Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

IP lawyer here - I can't give you actual legal advice because you aren't my client, but generally, you have two options here, neither of which will be surprising, or very satisfying:

1. Pay a lawyer or firm that specializes in this sort of thing to play whack a mole for you

2. Accept it as normal losses and ignore it.

Contrary to others claims here, it is not a 500/hour thing to do #1 when dealing with firms that specialize in this. it probably would be if you just hire a random one-off IP lawyer to try and deal with this particular instance.

Trying to deal with it yourself will be increasingly frustrating and time wasting for you. You will also never be able to prevent someone sufficiently motivated from doing stuff like this to your software.

Unless you want to spend your time dealing with those folks instead of building the software, you should hand this part off - it's not a good use of your time, value wise.

Put another way: most companies farm out processing of this sort of request to high volume low cost processing teams. Or AI. Or both. For you this is an important one off. For the person processing it it's one of a hundred tickets they are handling today. You are not going to get very personalized attention and consistency.

I don't claim this is how it should be, etc. I simply claim this is how it realistically is. It would practically require legislative change to have a different thing happen here and while interesting to discuss, that seems outside the scope of your questions, which seemed more practically oriented

What I am hearing is “there will be no justice here for you.”

The bad guys are winning, because the good guys have no legal recourse. The only practical solution is vigilante justice, but that makes you a bad guy.

In all seriousness, this kind of stuff happens every day: bad guys getting away because the law does not have the ability to do anything. How then is one suppose to trust the law, when there is virtually zero chance of seeing justice?

The question is not how then is one supposed to trust the law, because you already know the answer. The question is what one does about it.

This is HN so nothing else to expect than Big Tech people giving us the scoop with the tagline "let's be realistic here".

I imagine most people don't expect actual justice in life.

Let's separate criminal and civil here, because this is all civil law.

Civil law systems largely aren't about "good" or "bad". Justice there isn't "good guys win" and "bad guys fail". It never has been.

It's about trying to reasonably resolve disputes. That's all. Civil legal systems were created not to enforce morality or social order, but instead to formally resolve disputes. The system is pretty good at doing that. It will never resolve all disputes, let alone resolve all disputes in an "optimal" way (for any possible definition of optimal you come up with). It only tries to do a reasonable job of it.

If your expectation is that the law will stop "bad" actors from acting "badly", i think your expectations are out of whack. Yes it gets tried, but it is a fairly miniscule portion of the system overall, and generally not a very successful part of it. It's also remarkably recent in the history of legal systems. It is a quasi-political thing that the legal system simply isn't good at dealing with, and really is not a good match for it. I think results bear that out so far

You can take that for whatever you want - I can only tell you why the system is there, historically and currently. That doesn't mean you have to like that idea, and you are welcome to rail against it.

Since when is "theft" civil? Perhaps we don't consider this "theft", and as such, we feel this isn't criminal.

It's not theft, since something wasn't taken.

Laws are pretty narrow. Laws about theft aren't going to apply to philosophical positions about hypothetical lost ad views from cloning products.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words... this is a friendly reminder that the FBI does not agree.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EYTEqHBCV5k/maxresdefault.jpg

That's always been a misleading banner. Notice that it never uses the phrase theft, and that it only talks about criminal copyright infringement, but doesn't actually tie that back to the copying of a single movie. It's basically FUD.

For a serious take on copyright versus theft, I would defer to the Supreme Court. I post this because it's both authoritative and well-written.

> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

Nothing tangible, something you created was taken though. There certainly are copyright laws, enforcement is the problem due to the laissez-faire attitude of many.

No, it wasn't taken. It was copied.

Aren’t all the people getting in trouble for downloading music and movies from file sharing sites it bittorrent getting charged (or threat there of) with theft?

Or they all just civil matters?

It's all civil.

What if writing proprietary and/or non-free software was the real evil? LLMs have made everything open source. All software is free now.

The Justice is the liberation of code from those that wish to seek rent from it.

Communism, but I pay rent to Sam Altman

will be free when everyone owns the means to make it, instead you're going to rent the compute to make the software to escape the rent

> In all seriousness, this kind of stuff happens every day: bad guys getting away because the law does not have the ability to do anything. How then is one suppose to trust the law, when there is virtually zero chance of seeing justice?

Guess why trust in democracy itself is eroding everywhere and why even executing a health insurance CEO on broad daylight is not just widely approved but widely beloved.

The rich can get away with anything (Trump's claim of "I could shoot someone on 5th ave and get away" is pretty realistic, to say nothing about the Epstein crap), but if you are poor or, even worse, an immigrant - pray to God to help you because not just will no one else help you, but in the worst case you might end up getting fucked over for seeking help.

> executing a health insurance CEO on broad daylight is not just widely approved but widely beloved.

An Axios poll showed 17% found the murder "acceptable" or "somewhat acceptable." Curious where you are seeing such wildly different numbers?

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/united-healthcare-ceo-killi...

I mean, 17% as a whole. But when you have the younger generations going as high as 40% saying that murder was acceptable (and note the question phrasing here is about as negatively charged as it can get) you surely have to see the disconnect here.

> An Axios poll showed 17% found the murder "acceptable" or "somewhat acceptable."

That poll is across the whole population. Among the younger generations, particularly the "terminally online"? A whole different story.

Younger, terminally online people are largely degenerates. You’re just being sensationalist.

This is what HN has devolved into: someone taking adware and removing the ads is a "bad guy".

That is bad...

Well, shouldn’t that be up to the original developer? He made a product and let people use it for free. But no-one is forced to use it. And there are other image editors without any ads. Some are proprietary, and some are FOSS, e.g. GIMP.

I don't know. Shouldn't it be up to Microsoft whether my copy of Windows reports back all of my personal data? Shouldn't it be up to Dell whether my computer can only boot Microsoft operating systems?

What does that have to do with software that is financed by ads?

Why don’t you just install GIMP instead of using Photopea?

Exactly. Did you know that leaving the room during a TV commercial break is theft of service - or so argued TV channel companies in court once?

Uhm, okey. But how is that related to Photopea? Are you arguing that copyright laws are void for software that display ads?

How are you defining "justice"/"bad guys"? Under HN rules, if a company requires payment, it's explicitly only OK to post if a “workaround” to avoid paying is available. Additionally, HN explicitly says it's OK for HN comments to ask how to get around payment requirements, and for HN users to help other users to get around payment requirements.

Source: Official HN FAQ page.

What I am hearing is "if you can't beat em, join em". If there is no justice for software pirates then we should all pirate everything, at least from companies we dislike.

Not a lawyer but I have friends get some results getting an LLM to send threatening lawyer type letters.

Since you're here and on topic, a question that has been at the back of my mind because I feel that soon most software creators will be in this boat, with AI rapidly becoming able to clone software from observing behavior alone:

Are patents the only real IP protection left for software?

And would a patent (assuming this application had something patent-worthy to claim) help at all here? As in, in addition to sending a C&D maybe also including language about patent infringement would be more effective?

I know that patents are unpopular for many here (including you, IIRC!) but I think this question is extremely important, especially to anyone who wants to make a living purely off the software alone.

Remember: if no other moats or business models or funding models lend themselves naturally to the software in question, anything bolted on is pretty much already on the slippery slope to enshittification. A mechanism that encouraged people to compensate fairly for the value provided by software would be better for the Internet than what we've got going on today.

The only effective protection for software IP is hiding the logic on servers you control (SaaS). Anything released to execute on client hardware can be decompiled and cloned. This has always been the case but LLMs have made the issue more obvious.

there is no more software IP. ai does not need source: it can infer or deduce the logic or algos. and in the case of private software dont think it hasn't been sucked up too

Agreed, only I would rephrase it as, "hiding logic on servers is the best technical / non-IP protection for software" -- consider that IP largely exists to protect things that other means cannot!

But as sibling comment indicates, even that is no longer a guarantee. There are demonstrations and anecdotal accounts of reverse engineering entire features or even small applications, including the backend code, by pointing an LLM at the web UI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/bla...

This is why I'm thinking that patents and other legal means are likely the only way forward to protect software that does not have a natural moat, like network effects or some huge data advantage. That is actually a huge amount of software.

My concern is that without proper protection software without such moats, this will create incentives for people building them to adopt less-than-ideal means of monetizing their work, e.g. the things that lead to enshittification.

Patents can be somewhat effective for vertical market software sold by companies operating in countries with effective rule of law. But for horizontal or consumer software the pirates and cloners can operate servers in other shithole countries beyond the reach of law enforcement. We'll probably see more political pressure to respond to that with widespread IP address blocks at national borders. Eventually every country may have some variant of "The Great Firewall of China". (I don't think that's a good thing, just stating that it's likely to become more prevalent.)

> It would practically require legislative change to have a different thing happen here and while interesting to discuss, that seems outside the scope of your questions, which seemed more practically oriented

Is there an organization working on this?

I've spent 0 seconds googling this so excuse the dumbfuck question but: is there any precedent or convention for writing off the stolen goods as losses? I'm pretty sure physical goods from businesses qualify but what about this??

Digital losses to piracy sounds like something that would be impossible to quantify.. even if they can prove that people are downloading these pirated copies, that's not proof that the downloader was ever going to pay for the software in the first place.

Physical/digital has the same answer, just different effect.

As a general rule, you can write off what it costs for you to make something, but not what you lose from not being able to sell it.

Which means for physical goods, you write off the cost to make them, and for digital goods, you can similarly usually deduct development cost to make the software.

In neither case can you write off the amount you would have made had it not been stolen/sale had not been lost.

The practical effect is that because physical goods have a per-unit to-make cost, and most digital goods don't, physical goods get written off per-unit-lost and digital goods do not.

At least, this is the most general answer I can give you for that level of general question.

Could you just make a CICD process that for each minting of a software license it cost a person's time to review and accept and then the wages for that individual become the write off. I.E. Convolute the software delivery process so that like a physical good, it has a per-unit to license cost to recoup. Or would that be argued as it could have just been automated and it's not really a real loss leader just bad policy?

You don't lose this time for pirated copies of your software, as I assume you aren't taking this person's time to create a license for pirates.

To write something off you have to actually lose the money - writing off is a process to decrease your taxable income by your expenses, unless you're inventing fake expenses (read: performing tax fraud) it doesn't generate a greater amount of money than the expenses.

Why would you incur additional expenses just to be able to write them off?

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