ago
  What are you hoping to achieve? If it’s to screw them for as much money as possible speak to a lawyer who can advise you on the best strategy for that. If you want a small/reasonable amount of compensation and failing that, you want them to cease using your code, I would just talk to them. Put together what your licensing terms are and then simple case of pay or stop using. This the path I would recommend, and as long as the fee is reasonable, I (as someone who has to deal with this sort of thing in my current role) would simply pay, as it the normal cost of doing business. The reality is that this is likely the fault of a nieve developer, not the deliberate action of the organisation. Aggressively threatening to sue etc is typically overkill and the sort of behaviour that causes legal teams then to restrict developers and prevent them sharing their code etc.
• anoncoward111 8y ago
  I believe you would need to threaten to sue, or sue. That costs time, money, and/or a lawyer's time, which costs a lot of money. Additionally, you might not win. Shitty/unethical companies do this a lot. They find clients and they pay engineers to make everything work ASAP. Your code was a convenient way to fix everything with plausible deniability. I'm sorry for this, and I hope you do win if you sue! If you were in the US, I would like to take a case like this on for reasonable legal rates. Sadly, I can't obtain a law license without first paying $140,000 in mandatory tuition :) Hmmmm....
  • matt_the_bass 8y ago
    > Sadly, I can't obtain a law license without first paying $140,000 in mandatory tuition If you’re willing to live in Wyoming during law school, U of W offers free law school to anyone that gets accepted even those from out of state. The campus is super cute in a small town. If that is your thing, it’s a good deal. My brother in law took this route and he LOVED it. He moved from the east coast and plans to stay. He even convinced is girlfriend (from the east coast) to move there and now they’re married with kids.
    • undefined_user4 8y ago
      By free I'm guessing you mean funded by tax payers?
      • matt_the_bass 8y ago
        Yes. Funded by state taxes. It is an effort to reduce brain drain, attract higher wage business and diversify the economy. From my datapoint of 1, it seems to be working. My brother in-laws wife is a nurse. WY is in desperate need of nurses and she found a well paying job there. Had my brother in law not gone to law school there she would have never looked for a job there and they wouldn’t have been able to fill that position. Btw, her salary in WY is way higher than on the east coast.
        • undefined_user4 8y ago
          Theft is theft.
          • matt_the_bass 8y ago
            Could you please clarify your comment?
            • undefined_user4 8y ago
              Taxes are a form of theft. You vote for politicians who implement laws to use force to take money from people and then waste it on unnecessary crap like brainwashing facilities also known as schools where children are indoctrinated into believing that socialism is somehow a just cause. It's no different from a mafia. Whether or not it reduces brain drain or whatever is irrelevant. At the end of the day, it's still theft.
• itronitron 8y ago
  You'll need to hire a lawyer, assuming you don't want to go work for the company directly. Nolo press has a book on patent, copyright, and trademark that would probably be a good overview [0] although it is US based. Good luck! 0. https://store.nolo.com/products/patent-copyright-and-trademark-pctm.html https://store.nolo.com/products/patent-copyright-and-tradema...
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  Where in the EU, anyway I'm guessing you should go talk to a competent lawyer in your country, that's free.
• wnkrshm 8y ago
  How can you prove that they plagiarized your source code? Do they keep an open repo?
  • desdiv 8y ago
    Yes, the company keeps an open repo: >...their product (whose source is also publicly available) ...
• stagas 8y ago
  You should contact them and offer them to license your code to them and negotiate on a price, since they are already using it. You could also be proactive about it if you are interested in collaborating with them to continue improving on that library for a salary, since you are the author and the one with the know-how of things. People can be reasonable, try the respectful and honest approach first. They probably missed the fact that the code didn't come with a permissive license and they just added it by mistake. It can happen and doesn't necessarily mean they were being malicious so they'll be willing to make a deal with you.
• eb0la 8y ago
  1. Decide clearly what you want: be ready to negotiate. 2. Gather evidence. 3. Get professional counseling (usually that means lawyer up). 4. Decide what you want and DON'T WANT to do. The latter is much more inpoetant than it seems. 5. Get counseling again. Is the plan feasible? How? Refine the plan 6. Act Hacer news is not a good counseling source: you get what you pay for.
• barryparker 8y ago
  I think you should write an abuse to Google :https://support.google.com/groups/answer/81275?hl=en https://support.google.com/groups/answer/81275?hl=en. As it's illegal activity. I had almost same experience with my website https://my-custom-essays.com/ https://my-custom-essays.com/, it took some time to configure out all problems but it solve!
• MrGilbert 8y ago
  Go find a good lawyer. The funding under the H2020 programme is usually granted only on projects that do not produce a "ready-to-go" product at the end of the project. It should be in a prototype-state. If you claim that your component IS a major part of their product and service, chances are that the European Comission might take a closer look on it. However, you'll need a long and steady breath, as we are talking about months and years until sth. happens. Your best option at first might be, as pointed out by others, to approach them and seek for a license agreement.
• charlesdm 8y ago
  1. Are you willing to invest the money to go after them? Good lawyers are expensive (think hundreds of euros per hour) 2. Courts generally move slow. It might take years before you have a positive judgement. You will likely need to sue in their jurisdiction, which puts you at a disadvantage because you do not know the language and legal procedures. 3. And this is the most important one: even if you get a positive judgement, the company is likely to be a limited liability company which can declare bankruptcy. Did they set up an SPV (read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_entity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_entity) for this project, or is this a larger company with stable revenue and profits that has done this? If at the end of the day you can collect €150,000 (as an example), you might go and collect from someone with no cash in their account. They can and will declare bankruptcy. Then you're out of pocket legal fees, with no way of recovering them, and with no compensation. Consider this before you decide to sue. It might be easier to just sell them the tech for a reasonable amount of money. I would not threaten to "expose" them with the H2020 programme as this might take away their source of funding -- it makes it less likely they will buy your tech. I would reach out with a friendly email, telling them you noticed they used your library, and that you are aware they received funding because of it. Offer to sell them the library for a reasonable amount.
  • murukesh_s 8y ago
    IMO, reaching out to them with a neutral tone (not overly friendly) is the best approach you can try. If they are not responding after reasonable number of (and sure it's been reached) attempts, you could try either legal options or try other options like to sell the same product as a competitor and/or openly shame the company.
• m0llusk 8y ago
  It might make more sense to outsell them. Advertise your library as being used in a successful commercial product yet better supported by the original developer which is you. This idea that you own intellectual property is questionable. If someone hears your story or song or sees a picture you drew or downloads some source code then that has escaped into the wild and is no longer controlled. Given how much effort leads nowhere at all it is a kind of gift to be valued in this way. Instead of trying to own things that are conceptual and cannot be owned it makes more sense to control release and advancement. Get people to pay up before any source code can be downloaded, and once the designs or code or whatever is out there then offer more and better to the highest and best bidders.
• ThePhysicist 8y ago
  May I ask why you made this source code publicly available but didn't put a license on it? What was your motivation? In general, using unlicensed software code poses a large risk for any serious company (corporations even use specialized software to check the license of every open-source project they use), so you might be able to convince them to buy a proper license from you or stop using the code. If they won't you can take legal action.
  • jf22 8y ago
    Having some public code out there is good for attracting attention from employers.
    • craftyguy 8y ago
      That doesn't excuse not picking a license for it. explicit > implicit...
      • knewter 8y ago
        the fault is with the person who used unlicensed code. OP did nothing wrong if he wasn't explicitly choosing to permissively license it. sounds from his reaction that he wasn't. that's ok.
        • craftyguy 8y ago
          Sure, but if you leave your house door wide open, it's still not your fault if someone comes right in and takes stuff, but you certainly make it easier for them to do so. Picking a license is easier than trying to defend an unlicensed work in court..
          • boomlinde 8y ago
            > Picking a license is easier than trying to defend an unlicensed work in court.. Are you speaking from experience here? Whether it has a blanket license or not has absolutely nothing to do with its status as a copyright protected work. Quite to the opposite, having a blanket license should make it harder to determine whether its use constitutes an infringement on the copyright or is permissible by the license. There are plenty of reasons not to give your work a blanket license. For one, you might want to share an idea without necessarily giving anyone access to use your work directly, or you may want to present the work publicly for exposure so that interested parties can license it individually.
• weliketocode 8y ago
  Agreed with everyone who's saying reach out to the company and/or lawyers. I hate to sling negativity on the internet, but you posted code online and are upset that someone is making money off of it. Again, I could be way off base, but you come across in a similar fashion as a patent troll looking for a payday.
• _frkl 8y ago
  Have you talked to them? What did they say if you did? Management might not be aware this is happening. This here might be a quick-and-dirty attempt to stop them, at least temporarily: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/09/02/Killjoy-DMCA.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/09/02/Killjoy-DMCA.html Written for the US, but shouldn't matter all that much in practice.
• erkkonet 8y ago
  You say shamelessly but it could also be "cluelessly" (which doesn't excuse the company in any way). When I interview candidates, one of the questions I ask is if they know anything about licenses and if they can describe differences between for instance MIT and GPL. In my experience a surprisingly large number have no clue of the implications on a product and use code/libraries without considering the license. Either way, it's prudent to have someone review projects for this kind of liabilities before shipping anything.