Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month

B4uler5

Sorry this happened to you dude. I don’t want to be harsh but, out of the crimes ignored in this era of AI clean rooming, book destroying distilleries and a despondent ostrich adjacent legal system you do seem to be one amongst a deluge of cheated individuals. Hope you manage to get it sorted but I have no idea how that would go down at this point. I’m sure at least one of them could claim they copied it off the other ones and then you’re shit out of luck.

ianberdin

I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this. I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.

rvz

> What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world? Use a trademark.

verdverm

There are 100s of web based photo editors, paid and open source. How do you know they are taking yours, not someone else's or making their own with Ai? I would imagine they all converge on common features and core implementation foundation

aetherspawn

I think what you want is a legal avenue, like Trademark, Design rights, or patent. If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.

JohnFen

You should discuss this with an attorney that is experienced with IP law to see what your options really are. IP law is very complex and sometimes very surprising. You need expert legal advice, not advice from the HN crowd. As an aside, I thought that "cracked" software meant software that has had the copy protection or other access control bypassed or removed, not the alteration of the software functionality itself. If your software was actually cracked then you may have some fairly heavy law in your favor. For better or worse, bypassing access controls (even weak or simple access controls) gets special legal attention.

mistrial9

you wrote a complete product in javascript, and people wildly copy the code? My reply is that you now own a customer list, brandname and trademark, and that is about it.

lrvick

I was like oh cool... until you mentioned the ads. I would not fork or re-release proprietary code. I would ask my LLM to write a very rigorous end to end test suite for your tool, delete all the code, then have a clean context LLM re-write the code to pass all the same tests. Then I could publish it under an open license. Ads are a cancer, and it is a matter of weeks before someone does the above where you have zero recourse. I suggest open sourcing the code properly without ads yourself before someone does it for you. If you do that someone might donate to you instead of paying for the tokens to clone your work. Software is no longer a moat and DMCA means nothing anymore.

penskymaterial

You want to sue people for blocking ads? Did I read this correctly? If you want to make proprietary software that's cool, but client-side JavaScript was a terrible choice. The cat is out of the bag. There's a reason software for which you purchase a license key generally doesn't give you source code outside rock-solid legal agreements.

binlog

Yes you need a lawyer. You may not have filed the DMCA request correctly. You may not be understanding the law correctly.

jdlshore

It sounds like you might have a case for copyright infringement. Resolving the situation yourself has failed. Your next step is to talk to a lawyer.

bartread

Man, some of the comments this is getting are absolutely wild. OP, I’m sorry this is happening to you. It must be incredibly frustrating to have people ripping off something you’ve worked on for many years and pass it off as their own work. I would be furious in your position. I wish I could do something directly to help you but the best I can offer is to echo the best advice others have already given you: it’s time to get a lawyer. That is the one guaranteed route to get GitHub to sit up and take the action they should already have taken on your behalf.

handoflixue

Regardless of what you do now, I think you should be prepared for the upcoming reality that LLMs are going to be able to reproduce software, feature-perfect, in a way that does not currently violate copyright law. Right now, the settled law is that such an LLM reproduction is 100% legal. If you really want to protect your software in the years to come, you might have to seriously consider starting some sort of popular political movement to address this issue in copyright law. Current models can already do a full reproduction of anything with source code available (e.g. JavaScript...), and there's already been some poor-quality Photoshop knockoffs.

ranger_danger

> based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 Sorry GitHub, that's not for you to determine, as you are not a US judge. They should never have replied like this IMO and this behavior opens them up to liability for not properly handling DMCA procedures. Proper DMCA 512(h) notices (assuming OP's was proper) require the host (github) to remove or disable the content first without even attempting to verify the claims. Then the repo owner has a chance to challenge the notice. If they choose to do, they're basically required to publicly doxx themselves first, by nature of just going through the motions of the judicial court system. If there was no challenge after a set period of time, then the content stays down. If there was a challenge, it stays down until a court decides what happens next.

jameshilliard

> Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We've reviewed the information you've provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201. Did they actually republish you code or were they just creating wrappers that download/cache the code from your website to run locally?

busymom0

I just wanted to comment to say I love Photopea and have been using it for 6 years I think. Best piece of software imo.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730

anilgulecha

Can you post the actual link of the repo? You'd get responses with more context. You had commented on the photocraft post prior, so if it's that, then it's a bit muddled. It's a LLM based re-implementation and not a copy of the code made open. So the argument would be weaker there, and you'd really need specific code samples to make a case of copyright infringement. Photocraft not "piracy" as is normally understood, which is the exact same binary, optionally with the license protection removed.

thought-gap

First off, let me get this out of the way - I am not a lawyer. If you want a legal advice talk to a lawyer. Second, I am sorry this is happening to you. Third, based on GitHub's reply, specifically > we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 they took your submission as 17 U.S. Code § 1201 takedown notice. Maybe you specifically stated this. Maybe it was implied. This is likely not what you want and GitHub's response is likely correct. The reason for this is that § 1201 prohibits circumventing a technological measure. The JS you host on your public site, even if obfuscated, very likely does not qualify for this protection. Another detail - the reason it took long (a month later according to your post) is that after the youtube-dl fiasco, they committed to manual review, legal and technical, of every 1201 takedown notice [0]. Fourth, if you believe these copies are sufficiently reproducing your copyrighted work, what you likely want to do is file a standard copyright infringement 17 U.S Code § 512(c) takedown notice. This still goes through the same DMCA report flow but it should result in a less stringent review process and a faster response. Fifth and finally, consider asking your favorite LLM to get more context around these laws. Good luck! [0] https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/s...

kasajian

On the bright side, I now know about your product. Had never heard of it prior to this.