6 ms·

Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

• yieldcrv 3mo ago
  not a copyright issue there may some other intellectual property remedy, or not, but it isn't copyright hope that helps
• robotmaxtron 3mo ago
  copyright is only as good as the enforcement. enforcement is exhausting and expensive.
  • alansaber 3mo ago
    Enforcement is well within the capabilities of major orgs (ie nintendo) who litigate internationally
• eqvinox 3mo ago
  "still"? It never was. If you copy a (copyrighted) UI in bulk, that's a copyright violation just like copying code in bulk. The legal metric is generally "sufficient height of creation", the actual interpretation depends on where you are.
  • zarzavat 3mo ago
    Copyrights on UIs are nebulous. You can't copyright the functional aspects of a UI, that's the domain of patents, yet the functional aspects are likely the parts you are most keen on protecting. Also you need to prove that they copied you and didn't come up with it independently.
  • BikiniPrince 3mo ago
    I looked at those screen shots. The language is similar but it’s not verbatim. The is itself is just the usage of the same framework. Business logic can’t be copyrighted. Is it too close? I agree. Does it cross the legal test. I wouldn’t waste my money on a court battle.
    • eqvinox 3mo ago
      I wasn't talking about a specific case, and "UI" is more than a single page. To be specific, I'm referring to the sum of text (incl. translations), graphics and layout on the entire product/application/etc. I agree the screenshots in the specific linked case - if that's all there is - are nowhere near enough.
  • victorbjorklund 3mo ago
    It depends also what you mean with copy. The code has copyright but the rendered pixels don’t (other than if something like an image was created pixel by pixel). So if the code is different but the output looks the same it’s not copyright infringement (can still be trademark).
    • echoangle 3mo ago
      I think that’s dependent on jurisdiction. This comes up with fonts where what you said applies in the US but in Europe, the actual visual result of the software also counts and is protected (afaik).
      • victorbjorklund 3mo ago
        I don’t know any jurisdiction that gives copyright to the rendered output of html/css. There can be other IP (patents, pattern, trademark but doubt they apply for a normal saas ui)
        • echoangle 3mo ago
          Germany? The creative work is protected, and the design can be a creative work. How you implement it doesn’t really matter.
          • victorbjorklund 3mo ago
            Which paragraph? I doubt it really covers the final outputted design (unless its specifically some art project) of general ui designs.
            • echoangle 3mo ago
              paragraph 2 I don’t really see why it’s hard to believe that the design of a website wouldn’t be protected. Obviously a digital painting is protected, so hand writing svg code to generate an image would also result in an image that’s protected by copyright. And why would a html website not be protected? The law doesn’t really care about how you create the work as long as it is an expression of your own creativity. https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Text=2%20W%2012/07 https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Text=2%... > Es ist allgemein anerkannt, dass der Gestaltung von Webseiten unabhängig von der Digitalisierung ihres Inhalts ein Urheberrechtsschutz zukommen kann, sofern die Gestaltung die gemäß § 2 Abs. 2 UrhG erforderliche Schöpfungshöhe erreicht (OLG Frankfurt a.a.O.; OLG Hamm, MMR 2005, 106; OLG Düsseldorf MMR 1999, 729; LG München I MMR 2005, 267). Dies kommt aber grundsätzlich nur dann in Betracht, wenn die Gestaltung der Webseiten über das hinausgeht, was bei ordnungsgemäßer Erstellung eines Webauftritts im Internet handwerklich zu leisten ist.
• josefritzishere 3mo ago
  No definitely not. I've never seen a patent include code. They're more likely to describe IP in a work flow diagram.
  • pigeons 3mo ago
    How do patents relate to this copyright question?
    • josefritzishere 3mo ago
      I made a leap there without explaining. You can copyright code the same way you copyright a book. But in doing so you protect the text but not inherently the IP. Copyrighted code has a whole "originality" argument in it's defensibility. Patents do too, but they would never patent the code itself. If you want to protect yourself... it's belt and suspenders.
• wahern 3mo ago
  If you're worried about infringement, register your work with the US copyright office. You can only get monetary and statutory damages if the work was registered before infringement, otherwise you can only get an injunction. But you can't even file a claim in court to request an injunction without first registering the work. Basically, while copyright nominally attaches at creation, without a certificate you can't press any rights in court. You don't need to register each release, so long as a material portion of the registered work exists in subsequent derivative works. Without a registration threats of a copyright dispute are mostly noise to someone savvy enough to know how the game is played. If they think you'll persist they can just replace the infringing work or cease distribution, which is a hassle but not a significant deterrence for bad faith actors.
• glimshe 3mo ago
  Software copyrights are among humanity's worst inventions. We as a species are no better off because of it, and neither are the small creators that copyrights are supposed to protect. Software copyrights only exist to protect a renter model from big corporations. There's an argument to be made for patent protections, but many of those are questionable considering the number of trivial software-related patents (there must be a patent somewhere for replying to an online conversation through an edit box and an "add comment" button). I don't know if LLMs can somehow help the situation. I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.
  • thomastjeffery 3mo ago
    Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around. Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd. Copyright grants "artists" (in the broadest sense of the word) a monopoly over their "work", again the imagined product of their labor. In practice, this actually means a monopoly on the labor itself, because all art is derivative work, and the derivation of work is the specific thing that copyright monopolizes. Twice absurd. LLMs, in the best case, are calling that bluff. The problem is that they are calling it poorly, and the bluff itself is incoherent to begin with. Even worse is that LLMs can be monopolized as copyrighted "works", which is a clear abuse of the system. We should get rid of copyright and patents. Dismantle all the moats and publishing houses (including social media). Liberate derivative work. Value labor directly.
    • swiftcoder 3mo ago
      > We should get rid of copyright and patents... Value labor directly. Ireland's UBI for artists seems like the only real solution that gets to the heart of the problem
    • CobrastanJorji 3mo ago
      > Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense. My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.
• kmeisthax 3mo ago
  There's a couple of related issues being conflated here, and I'm not sure which one to bring up, mainly because I'm not sure in what direction the copying would be ruled to have gone. So I'll just mention all the cases. The first thing to note is that nonliteral copying can still be infringing. Actually, among copyright cases that actually go to trial, most of them are not bit-exact matches ("striking similarity" in legalese). The lower standard those cases would have to meet is substantial similarity, which requires proving both access and similarity. In other words, in order for you to produce a copy[0], you have to have both seen the original and produced something that is close enough if you squint at it. So let's say Papermark is the original and Corgi Dataroom copied it. If this actually went to trial, a significant amount of discovery would be spent harvesting all the e-mails and messages Corgi's development team sent to one another. Any evidence of knowledge or access to Papermark would probably be enough to prove a copyright violation. You mentioned LLMs, and some of the tweets here also mention them. I have no clue if either product used an LLM, but it's important to note that in the US, anything written by an LLM does not accrue copyright protection. So, if Papermark was LLM-authored, as a threshold matter, they would have to register[2] a very specific copyright that neatly carves out the LLM-authored bits. The judge would then only consider the parts of the code with verifiable human authorship, which would severely weaken Papermark's case. In the reverse case - i.e. Corgi Dataroom is LLM-authored - then Papermark's case becomes stronger. Note how I didn't say "AI slop is public domain" last paragraph, because it isn't. There are still unsettled legal questions as to whether or not training on copyrighted works is legal and if using an LLM trained on that work constitutes access to it. Furthermore, LLMs can have search tools that would give them access to code not within the training set, which would also be a more straightforward copyright violation. So if it turns out Dataroom's developers are all Claude fans, and Claude is copying Papermark code, then it's just a normal license violation. LLMs do not launder copyright. We can also consider the case where BOTH tools are LLM-authored. In this case, there might just not be a copyright case at all. Technically speaking, there would be some third class of plaintiffs who have been infringed, but they would have to choose to sue. It is a long-standing principle in law that you are not allowed to sue for other people's harms[1]. So in this case, nobody would have a case. > Now software developers are feeling what authors and artist felt It was specifically the FOSS community that sounded the alarm about training data theft first, because the FOSS community correctly understood coding agents to be an attack on copylefts[3] (albeit through the incorrect belief that LLMs could launder away copyright interest, as opposed to it just being told to make a noninfringing substitute). [0] I am skipping over notions of fair use and derivative works as they would complicate the analysis and do not apply here. [1] In general, the operating principle of American courts is "fuck around and find out", and this implies that the court is only allowed to find out once someone has fucked around. Otherwise, the courts could just sue themselves to rule on whatever the hell they want. Isn't adversarial common law GREAT!? [2] Yes, copyright registration is mandatory in the US, otherwise you can't sue, which is the whole point of copyright. The Berne Convention only half-applies here. [3] Clauses in licenses that require modifications to the work to be provided under the same license terms. Creative Commons calls these Share-Alike licenses.
• axus 3mo ago
  I'd argue that software is an "applied art", and needs a "high threshold of originality" to be protected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality Oh and if it's not human generated, you can just copy it.
• stronglikedan 3mo ago
  There are no novel UIs, so copying UIs is okay, and necessary. As for source code, I'm a stickler for the license. The modern set of licenses cover any scenario I can think of, relatively fairly. AI is merely a tool, so the craftsman still owns the output. If the output violates a license, then the craftsman should be held to account.
  • pryelluw 3mo ago
    I’ve seen companies get sued and lose in court for copying UIs. So no, legally speaking, copying a UI is not something that companies ignore.
    • kube-system 3mo ago
      The look and feel of an interface could be covered under a design patent, which would be a different question than copyright, and a much higher bar to enforce (particularly, protection is far from automatic).
      • pryelluw 3mo ago
        You’re talking about enforcement which is a fair point of view, but I’m taking about likelihood of getting sued and having to settle in order to avoid the risk of losing a case in court. Which is the more common case for situations where one company alleges the other stole their IP.
    • gpm 3mo ago
      Can you point to cases so I can google them?
      • Froedlich 3mo ago
        Borland Quattro.
        • gpm 3mo ago
• sandeepkd 3mo ago
  I think there are couple things going on here The replication/copying has always been there in one form or another. The bar has traditionally been higher for reputation and monetary risks. Lately the legal bar is the one that going down, ease of replication makes it even more tempting and when big players are doing it at scale (bots) then it validates the strategy in one way or another. If anything, there have to be downstream consequences of this with time, libraries to pollute the front end code for LLMs are most likely going to get popular and probably one way to make it harder for your IP to be replicated.
• dlcarrier 3mo ago
  Copyright doesn't cover instructions like recipes, protocols, or APIs; those require patents. Not looking at the source code has been used to make nuisance copyright lawsuits less likely (e.g. Phoenix and AMI implementations of IBM's BIOS) but it's still easy to prevail when a new work is created by rewriting some else's source code. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....) Neither copyright nor patent cover a user interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....), so that can legally be copied outright.
  • dijksterhuis 3mo ago
    > Neither copyright nor patent cover a user interface *us only > You automatically get copyright protection when you create: ... original non-literary written work, such as software, web content and databases https://www.gov.uk/copyright https://www.gov.uk/copyright > Registered designs provide protection for the visual appearance of a product. In the context of GUIs, this means that the unique visual elements of your digital interfaces (i.e. the lines, contours and shapes) can be safeguarded against unauthorised use by competitors. https://cms.law/en/media/local/cms-cmno/files/protection-for-guis-in-uk-eu https://cms.law/en/media/local/cms-cmno/files/protection-for...
    • dlcarrier 3mo ago
      It looks like a registered design is similar to a design patent in the US. The automatic copyright is the same in the US as the UK, probably due to the Berne Convention. Apple did file a claim against Samsung for multiple design patent infringements, including a design patent for using a grid of icons with rounded corners, but the US Supreme Court ruled that Apple would have to show financial loss from the infringement, which basically gives it no more power than a trademark. That was after a jury trial that heavily favored Apple, so it's not likely that anyone will ever get anything meaningful out of trying to enforce a design patent on a user interface alone. Has anything like Apple's lawsuits against Microsoft or Samsung happened in the UK? Outside of purposeful counterfeiting, case law over trademark and design patent clams seems to be pretty weak. Then again, copyright is only powerful because of centuries of case law expanding its reach, and as written probably shouldn't cover fan fiction, shared universes, or possibly even translations. Intellectual property in general seems to be more about common law than the actual statues creating it.
• aldousd666 3mo ago
  Copyright doesn't cover the results of code, nor the methods used in the code, techniques and algorithms aren't covered by copyright. Period. Copyright applies to 'the work'. If you don't copy the source code, it's not covered.
  • scosman 3mo ago
    They copied strings, and visual design. Both of which are work, both of which are covered by copyright.
    • kube-system 3mo ago
      Designs and strings are only sometimes covered under copyright. The elements of a design that are ornamental, utilitarian, or a general look and feel are not covered under copyright but would be covered under a design patent if one exists. Strings are only covered under copyright if they are a sufficiently original work of human expression. Simple informational messages generally wouldn't qualify.
      • scosman 3mo ago
        This was copying many screens, composing layouts and many strings. not a "general look and feel" or one off utility string. Others found parts of the code copied (exact variable names). It would take a court to decide, but I think it's pretty clear cut copyright violation. They gave their agent had access to the EE code, and seemingly asked it to produce a copy. It's not a 1:1 copy, but there was a lot of copying. No clean-room attempt was even made. If I take the first chapter of Harry Potter and write a new ending, it's still copyright violation. They took many parts.
        • kube-system 3mo ago
          If they did take sufficiently significant parts of copyrightable components, then yes, it would be a copyright violation. I don't think I saw overwhelming evidence of that in the OP, but certainly there is more to the story.
• dataviz1000 3mo ago
  Did you agree to terms of use? Did you have to click a check box that you agree to terms of use before seeing or having access to the items you copied? Click wrap. If in the contract that you agreed to there is language that you agreed to not copy the work, then you likely are in breach of contract. If it is publicly available knowledge probably not breach of contract. I’m not a lawyer of course.
  • echoangle 3mo ago
    Copyright applies even without the contract.
    • dataviz1000 3mo ago
      There is a lot of copying that isn't protected by copyright. It is possible to include what can't be copied that might not fall under copyright in the terms of service contract. Many people not being able to use copyright to prevent copying instead successfully sued based on breach of contract. Companies should understand that they can protect their IP this way.
• arjie 3mo ago
  The Corgi event doesn't seem particularly notable. There are similar features implemented in the most bog standard way that those features can be implemented using the pattern that AFAIK Github pioneered with a 'Danger Zone'. Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same. I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community (seeing as I wasn't around when Bill Gates famously asked for money first or whatever). To think that a past OpenOffice would have been considered unconscionably close to a copy of an old MS Office of the era twenty years ago. In some way, The Corporations Won, because it turns out software engineers turned into IP maximalists. Thinking back to when I first installed Tux Kart decades ago I never could have imagined that we'd get to this stage. Really wild, man.
  • gnerd00 3mo ago
    > I don't know it is abundantly clear from the post, agree > Bill Gates MSFT declared open source a "cancer" and "a threat to American Values" .. later, almost the entire Internet is run fundamentally on OSS. What motivations might MSFT have had in 1998 ? Are there clear lessons from the extremes of the past that could be applied now? Do authors have a right to LICENSE software they write? which ones, only Linus or Daniel Stenberg ? are there others? does a LICENSE mean anything ? ##-- related From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject: Microsoft and the Big Lie Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:47:38 -0400 ... In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer ... have described it (open source code ed.) as "un-American", "a destroyer", and "a cancer". They have deliberately confused the GPL with non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of data.
    • sowbug 3mo ago
      I assume this is the Bill Gates reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb...
  • Xeoncross 3mo ago
• jasonlotito 3mo ago
  It depends. Is the text auto-generated from a framework? Is it creative? Is it worthy of copyright? It seems more instructional. I say let them sue for copyright infringement for the text. Let them sue for breaking a license. Let's see how it works out. Doesn't impact me and if it costs the rich money, good. Let them suffer.
• Havoc 3mo ago
  Think it'll be hard to define in any sufficiently specific manner legally because UI/UX/source/functionality aren't entirely separate, but ethically I reckon it comes down to what one means by copy UI. e.g. If you're creating an uptime dashboard...they all kinda look the same anyway and there aren't that many ways to do it so that seems OK. If it's copying an comprehensive UI with layout and flow between the various pages etc then you're getting a bit closer to theft.
  • bawolff 3mo ago
    That is why we have judges, to make judgement calls. Its probably going to come down to how closely you are copying.
• tamimio 3mo ago
  There was an article here about stealing the other day and only change 3%, so I guess it’s working already!
• egypturnash 3mo ago
  "Now software developers are feeling what authors and artist felt". As an artist who got repeatedly told to stop making buggy whips and get into the absolutely tedious-sounding new field of "writing prompts" every time I expressed dismay and displeasure about image generation around here, every story about this sort of thing here is the sweetest schadenfreude I have tasted in my life. Especially when the general feeling in the markets I work in is that AI images are kinda tacky and empty and nasty, and people would rather pay another human to realize their ideas than try to refine image generation prompts for a couple hours and get something vaguely okay that makes people go "ew, AI".
  • teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
    I can’t imagine software engineers caring about this at all. The only people that care about UI theft are C suite IP clutchers. SWEs generally love being able to use each other’s work. Copying UI by eye has been SOP since the dawn of computing.
    • thewebguyd 3mo ago
      > Copying UI by eye has been SOP since the dawn of computing. Case in point, the very GUI operating systems we use today are arguably a "stolen" product from xerox parc.
    • faizshah 3mo ago
      As someone who has used multiple vibe coded internal tools: you will care when you use these tools and encounter strange bugs and missing features. The human touch is visible in the way your features work just like in vibe coded art and games it lacks intention.
• otekengineering 3mo ago
  OpenAI/et al. selling an IP laundering service under the name 'max subscription' may force the world to accept the perspective that Intellectual Property isn't a thing. The business model of extracting value from creators via rent seeking IP may not be viable in a world where LLMs can generate anything on demand. We might be transitioning to the Lockean view that for something to be ownable as property, it must be a scarce resource, and information is not a scarce resource. From that property rights perspective, the property that's created when new information is created is not the information itself, rather, it's the act of creation (claim to authorship) that's the scarce resource. I don't know what a world looks like where the only form of IP is non-transferable and owned by the original creator. Maybe that new form of IP creates less value over all, and maybe that's ok if the creator is getting 100% of the smaller pie instead of crumbs from media labels. Companies like Red Hat could be an example of a viable business model if IP laws follow the current winds. Companies like Corgi will need to rely on internal talent to ensure that their product is better than what someone looking at their product can vibe code a copy of, which from my perspective as a consumer, sounds like a better route than Corgi relying on an internal legal team to send a cease and desist letter.
  • aitchnyu 3mo ago
    > information is not a scarce resource The powerful/corrupt will maintain their information asymmetry; software, tourism, self help etc will be devalued.
• 5701652400 3mo ago
  copying other business pixel-to-pixel and direct claims agains competitor is just distasteful. add to this recent YC "AI that MITM API and re-implments anything automatically" is very bad image to YC. with such bad behavior from SWE community, you just got to lock down your app behind certificate pinning, hardware attestation, gRPC/protobufs, and internal data only. no more "free open web in browsers" when you get gents like this stealing other peoples efforts.
• 5701652400 3mo ago
  technically may be it is. practically you are a dick. (e.g. instagram copying snapchat)
• davebren 3mo ago
  In effect the source code is being copied by the LLM. This is what it's designed to do. LLMs are a lossy statistical compression of their training data. If you give it a prompt telling it to replicate a product that's in its training set then its optimal next token prediction output is going to be to a lossy copy of that product's source code.
• 8note 3mo ago
  we need open training data models, and not just open weights. if you cant prove that the source code wasnt trained on, how can you show that its not a copy of the copywrited original?
• throwaway81523 3mo ago
  The clean room PC compatible BIOS's were written that way for a reason.
• conartist6 3mo ago
  So to be clear the answer is emphatically "no". If you copy everything else, the defense that the source code is technically different will not save you.
• jessebradner1 3mo ago
  [dead]
• erelong 3mo ago
  ...hopefully as other comments said, that LLMs make us abandon the confusing idea of "intellectual property" so we don't have to ask questions like this or get in to torturous questions if this or that thing is "infringing" or not
• crest 3mo ago
  By that logic OpenOffice would infringe on Microslop Office because "it looks the same" (as an older version of M$ Office).
• mrkimsh 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• negergreger 3mo ago
  [dead]
• mrdependable 3mo ago
  A sad state of affairs when the law is what people look to in order to decide between right and wrong.
• austin-cheney 3mo ago
  No, that was never a defense. Replication of the work artifacts without literal copy/paste can still be a violation. It depends on just how similar the works are as demonstrated to a civil court jury. At the same time complete recreations are not copyright violations. For example ZeldaClassic.com is not a violation of copyright against the original game. The final products appear almost like a clone, but the underlying work is completely different. Copyright law protects work artifacts, not ideas or assembled constructions.