[lorey]

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

[nfw2]

I 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.

[palmotea]

> 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.

> ...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.

[gilleain]

A 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

> 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.

[gweinberg]

They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"

Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.

[gilleain]

I see that I was unclear - I did not mean "the law goes along with this, and I don't know why?" I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".

[alsetmusic]

> I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".

It's an insane degree of self-delusion. No sane and rational person would believe that society had a loophole that allows people to opt-out of following laws by chanting magic invocations and then didn't close the hole after multiple people successfully exploited it.

Said more clearly: the only thing that makes you immune from following the law is wealth and status, and even then it's not guaranteed. You have to be unreasonable to think that as an ordinary joe-schmo you could beat the system in any significant fashion without those.

The worst part is that they manage to get cases dismissed by getting charged for actual crimes that are small and petty, then feel vindicated when charges get dropped, thus leading to perpetuation of their lunatic behavior. They fail to realize that they've been the lucky beneficiary of an overworked DA and a strained system and instead see proof that they were right the whole time. I know this because I hear them say how their cases always get dropped as they get arrested for refusing to provide a driver's license (a crime if operating a motor vehicle on state roads) and other petty crimes in YouTube bodycam videos.

I've been fascinated by this ideology for at least five or six years. Fortunately, people in government are wise to them now. Cops used to be genuinely confused by their babble, but cops and judges now call it out right away by the language and arguments. "I'm traveling" and "Who is the injured party by me not having registration? I move to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction!"

[phatskat]

I wanted to drop some of my favorite bits about sovereign citizens here, but honestly most of what they believe requires a lot of explanation to really grasp. A quick glance of this seems a good place for the curious: https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/Sov%20ci...

[hamdingers]

> why would law enforcement and courts go along with it?

They don't want to deal with it. If someone has one of those SovCit license plates, you know pulling them over is guaranteed to result in frustrating verbal sparring match, which may result in the cop giving up (which is then shared as evidence for the SovCit movement's effectiveness!), or may escalate to a physical altercation.

Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.

[heylook]

> Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.

Probably more of them don't understand. I am very unfortunate to have one in my extended family, and they have fully lost their grip on reality and basic cause-and-effect. They skate by most of the time, which reinforces their beliefs, and then once the pile gets large enough, the whole thing collapses on them, and then cycle starts over.

[nailer]

> 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.

[nfw2]

Social contract philosophy has always seemed oversimplified to me. Are people in China or Iran consenting? "I consent, so I won't be killed" seems more like coercion.

[skinfaxi]

What is tolerated is consented to in a sense. The alternative is rejection of the contract terms but you have to be willing to bet your life on it.

[ValentineC]

After reading that article, I still don't see how "shape rotator" types are more likely to prod and poke the grey areas of law.

It's entirely possible that most startup founders are like that (I found out to my own detriment, when a now-YC founder once tried to game the membership system of a community space I help run), and that YC actively looks for that as a trait they like.

This entire thread also reminds me of this PG article on being Relentlessly Resourceful:

https://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

[datsci_est_2015]

> 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.

I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?

[palmotea]

> I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?

I would imagine that those motions at least have some plausible legal merit.

A software engineer would file a literal truckload of motions that each say "poop", and feel very clever about their "expliot."

[sseagull]

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1494/

[throwawalien]

I 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]

We 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

[alsetmusic]

I got LinkedIn notifications for both Anthropic and OpenAI with my exact job description, but at 3-4x the pay. I said hell no. They would want me to actually work. The job I have now is easy. Plus, they're slated for mass layoffs when the market realigns. I work a gov job that's protected from market layoffs and the security of that is too good to give up.

[nfw2]

They 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]

They’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?

[aleqs]

A 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.

[mlnj]

Listened 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.

[manwithopinions]

Also, I should add, they’re growing fast because they will underwrite anyone for anything. They’re one “oops our AI underwriting has been taking on far too much risk” away from disaster. That they’re demanding 7 days a week from their employees while spending their time building a dataroom product instead of, I don’t know, improving their underwriting, is a bad sign.

Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims? I assume other YC startups are happy because a) they can’t get insurance anywhere with good underwriting b) they figure YC will bail Corgi out when it goes wrong because seemingly every YC startup depends on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_retention_group

“Policyholders should be aware that certain Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be admitted insurers in the state in which the insured risk is located. Policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurers, and certain other Specialty Insurance Carriers may not be subject to all of the insurance laws and regulations of your state. State insurance insolvency guaranty funds may not be available for policies issued by non-admitted insurers, risk retention groups, captive insurance companies, offshore insurers, or other non-admitted Specialty Insurance Carriers. In the event of the insolvency of such a carrier, policyholders may not have access to state guaranty fund protection and may bear the risk of the carrier's inability to pay claims.”

https://www.corgi.insure/disclaimers

[petesergeant]

> Normally getting insurance from a startup like Corgi would be a very bad idea because what’s to say they’ll be able to pay out claims?

Actually normally it’s fine because it’s rarely the startup selling insurance who’s doing the underwriting.

Corgi is more worrying because they’re (apparently) underwriting too.

[tclancy]

Is that how things work now? Well then, I m worth five billion nd say things should stop working that way. Persuaded?

[fennecbutt]

Lmao tech money is fake. Look at how much AI companies are throwing around. Musk is personally worth 1T now supposedly.

It's all virtual valuations. The stock market is poison but most people on here won't admit to that because they have their own interests in it. What a joke our species is lmao. We're still grabbing big sticks to hit each other with and worrying about our neighbors coming to take our rocks because we're all just monkeys still, even though we pretend we're not.

[FireBeyond]

> Musk is personally worth 1T now supposedly.

Not after all the SpaceX "settling": https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2026/06/24/elon-musk-...

[rafram]

They'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/X...

[2]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-insurance/jobs/Y...

[LastTrain]

Why do you need 7 days a week from your engineers when AI easily replaces engineers?

[philipdavis]

didnt click Genuinely Just curious, did you write this with llm?

[johndhi]

is "we didn't copy the code" NOTA

[zaptheimpaler]

He 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

[skeeter2020]

Any 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]

VC startup world is not about intelligence. It’s about impressing investors.

[throwyawayyyy]

Kind 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]

There 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/

[jszymborski]

That thread was painful to read.

[wongarsu]

> 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

[reactordev]

Doubling down on the lie is all you need to know about Nico.

[zamalek]

You 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]

They didn't even attempt to make a clean-room implementation, they just had the LLM clone it for them with access to the source.

[OrangeMusic]

I'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.

[thih9]

> 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.

[conartist6]

This 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]

The 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.

[LastTrain]

We’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.

[dzhiurgis]

> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries

That would be my cynical response.

[GTP]

Which 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.

[dzhiurgis]

Is there precedent where that clause was enforced?

[GTP]

No idea.

[snihalani]

Does Design/Text count as intellectual property?

[smallnix]

IANAL but UI is not protectable in the EU. I remember this was relevant when people copied MS offices ribbon ui for Delphi components.

[echoangle]

I 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.

[charcircuit]

>they copied whole pages verbatim

Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.

[ncruces]

You might be surprised to learn that the work of a copywriter is also copyrighted.

[handoflixue]

That's a weird thing to say in response to someone saying "the text was rewritten, so it's not actually a copy"

[saghm]

The 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.

[handoflixue]

Are you familiar with "Weird Al Yankovic"?

[saghm]

The legal ruling that makes what he does legal even if he didn't get permission (although he does) is about parodies; it's not clear why you think that would apply here. If all he did was change the title and the phrasing of some things, it's doubtful it would be.

The closest equivalent I can think of here would be starting from a blank slate, producing the layout manually to be roughly the same (similar to recording the music from scratch to match up with the original), and then come up with completely original wording that's about something unrelated to the original wording. That doesn't seem anywhere close to what anyone here is claiming.

[VibrantClarity]

Weird Al asks permission from every artist he parodies.

[Kwpolska]

On the first screen, the only "rewriting" done was s/dataroom/Room/g.

[ncruces]

And 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.

[charcircuit]

You are intentionally misrepresenting my comment. I explained that it was not verbatim which refers to an exact copy.

[handoflixue]

Weird that you don't mind misrepresenting that intention of mine. Or are you under the impression that you have a telepathic insight into the minds of others?

[zdragnar]

I thought it was a pedantic remark on the use of the word "verbatim"

[saidnooneever]

yes 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!

[bushido]

> 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]

Using the same design system doesn’t make you accidentally create the exact same UI screens.